One thing I can’t stand about the effort to drive more traffic to a site is the almost mandatory need to play suck ass to some high traffic megablog in the hopes that maybe, someday, somehow, they might acknowledge your puny existence for one microsecond and throw a fraction of their gazillion readers and visitors your way.

If I write a post I think is particularly funny, charming and relevant, I email a link to it to a couple of high profile bloggers, then pray, beg, sacrifice chickens and hope hope hopey o’ change hope that it doesn’t disappear into the darkest catacombs of that blogger’s inbox, never to be seen again.

Except that of course it does, because I am a speck of dust who can never evolve to the point that I could successfully grab their attention, though mostly I think it’s because I’m not a hot babe who blogs in her underwear (and leaves up a webcam to prove that she does in fact, blog in her underwear.)

Makes me feel like I’m in high school all over again, trying to get into an exclusive, elitist club that nobody wants me to be in, partly because they weren’t even aware of my existence, and if the time should ever come that they did become aware, then they’d rue the day I was born.  It seems that I can only inspire either indifference or sheer, unadulterated hatred.

All I can really do then is watch from the sidelines while these successful bloggers happily fondle each other and share links and traffic and readers, and yet I myself can only but trudge endlessly in the mud of Google irrelevancy.  It all seems so unfair, because really, all I’m asking for is a microcosm of acknowledgment, just a F*%&ING link or two from your millions-of-hits-a-month blog that takes all of two seconds to post, which would at least give me a fighting chance to succeed.  And I’m not even doing it for me, I’m doing it to help my sick, sick Mommy, who I can’t fully care for unless I can find a way to supplement my already heavily taxed salary.  A link for a life.  That’s all it takes, but noooooo, I’m not in your “speeeeeecial” club see, and worse yet, I’m not a half-naked chick prancing around my blog and uploading sultry looking photos of myself to Flickr either, so therefore I’m not worth the poopie poo on your shoe.

Well screw you big boy, and screw this ridiculous internet caste system we’ve made for ourselves.  A-list blogs and B-List blogs and C-list blogs and whatnot?  F&^% that.  I got my own label: the One-of-a-kind, All-night-long, I-am-your-Daddy’s-Master Blog.

And this club can only fit one member, baby:  Me. 

Tags: blog, blogger, bloggers, blogs, caste system, elitism, email, exclusive club, funny, google, Links, traffic
Categories: Comic Relief
 
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With all the hoopla over Google’s latest PR update, I decided to dedicate a karaoke song to all those bloggers out there feeling the pain of seeing their PageRank reduced. You’ve heard of Backstreet Boys “Quit Playing Games With My Heart?” Well this is my personal rendition, “Quit Playing Games With My Blog!” Feel free to listen to the podcast of me singing the song, but I should warn you, I’m a really bad singer. Here are the lyrics:

Google…. Oh…..

When I load my site, I see
You’re not being true to me
I looked at my toolbar, and saw
You left me with PageRank of three
Sometimes I wish I could, turn back time
When a listing on Yahoo was free
Oh I wish I could, so bad, Google
Quit playing games with my blog!

Chorus:
My blog!
My blog!
With my… I should have known from the start!
My blog!
My blog!
With my blog!

I code my site, the way, to
Keep your bots coming back to me!
Everything I do, is for you
So what if I had a paid link or two
Sometimes I wish I could, turn back time
When there was no such thing as nofollow,
Ohh I wish I could, so bad, Google you better
Quit playing games with my blog!

Chorus

Quit playing games!

Google, Google!
The link love we had was so strong
Don’t penalize me forever!
Oh Google, Google!
My site is optimized so let’s
Stop this tonight!

Google…. Oh….
Quit Playing Games!
Na na na na na na
Na na na na Google
Na na na na na na

Sometimes I wish I could, turn back time
When Altavista was number one
Oh I wish I could, so bad, Google
Quit playing games with my blog!

Chorus

Quit playing games with my…
Na na na na na na
Na na na na Google
Na na na na na na
Quit playing games with my blog
With my blog
With my blog
With my blog!

You can see the original lyrics to the actual song here. Apologies to the Backstreet Boys for torpedoing their song.
 

Tags: apologies, backstreet boys, blog, bloggers, clown, funny, google, heart, humor, karaoke, love, lyrics, pagerank, playing games, podcast, seo, singing, song
Categories: Blog Fog, Comic Relief
 
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Eventually I’m gonna have to do some redesigning to fix some of the rendering problems this blog has. The biggest issue is that I can’t keep my footer under all three columns. As long as the middle column is longer than my sidebar, the issue won’t present itself, but since some of my posts can be very short, that isn’t always the case. The end result is that the footer gets snaked under the sidebars, crapping out the whole page. I’ve been able to workaround this issue by removing the sidebars from my single post pages, but eventually I need to find a better solution.

I’ve been looking around for blog design consultants willing to clean up this site, and found one called the Blog Studio. It seems to come highly recommended, so I sent them an email outlining what I’d like done and requested a price quote.

They blew me off.

At first I thought maybe they were really busy, so I gave it another week or so, and then sent them another email.

They blew me off again.

Now that’s just rude. They must think I have no money, or they cater only to the rich crowd of A-list bloggers who can afford to spend serious coins to have their sites redesigned. Snobs. Damned, damned snobs. All I wanted was a price quote or some general idea of what it would cost to fix the coding on my site, and if I didn’t have enough now, I could work up some O.T. and maybe use some Christmas money to get this thing done. But God forbid I should even be given the courtesy of a reply.

Well I certainly wouldn’t recommend them now. Nate Whitehill recently started a blog design business as well, which received major attention ever since he redesigned John Chow’s blog, so I might take a look at one of his packages instead, even though he blew off my last email as well. I’m gonna assume he was busy though. I hope. Maybe…? Please……..? …………………….

Tags: blog, blog design, blog studio, bloggers, blogging, coding, coins, crowd, email, footer, general idea, john chow, nate, redesign, rendering, reply, sidebar, sidebars, snobs, tongue, whitehill
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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My blog is ruined.

I resisted for as long as I could, but I finally succumbed to the pinkness. Danielle at Pink Internet Marketing recently offered up a chance to win a Pink SEO Bear for bloggers everywhere, and being enticed by promises that the bear would help me get girls (not to mention the fact that I simply can’t resist a cute face), I decided to enter as well.

But let’s get one thing straight here. I HATE the color pink. HATE it, a’ight? I mean it’s just sooo… well… pink. Me, I dig dark colors. Blackness defines me. My car is black, my computer is black, my hair is black, and my leather jacket (when I get one) will also, of course, be black. Being ensconced in the darkness makes me seem more mysterious, more manlier, and maybe, just a bit more dangerous too.

But now I just HAD to go and pinkify my blog didn’t I. Ugh… It’s ok though, I’m sure this will wash off eventually, and my blog will soon return to its normally dark and mysterious self.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sudden urge to go window shopping for some Prada shoes.

Tags: black, blackness, blog, bloggers, colors, contest, dark, darkness, girls, internet marketing, leather jacket, mysterious, pink, promises, seo, urge, window shopping
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Today marks the one year anniversary of the Habitation of Justice. I should say something profound, so here it is:

The chocolate moose is not in season.

If you can figure that out, let me know. On a more serious note, as far as blogs go, this has been a pretty quiet year for me. There were times when I literally would get only one visitor a day, and sometimes I’d let weeks go by before blogging another post. I had been focused on other things, (like going to law school), but as soon as it became clear that my life wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, I started to pay more attention to my blog. The last few months were all about promoting my site and optimizing it for search engines so I could bring in more traffic. Now I’m getting upwards of about 100 visits a day, which is still nowhere close to my goal, but at least it’s much better than what it used to be.

Sooooo, now that it’s been a year, where do I go from here? What direction should I take this blog in? Ever since my law school dream bombed out, I’ve been entertaining fantasies on how I could make a living out of blogging instead, quitting my dead end job and hitting the road, living the life of a nomad as I moved from place to place, finding ways to help people I encountered in my travels, and experiencing exciting new adventures that would endlessly provide great writing fodder for my blog.

Could it happen? Not unless I can find a way to monetize my blog so that it brings in a full time income, a feat that only one half of one percent of all bloggers on the Internet have been able to accomplish. And usually those types of blogs have the kind of niches where they tell everyone else how THEY can make money off their sites. Either that, or it’s rife with affiliate marketing and other business related themes that I simply can’t get into. I just don’t have the mentality for it. I can only tell a story, and telling stories through this particularly venue has not proven to be an especially profitable one for most people.

But…. it’s all I got. After racking my brain trying to come up with a niche suitable for me, I decided that it had to be something that I could always love doing, rather than delving into a niche only because it might prove to be more of a money maker. I loved to write, but not about products and marketing and technology and business and whatnot, but about life in general. About what’s real. About my deepest emotions, hopes, and despairs. About my life experiences, and how readers could relate to it. But I realized in order to blog about life, I had to first HAVE a life.

So I guess that’s what will define my second year: finding a life worthy of blogging about, and telling a story that could immerse the reader in my riveting world. Well… at least as riveting as I can possibly make it.

Only time will tell if this will be my breakout year (both online and offline), and whether I’ll be able to generate the kind of readership that I’ve been looking for.

So stay tuned, it’s going to get very interesting from here on out.

Tags: affiliate marketing, anniversary, blog, bloggers, blogging, fantasies, fodder, full time, habitation, job, law school, life, mentality, monetizing, niche, niches, nomad, search engines, story telling, time income, traffic, travels, writing, year anniversary
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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For the first time since I started blogging many moons ago, I finally put up Google’s Adsense on my site. This I do, 4 years after its release, with the Internet now completely saturated with these types of ads everywhere you surf, during the worst advertising slump since 2000. I’m brilliant.

Oh well. I’m obviously not going to hold my breath waiting for the money to roll in, but I do think the process of learning how to place these ads on my blog has been a good learning experience for me. Some experts say bloggers should wait until they start drawing significant traffic before they start placing advertisements on their blogs. But because monetizing your blog involves so much more than simply slapping an ad in the header, I think it’s important to learn as much as you can early on, so by the time your site does generate respectable traffic (if it ever does), you’ll have already learned the most important aspects of what makes for successful online advertising, and how you can make it work for you.

Personally, I’m treating this as an experiment to see where it might lead. If the stats show people clicking on the ads despite the low number of traffic I get, that bodes very well for the future. On the other hand, if 6 months goes by without a single clickthrough, it’s either a sign that this particular ship has LONG since sailed, or that I need to try another approach. Regardless of what happens though, the bottom line is I’m never gonna know for sure unless I try. Success is usually a trial and error process, and I’m finding that I can learn a lot more through my mistakes than if I had signed up for a $2,000 seminar that offers little more than the common sense knowledge your mother should have already taught you.

The good news is that I’m venturing into an area where you don’t automatically have to be first to succeed, just one of the guys who makes it all the way to the finish line. Blogging is a marathon more than anything else, and most bloggers eventually either give up or burn out within a relatively short period of time. If blogging is something you think you can do blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back for the next 20 years, then the future definitely bodes well for you. Endurance is the name of the game, and very few people truly have it, especially when it comes to blogging. Even I burned out and stopped blogging altogether for almost a year, and I’m the kind of guy who loves to write.

Even doing what you love though can be a laborious pain at times, but then again, nothing worth having in this world is going to come easy. It’s usually a long and arduous process, but I’m confident those who believe the laborer is truly worthy of his hire will eventually reap the rewards they’ve worked so hard to obtain.

I only hope I’ll be one of them.

Tags: ad streams, adsense, advertisements, advertising, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogs, bottom line, clickthrough, common sense, finish line, google, many moons, marathon, monetization, money, one of the guys, problogging, readers, sense knowledge, slump, traffic, trial and error
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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