Mikes Film Talk

I’ve given up trying to figure out why certain posts I put on my blog get a better response than others. I haven’t really been tracking it to be truthful. But I have noticed that some posts go through the figurative roof.

Looking at the ‘views per post’ doesn’t help at all. I know that I’ve read several other blogs that purport success secrets to increase your “viewer-ship” and widen your audience. I sometimes read these and wonder how do they know this and how do I know they’re right.

The easy answer is, I don’t. It is relatively easy to set down in front of your laptop and present yourself as some kind of “expert” or ‘know-it-all’ who can help every blogger and potential blogger to achieve their goals. But is blogging really about success?

Success is generally measured by income. We don’t, as a rule, measure success by ‘spiritual growth’ or by how much we enjoy our passion about a certain task,  job or hobby.

I  definitely don’t measure my blog’s success or failure by monetary means. Nor do I measure it’s “success” by the amount of views received over any given time period. I do get excited when I see that something I written about gets over a thousand views. But to say that I don’t get excited when something else I’ve written gets only one or two views, would be wrong.

I still believe that the main reason, I blog is two-fold. I blog to practise writing and to say the things that I don’t always have another forum to communicate my thoughts or feelings on.  Because I am not approaching this as a business or a hobby, but as an end to something else, I do get puzzled about why one blog post gets loads of views and another gets a couple of metaphorical glances.

But that is part of the fun I suppose and in a sense another aspect of learning. I am still writing things that one day I would like to see published. If for no other reason than to say I have managed to accomplish something that I’ve always wanted to do. But the other things I write are not for release yet. I am also, I’m embarrassed to admit, very ‘un-coordinated’ about how and when I write.

This lack of coordination, or self discipline if I’m really honest, means that one day I might write four articles; each one about things that are completely different from one another and on another day be hard pressed to write one.  And not for obvious reasons either. On the days I have to really work at writing one article, it’s usually because I can’t force my thoughts in one direction long enough to capture a single topic to discuss, discover or dissect.

I have figured out that blogging is a sort of mutual admiration society of  ‘like-minded’ individuals. It appears that “to get” you have “to give” in the area of likes, comments, and to a lesser degree, views. It is in this area too that I find myself guessing a lot.

When I was posting to my first blog, Random Thoughts for a Random World (no a “closed” blog), I was very slow to start commenting on other blogs I read. I then found a blog that I really liked and began commenting. The little “love affair” lasted for a while, then the blogger complained that, although she loved my comments, I was using too much space to do so. In other words, could I please shorten my input.

I was a bit taken aback. I hadn’t written ‘Gone With the Wind‘ length comments, I saved that type of writing for my blogs, so I stopped commenting at all. Not only was I a little insulted, but, I also became very reticent about leaving comments on any blog-post. I got the idea that even though a lot of blog writers finished with a “and what are your thoughts” ending that, some of them at least, didn’t want feedback apart from the ‘you’re so marvelous’ variety.

Confusing.

Still, I’ll keep writing my little blog-posts and keep guessing why some are “popular-ish” and others are not. I will still hesitantly comment on other blogs that I enjoy and either agree with the posts topic or at least agree with the sentiment the author is expressing about his or her topic.

I will, in other words keep practising with the hope that I will progress in my ability to put two or more words together in a sentence and not muck them up too badly.

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