Setting smart goals
I started out this year with the intention of writing a blog post five days a week. That quickly proved problematic; I’m both an introverted person and not very good at thinking in the specific sort of abstract manner required to come up with ideas for blog posts. At the same time, writing a blog is a great way to increase online visibility, so I decided to force myself to try.
I’d say my effort has failed. Even before I impulsively decided to switch to a three-post-a-week goal at the beginning of February, I’d say it failed. Why? Because I’m not writing enough about the types of things for which I’d like to rank highly in Google.
Which begs the question: why blog at all if the only reason you want to blog is to show up when someone searches for a web developer, but you’re not talking about web development? I’ve talked about my experiences with a CR-48, the metric system, punctuation, and North Korea. Great. Now all I have to do to achieve my goal is say Web Developer in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois a few more times in strategic, non-spammy-seeming, ways, and I’ll be all set.
But is that who I am? Am I the kind of freelancer who seeks to be the highest-ranked on Google because of my own professional self-promotion, or am I the kind of programmer who writes about the things I care about, letting search engines do their job well on their own, and hoping for new clients through positive word-of-mouth recommendations? I’d certainly consider myself the latter.
Which brings me back to the original point I’m trying to make: is a schedule-based blog the smartest way for me to go? Am I looking for quantity of content or quality of content? ‘Cause I certainly feel, at the moment at least, as though I’m writing for writing’s sake, rather than for that of my readers. I’m not sure I’m enriching your lives simply by giving you something to read every few days. Perhaps it would make more sense to stop—wholesale—until I feel I have something relevant to say about my job.
No. ‘Cause I’m a one-man online presence development machine. And, the fact of the matter is, my use of the CR-48 is relevant to my client work; most of it is done on my CR-48. The fact that I even have a CR-48 says something about my level of geek-knowledge. And ranting and raving about misappropriation of punctuation in sentence separation tells people that I am, perhaps nearing a fault, incredibly detail-oriented. So, the fact of the matter is, keyword-spamming or not, my personal interests are as relevant to my work as can be.
Just, please, send me an email and give me some more ideas for things to talk about. I think I might be running out of interests.