Blogging is a saintly exercise

I’m a month into this blogging thing, and have discovered it’s one of the most fun, creative things one can get up to on the computer. And even when I’m off

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the computer, I’m thinking what I’m going to post next, wondering who is reading what I’m writing – and what do they think?

Then there’s promoting your blog – face it, your friends and family, who may well love your blog and check in regularly, well, they are a pretty small group. 20-30 hits a day. And yet, you know there are blogs out there getting millions of hits every day. How do you get a slice of them?

Adding an RSS feed to my Facebook page was a good idea. Linking from other people’s blogs. I tried doing some posts on mailing lists – but it really felt like I was spamming, even if it was selective – but that just felt icky, so I gave that up quick. But the numbers did go up from all of these things. Google hits were going up. Then one day I had a huge jump – somehow a site called Alpha Inventions had send a couple hundred hits my way. I followed them up. It’s a blog-reader – or blog scroller, that pops up a new blog every 4-5 seconds. If it’s something that interests you, you can click on it and read it. If not, you just wait for the next one to pop up. And… you can plug your URL in and your site goes into the viewing queue – the catch is you are bumping some  else out of the queue and you will eventually get bumped. But I’m getting more hits – which is great. I just hope they turn into regular readers.

Blogging forces you to write something new and interesting every day. The oldest rule of writing there is – writers write. If you ain’t writing – you ain’t a writer. Somehow blogging is making me feel downright saintly, unlike my regular columns which are jobs, albeit ones I love. I’m feeling so saintly, that novel is calling louder and louder. No… I don’t think I’m going to set it in the Blogosphere.