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March 14, 2005
Why I 'blog' & wrestling with a 1950's sensibility
Jeff Harrell starts this morning with a good piece entitled How I blog. It contains solid, common sense advice to building and maintaining a successful blogging endeavor.
Me, I have a bit of trouble with point 2. Let me back up a bit.
I caught the politics bug when I was 10 due to my dad, a former newspaper man of the old school. He would get up at 5 am to read the paper from front to back (still does), I would come home from school and do the same thing then over the dinner table our conversation would start something like:
Dad: did you read the article on page A10 about the ...
Dar: Yes, and I have some questions about ...
This was routine just about every night until I moved out of the house after high school. Still, everytime we get together my dad and I hash current events and politics.
And I love to write. It has always been one of my ways to "talk back" to the articles I've read or to clearly articulate my thoughts on any particular subject. Mom has clippings of the few of my "letters to the editor" that actually made it into print at the LATimes.
Making the full leap into bloggership was both fun and scary. My participation on political message boards had become unsatisfactory (especially as the boards at Yahoo became clogged with trolls and flamers who hijacked threads with increasing regularity). Thus I launched this blog in August of 2004 eager to participate in both the election and to write about whatever subject I found interesting (including being able to post some of my fiction pieces!) I love the freedom my blog provides.
And I hoped for an audience who would find my writings just as interesting to read and comment on as I found when I visited other blogs and writers.
Now this is where I find point 2 a bit difficult, and for a rather silly reason (and I admit the silliness on my part). My parents, married in 1951 (I came along 3 years later) raised me with a 50's sensibility. And that includes a bit of humility where it comes to "self-promotion." Make no mistake, I use the backtrack facility with regularity and I participate in forums like the Carnival of the Vanities, Storyblogging, and Redstate.org, but I haven't quite got myself up to emailing other bloggers with links to my articles (except on very rare occassions). I guess I figured "if I write it they will come" and it has worked as I've seen my audience grow month by month. The stats from my hosting company (Hosting Matters) show I have crossed the 50,000 visits threshold and my daily average visits have grown from about 30 (8/2004) to about 425 (3/2005). I'm thrilled even though I know I could do better.
So I think, after reading Jeff's post, that I'm just going to have to take a deep breath and add email to my efforts in building my readership. I just gotta stop hearing my mom's voice about "not tooting my own horn" in my ears as my cursor hovers over the send button.
Posted by Darleen at March 14, 2005 06:59 AM
Comments
You aren't the only one that has that humility issue. Most of us were taught not to brag as a kid and while that is a great moral lesson in this day and age if you don't "brag" or tell people how good you are no one is going to do it for you. It's almost a necessity if you want to be successful.
Posted by: Digger at March 14, 2005 09:26 PM
- "Its not bragging if its true".... Texas corrollary for the "tooting your own horn" parent tape Darleen...:)
Posted by: Big Bang Hunter at March 16, 2005 05:12 PM