Why I Blog

Yay, three hundredth post; I’m now in the top half of all bloggers, simply from the fact I’ve stuck at it for long enough to generate three hundred posts. Or more correctly, three hundred posts which aren’t simply a photo and a couple of captions. Okay, I might have just made that up, but as it feels true, it must be!

Yet there’s an obvious question which is so rarely asked: why the hell we do it. Or if it is asked, the answer is not really that honest. Both unconscious and conscious.

After all, it’s a lot more work than most non-bloggers realise.

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The first reason has to be a simple one; sheer egotism. That is; believing that I cover topics which are worth covering, and I do so in a manner which is (hopefully) both readable and vaguely authoritative and/or interesting. That I can do it better than the average person and so on.

Truth be told, I’d been producing ‘bloggable’ content for years before I finally produced my first true post. My ‘proto-posts’ had been on a few online forums, several of which I no longer frequent. I didn’t intend to do that; more that there were times in which I ended up producing said proto-posts – mainly when developing a new idea, setting out my stall and/or retorting to an alternative argument (In fact, a fair percentage of my non-review posts are forum retreads).

So, why didn’t I stick to that?

Firstly, online forums – like all social media – are ephemeral in nature. Not as pure ‘in the moment’ as say the Instragrams and FaceBooks of the world, but sometimes quite close. Depending on how well the forum is organised and indexed (both internally and externally), old ‘content’ may be effectively lost under the weight of newer stuff.

Then there’s the simple issue you have almost no control over the forum. You can be censored, banned or even nonpersoned, basically at a whim of the Admin gods – some of which can be petty arse-hats at times. Depending on how much of your output was there, this can be anywhere between ‘mildly annoying’ to ‘catastrophic’. Then there’s some deluded types who think the forum ‘owns’ all your content, simply because you put it there (and you should be ‘grateful’ for it being published there).

In fact, that’s what the ‘The Alexandrian’ and I have in common; we both are exiles from forum-land, finding in blogging a publishing medium which is less capricious and unstable.

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While that was the original reason, it’s highly unlikely I’d have continued this blog for this long and sure as hell not that many posts merely on the back of my rehomed existing content. Because almost nobody cared. In fact, it was only my first product reviews which even started to get a sniff of attention, and as of last month 95% of my views are for reviews, of which make up about 60% of my whole output post-wise and perhaps 40% of the output effort-wise.

Baldly put: reviews got me views, which gave me the motivation to continue writing.

Not that this was bad. I’d already started testing out some bars and so on, so formalising and publishing my conclusions wasn’t a complete jump. I’d already done a few posts about health/fitness too, so hardly a surprise topic-wise either. And frankly, I’d gotten rather pissed off with the general absence of actual honest reviews about products, or incomplete ones, or ones hosted in locations which were awful to search.

But this raises the question; if I’m doing it for attention, why do I continue doing posts like this one – I’d be better served time/effort-wise to ditch all this ‘heavy’ stuff and stick to reviews. In fact, I may be crippling any remote chance I have for making this thing pay by doing posts like this. To which I say; so be it.

For I do this not simply to scratch the ‘creative itch’, but the belief that some of these posts deserve to be created. Sometimes, it’s a topic which has a new slant. Other times, something which I feel should be simplified and brought out of the Ivory Tower for all to see. Generally speaking, if you see a non-review post like this, it means one thing – I’ve been unable to my satisfaction to find a source online to answer my question or issue, so I’ve had to provide one myself.

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This tendency is what Orwell called ‘the historical impulse’. After all, if I couldn’t easily find my answer using that big Ur-brain which is internet search engines, it suggests perhaps it’s not been done yet (or more correctly, has been done but I’m unable to find it for whatever reason).

What’s more, it combines neatly with my periodic ‘obsession questions’ – that once one has entered my brain, I won’t really rest until I get an answer. So basically, I’d have done most of that research anyway, and putting it all down in pixels and bytes helps me clear my mind and order the thoughts. I know this looks a bit narcissistic, but perhaps my musings might be of interest to others.

Yet… writers in general are narcissistic. It kinda goes with the territory. Writing (in all it’s forms) is the equivalent of you standing on a soapbox and proclaiming ‘look at me, I have something to tell you!’. Naturally, you have to believe there’s actual worth in your message, otherwise you’d not do it (whether you’re right or not is naturally a different question and to some extent subjective). Even the most humble leaver-of-comment on say, this blog generally follows this rule.

* * *

However, I’ve still not really answered the question – mainly I’ve talked about so far is the reasons why I write, not why I blog.

The other main answer to this is pretty simple; what other options do I really have? If you want to get paying gigs, you need a portfolio, and in the absence of any ‘properly published’ works, this means a blog. And if you want to ‘go it alone’… well you need the blog. What else can I do? Make some ‘zines and show a) my crap graphics skills (behold, my E in GCSE Art!) and b) the fact nobody near here gives a flying about the contents. In this case, blogging allows me to reach potential readers to a level no other medium could. Like standing outside the local McD’s handing out tracts.

Social media isn’t an option. This is clear as soon as you consider the fact I’ve just passed the 1,000 word point and have no idea what platform would even accept this offering. Social media is not about content creation, it’s about giving a soapbox to for hawkers, shills and angry randos screaming at each other, all slathered with the slick grease of money and the splatterings of turds from the trolls, bots and Russian / Chinese agents continuing in their highly successful plan to get us in the West to destroy ourselves so they don’t have to. At best – and this is a debatable ‘best’ – they can serve as a method to plug your blog and perhaps occasionally make a contact / conversation worth having.

Plus, it fails the critical point at the top; it’s a forum which you don’t control. And with all the problems associated with it.

I suppose there’s the various video hosts, but I don’t produce content (as yet) which would warrant that. Basically, you’d simply get a long video of me, reading to the camera. Honestly, I think you can live without that view (in fact, might be best you don’t see that view). And when it comes down to it, the likes of YouTube and Co can as easily kick you off their platform as any of the socials do. What’s more, I think I can embed videos to my posts if needs be…

Which is the positive thing about blogging – as publishing mediums go, it’s pretty portable. As long as you keep backup of your content (and subscribers list), you could with relative ease re-create it with little difficulty. There’s no de facto monopoly blogging site, and you can increase your level of ‘creative freedom’ by getting independent hosting which for the basics seems to be around the price of perhaps two or three takeaways a year. Lastly, the levels of censorship seems to be much lower in blogland than elsewhere – at least for now (I personally suspect ‘They’ believe them to be all-but-dead, and what better way to hide in the obscurity of a body on life support?)

* * *

Which is my ‘final thought’ of this post. That when it comes down to it, the idea of ‘free speech’ in general terms online does not exist in the ways we generally felt it did a decade ago. Perhaps it was simple naïveté; we felt that we could use tech to break the liver-spotted dead hand of the Murdochs of the world, to get away from the white-bread TV executives, cliquey print journalists and cringeworthy, out date ‘talent’. Unfortunately, we only managed to get away from Murdoch to end up being caught by Zuckerberg instead. Perhaps we should have seen that coming; after all, the ‘phases of development’ seen online follows perfectly the normal rules of capitalism. But that’s not the point I’m making today.

Anyway, the point which I am is that unless you’ve got enough outlay, the only place you really have any modicum of control/security over is in fact, a blog. Forums aren’t yours, social media clearly isn’t yours, comments on sites will only survive if allowed and content hosts like YouTube don’t really care about you unless you’re a whale of a creator. Blogs also allow you do reveal as little or as much as you desire about yourself – which is good, because I wouldn’t be so candid if had to sign my ‘real’ name. Or log in with a photo of my face.

And to be honest, I think my work would lose a bit of it’s bite if I had to.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Blogging: Lessons From The First Year

A year ago (well a year and two days exactly, but RL got in the way) I launched this blog with my first post; ‘Progressive Tar And Feathers‘. And in the vague possibility that the following may be a help for someone out there in the Great Superweb, here’s the semi-structured thoughts on this first year.

Reflections…

So, first things first; the stats. In the 368 days since launching ‘Tales of the Minority’, I’ve had 423 visitors, 656 views, 237 ‘likes’ and have 43 followers. In return I’ve written 137 thousand words (a touch longer than Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities) in 190 posts, which I guestimate has taken me perhaps around ~500 hours to produce. My remuneration from all this is easier to calculate; it’s zero. However, on the plus side the tangible costs are also near zero (the only one I can think of is the various product I’ve bought to test, though it could be argued I’d have ended up buying quite a lot of them to test regardless).

However, there’s the intangibles to consider; my time (or yours for that matter) is not worthless. Nor is my mental effort to sit down and craft text in a manner which is readable. And while it’s traditionally ‘not done’ to blow one’s own trumpet, I think I can say I do have a bit of skill in this department too. Well, at least compared to some stuff I’ve read in my time.

Which is one of the biggest issues out there; some (perhaps many) newbie bloggers expect a decent amount of fiscal recompense or at least a respectful amount of traffic in the first year which can then be ‘marketised’.I wasn’t expecting either; on the basis that search engines are fickle masters, this blog is too generalised, I don’t spend my time doing the drill on social media and the knowledge that ‘creatives’ rarely pay, and seldom pay well.

Banging One’s Drum

One thing which surprised me a bit was the fact that quite a lot of the ‘successful’ bloggers spend a lot of time on social media. To the point the vast majority of their efforts are here plugging content, rather than actually producing it. FB, Instragram, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Twitter and so on. Now, I’m not some fusty antiquarian who doesn’t realise the value of doing all that, more a person who has only limited time and energy and feels that it’s better to make the content and not promote it than promote content which doesn’t exist.

Plus, I don’t wanna. All that soft-soaping, arse-licking, cliquey bitchiness and so on. I don’t want to play the role of a virtual flunky, ready to drop my figurative knickers for the honour of being RT’d or allowed a guest spot somewhere by one higher up the chain than I. Knowing that a single slip can make you be exiled, possibly forever. An electronic variant of the old back-scratching and crawling of the literary sets which pisses off enough creatives that many of them end up self-exiling themselves in the back end of beyond simply to have a cast-iron excuse of not taking part in all that crap.

Then there’s the dirty open secret; the fact that much of the income made from blogging is of suspect provenance; the advertorials and ‘sponsored content’. To put it bluntly; well-regarded ‘amateur’ content-makers are seen as a cheap and effective way to hawk product. From freebies to cold hard cash, it could be said your first offer (which I’ve not had yet) is a sign that you’ve become sufficiently ‘influential’ to be worth bribing.

But that’s the critical danger – as I said to a relative of mine who does vblogging recently. The company is interested in your ‘authenticity’. This is a product which is easy to lose and very difficult to re-gain. ‘Once a whore always a whore’ and so on. Now, this isn’t an issue so much if you’re either completely apolitical, openly materialistic or have the chutzpah to successfully pull off making said selling-out to be an art form (I’ve seen it done), but can destroy your brand, esp if you pick the wrong product/company to plug.

To paraphrase my advice earlier; I think ~500 hours of my effort is worth more than a free box of protein bars or pair of running trainers.

A Literary Iceberg

What isn’t appreciated by many newbies is the amount of effort a blog actually requires. One of the best pieces of advice I got about blogging was that you needed to build up solid ‘body of work’ before you actually started to generate traffic. In my case, it was nine months of near-nil views (perhaps occasionally a visit or two for a new post) before I actually started to get a few referrals from say, search engines. That’s a lot of virtual pen-ink and time I’ve expended before basically, anybody started to notice.

However, the plus-side to this is that when you do start being noticed, you’ve already got some ‘back catalogue’ which continues to be of value (sometimes) even when it’s no longer fresh. This is one of the strengths of blog-style output than social media-style; the latter is all too often just about the present, the past being often figuratively buried – you can find it again if you’re really interested, but it’s usually a real faff to do so. In this case, social media is like what journalism in the pre-Internet age was; you’d be printed, read and then binned. That only a very organised writer would be able to later on go back, collect up all their contributions and re-issue them.

Then there’s the sheer amount of work that goes into each post. Writing itself is an effort; something which isn’t really appreciated by folks who don’t do much of it. Content is cut, added, moved around and edited all the time. Grammar and word usage checks have to happen too. Then there’s the ‘research phase’ of every post; sometimes this can result in a couple of hours of reading other sources and so on to get a better grip on the topic being written about. Even relatively short pieces – like the product reviews – require me to do a little digging to see where they’re normally sold, at what price and who made it and entering them into my spreadsheet to study it’s nutritional content. Something even as simple as a title can take some time to coin; there’s been several times where I’ve been slamming prospective titles into search engines seeing what worked.

After all this work, you’ve then got the technical aspects to deal with; tags, categories, font editing etc. Are any cross-links required? Are they part of a grouping which requires an entry into the index? Do you want the page published now or later? This all adds up; my rule of thumb is that a product review usually takes around an hour to produce, a regular post around three hours and a ‘long-read’ (like this one) five. This doesn’t even take into account the times where I’ve been casting around for a topic to cover (which happens to all of us at times).

Opportunity Costs

Naturally, all this adds up. Which leads to two issues. First, many of the folks who ‘make a living’ from ‘online commentary’ (a catch-all of blogging, social media etc) do so for they’re putting in 35/40 hours plus a week. Aka it is a job. It’s not something which can be done on top of say another full-time job.

When you think of it this way, I strongly suspect that a lot of ‘content creation’ (another catch-all term) doesn’t actually pay. That is, the time taken to create it could have been used more productively on a task that earned more cash. This is known in the trade as ‘opportunity costs’ (aka the costs of doing X instead of Y). That if you’ve spent two hours writing a blog post which generates £5 in income instead at work to earn £15, well that blog post ‘cost’ you £10. (However, it can be argued that the blog post is different for it can continue to earn into the future with it’s ‘residuals’, which that two hours at work clearly don’t.).

The other issue is more insidious – a variant of what I call the ‘inverse law of social media’; that a more a person is posting about their lives, the less life they’re actually experiencing. Take this post, for example; I’m running over an hour late because I decided to go for a run and then hit the shower. More time in front of the screen is less time doing the thing you’re using as the material for the content. It reminds me of the advice I once heard a friend of mine give to their kid; the people leading the best, most interesting lives are too busy to be constantly posting about it.

Problem is, you need the experiences to generate the content. If you focus way too much on the latter, you end up with burnout; even if you have got things to write about, you’re too mentally exhausted to write. Part of good blogging, I’ve come to appreciate is knowing when not to blog. But…

Perfect Is The Enemy Of Good

That’s a hard thing for any ‘creative’ to admit; that their work is not ‘the best they can do’. It never is. This is because perfection is unobtainable. Everything can be ‘made better’ with more time and effort. Plus, perfection is subjective.

One of the most important things for anybody who ‘creates’ is to learn how to produce the ‘desired quality level’. Be it building a wall, making a cake or writing an article, you consider the situation and aim for the quality you feel suitable for it – like you’re much less likely to ‘pull out the stops’ for an everyday cake just for your family than one being made for your Gran’s 90^th.

But the problem is that the majority of us as kids were taught crap like ‘give it 110%’ and similar without ever mentioning whether the thing we were ‘giving 110% on’ was worth it. That basically, we’re taught that hard work was the important thing, not the value of the results. This extends to blogging; that a combination of childhood programming and/or insecurity regarding our skill(s) leads us to end up to sit there, forever tinkering and polishing the damn thing even though it’s barely adding to it’s ‘value’.

The Three Rules

With the above in mind, I now operate on my three cardinal rules of blogging;

#1: The article has to add something to ‘the conversation’. New information. A different opinion or theory. An experience. This is why – for example – I so rarely talk about the hows of exercising; people better than I already have done so and better than I could. This is known in marketing as ‘USP’ (Unique Selling Point). Your offering has to be different to others.

#2: The article has to have a purpose. Mindless rambles are not on, or angry ranting. Now, there’s nothing wrong in making an article look like you’re doing either of these – but that should be a style, not the content. That you need to remember the purpose when thinking of the ‘craft quality’ of the article; a review can be a fairly run of the mill affair, while a short story or essay much higher.

#3: The article is ‘of today’. To this, I mean that it’s a monument of the day it was written; you don’t need to spend so much time polishing the damn thing it starts being ‘of yesterday’, nor do you need to keep updating it afterwards. Once I’ve posted it, the only edits I allow myself to do is fixing links, sorting out spelling/grammar and occasionally correcting factual errors. That’s it.

Final Thoughts

Blogging per se hasn’t thrown many surprises at me. I wasn’t expecting it to become popular overnight, had a strong suspicion of how much work it could be and wasn’t blind to how social media has become so enmeshed into it. I was also rather cynical in thinking that most of the folks who make the most cash out of blogging were a) the disguised marketeers and b) the folks who say you can make so much cash out of blogging – but has proven fairly accurate so far.

My biggest ‘mistake’ was not thinking beforehand exactly what I wanted to do from this blog. If nothing else, I think I would have chosen a different name for it.

Unlike others, I don’t regret doing it all ‘on the cheap’. There’s nothing stopping me from at a later date buying a ‘proper’ domain and exporting the whole thing there. I don’t have a lot of cash and if the ‘newbie rule’ is correct (your first attempts will be shit and best forgotten) it’s sometimes best for you to learn the ropes in a place you can nuke afterwards if you screw it all up.

The one thing which has actually rather surprised me is the relative lack of ‘content worries’ in blog sites and so on. Oh, there’s many people out there wanting to talk about social media tie-ins, trying to get guest posts, the technical aspects of it etc – but so little about writing per se.

And this seems the wrong way around. If your blog is your ‘shop’ and social media your ‘adverts’, the posts are your ‘products’. While you can operate a shop in a poor location with no advertising, you can’t operate a shop in an excellent location with perfect advertising if you’ve got nothing to sell.

At least, that’s what it looks like from here….

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.