I'm Just Sharing

This is my 500th post on this blog. It’s taken me less than 2 years to get here, and if I keep up the pace, I could hit #600 by December.

I don’t usually write a post acknowledging a milestone post on that day. What I usually do is wait until the post afterwards, where I usually give stats about the last 100 posts. I’m still going to do that, but I decided to go freestyle for this one, which is a pretty big deal in my mind.

When I started this blog, it’s intention was for me to talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. At some point, it turned into a blog that was about something. That something was more than one thing; well, is about more than one thing.

I’ve written about affiliate marketing, or lack thereof. I’ve written about websites and about internet things in general. I’ve written about social media, especially Twitter. I’ve written a lot about blogging. And I’ve written about writing, both books and articles. Every once in awhile, I’ve written about my businesses, diabetes, and of course my monthly income.

What I haven’t done is written much about personal types of things. Out of the first 499 posts, I’ve only written 16 personal posts. I think I got caught up in the money thing early on, the niche thing most of us like to talk about. I think I had high hopes that if I concentrated on more internet, computer, web stuff that it would give me the best opportunity to make money on this blog.

After awhile, I realized I wasn’t going to make any money off this blog. It its way, it’s considered a “make money online” blog. Nothing really wrong with that, except this isn’t the market that normally buys anything from anyone else, because we’re too busy trying to make money ourselves. In a year and 9 months, do you know how much money this blog has made? It’s made less than $5. Not only that, but in checking my stats, the products I’ve created, over there to the top left, have generated almost no clicks, and I get almost no clicks on the affiliate ads either. As far as making money, the blog is a dud.

Then there was the kind of pitiful attempt at trying to get more RSS subscribers by holding a contest. Well hey, we all try a contest at some point, right? I was trying to go from 54 subscribers to 250 subscribers in that contest, although I really was hoping to just reach triple figures. Instead, it “jumped” to 65 by the time I ended the contest. Pitiful indeed.

Even now, though I posted that article the other day showing that I’d actually hit 100 subscribers, finally, as I write this I’m back down to 90. And, according to Analytics, I’m averaging less than 30% on visitor loyalty, as in repeats visitors; it seems the days, at least for me, when CommentLuv, commenting on blogs where people wrote on mine, being a dofollow blog and basically trying to please everyone but myself, aren’t bringing folks back.

Where am I going with this? It’s a good time for a bit of reflection, and a minor change of direction. In the past week I turned 50 and I’ve now hit 500 posts on this blog; I’ve crushed the average. I’m close to milestones on my business blog also, almost 600 posts there. But the business blog must stay the business blog.

It’s time to get more personal. It’s time to talk about issues and things I want to talk about more often, such as the rant I had earlier this year. It’s time just to write, to not always have to research. I may get a bit more political or philosophical. I might rant a bit more often, or tell more funny stories. Heck, I think I’m going to turn into our friend Sire a bit more, only I won’t be writing poetry. I may share some old song lyrics, though; a couple of them I thought were pretty good.

I’m going to talk feelings. I’m going to talk society. I’m hoping I won’t start talking religion, because I don’t have one, and trust me, anyone who does really doesn’t want to get into it with me because I go for the jugular. Let’s just leave religion alone.

I’m not going to go for controversy; I don’t want to become that type of blog because, frankly, I can be thin-skinned. I will express my opinions, though, and allow others to express their opinions, as long as we keep a sense of decorum here. I won’t call any commenters names, and I won’t allow any commenters to call anyone else names. Those posts will be gone in a heartbeat; call it censorship if you will, but I’m paying for this blog, so it’s my prerogative. And it’ll all be clean; I don’t curse, never have, and I’m not going to allow anyone else to curse either.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m going to negate some of the other things I’ve written about all this time. After all, those things affect me as well, to a degree. It’s just not going to be my focus so much. I’m still going to market my affiliate programs, and any links you see attached to a word that’s not linked to a source or internally is probably linked to some product; hey, you did know it’s football season, right?

So, here we go. The next 100 posts should be interesting, just to see what I come up with. Oh yeah, that next one will be the recap, so that’s something that won’t change. After that,… the skies the limit. I hope you stick around, and I also hope more new visitors come and subscribe. We all want to be famous, right? Okay, maybe not John.

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