Blogging: Something’s gotta give

The iMac’s wireless rodent ran out of gas the other day, and I didn’t have any AA batteries laying around the house. Instead of running forthwith down to the corner store to buy new batteries, I made a deliberate decision to leave the computer off.

This is something I need to do every day: leave the computer off. Maybe more of us need to do that.

Don’t know about you, but I spend way, way too much time in front of computer monitors, to the detriment of  health, social life, and the general sanitation of my home. So mesmerizing is this thing that whenever I sit down in front of a computer—doesn’t much matter what for—I go into a kind of hypnotic state, losing track of the time and losing track of conscious existence. I don’t hear what’s going on around me and I don’t think about what’s going on around me. That’s how I came to destroy not one but two expensive pieces of cookware (and have on occasion been damned lucky not to set fire to the kitchen). I depend on the Internet for news, encyclopedia information, medical advice, teaching tools, social interaction…and it has expanded to take over my life.

Like the Borg, it has assimilated me.

Between this phenomenon and the fact that the rib injury has hurt so much I could hardly move, by last Friday my house had come to rival a pigsty in its spectacular filth. All 1860 square feet of tile floors felt gritty underfoot. The kitchen floor was getting sticky as well as unsightly. The stovetop was encrusted with grease. The kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Outdoors, plants were dying for lack of water, the garden had gone to seed, suckers were growing like green scrub-brush bristles all over the desert willow and the yellow oleander. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s in-line leaf-catcher was so stuffed with debris the system was dying of entropy. And on Thursday a fellow member of our business group, showing off his brand-new iPad, snapped a photo of us all: I was sitting there with my head thrust forward and a dopey look on my face, just as I must look while parked in front of a computer monitor.

This. has. got. to. stop.

Friday’s post was written on Thursday night. So, on Friday when the iMac went incommunicado, instead of rescuing it, I pulled the suckers off the desert willow and then spent the entire day cleaning house. Did the laundry; washed the sheets; changed the bed. So far behind on these chores was I that catching up required an entire day.

That evening I used the MacBook to view current episodes of Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show, during which time I soaked, oiled and manicured my skaggy, neglected toenails and fingernails. Saturday: cleaned and vacuumed the filthy car, cleaned out the garage, read assignments from the online students. Rode my bike around the neighborhood. Sunday: cleaned out the pool equipment, scrubbed down the grease-soaked barbecue, pulled the dead and dying plants out of the garden, started to trim some of the frosted branches off the cape honeysuckle and the bougainvillea, rode my bike into a different neighborhood and along a stretch of canal bank. Ironed four weeks’ worth of jeans and shirts. Watched last week’s episode of PBS’s Masterpiece on the MacBook and this week’s off the air, again manicuring the exhausted fingernails with shea butter.

A weekend away from the computer left me feeling…well, I was left with quite a few thoughts.

• I need to limit the time I spend in front of the computer.
• I’ve got to keep up with housework, yardwork, and basic personal grooming.
• I need to get a social life.
• I need to get more exercise.
• I must re-evaluate why I am writing this blog and whether I should continue writing it at all.

While all this was going on, a flurry of anguished e-mails hit the message board of the blogger’s group I belong to. One of our members was undergoing a similar crisis of confidence. She reported that she had run out of ideas for posts, and that…yes! She was simply spending too much time in a trance-like state in front of the computer monitor!

She was expressing exactly what had been going through my own mind.

Why blog at all? Why did I start blogging, and how did FaM morph from an obscure diary to…to whatever the hell it is?

When I was a teenaged girl, I started writing a daily journal. That’s how I became a fairly skilled writer: practice makes perfect. On and off over the past 50 years, I’ve written something almost every day.

Four or five years ago, wearied of constant virus hassles and endless Microsoft patching and updates, I bought a Macintosh. A program called iLife came with the Mac. Among other things, this program makes it possible for users to write blogs and store them in Apple’s cloudlike server space, now dubbed ME.com. When I found this after I bought the iMac, it occurred to me that instead of filling up notebook after notebook, I could write journal entries digitally.

Too, I’d heard of “blogs” and wondered if I could write one. Somehow I’d stumbled across Trent Hamm’s The Simple Dollar, and so (monkey see, monkey do!) I decided to try my hand at a personal finance blog—heavier on the personal than on the finance. It really never occurred to me that anyone would read it. Nor did I especially intend for anyone to read it, any more than I intended for anyone to read my daily journals.

The iLife system is pretty limited. Its blog function apparently was intended for people who want to post photos of the kids for the grandparents to view, and not for serious blogging. This was fine by me, because at the outset it was strictly a hobby. And so I was astonished to discover that somewhere out there, people actually were reading my maunderings.

Belatedly, I moved FaM to WordPress.com. There it remained pretty much an idle hobby, but because of WordPress’s broad functionality, the blog grew in reach and readership. I continued to write every day, only because that’s what I do. But over time I began to craft posts more carefully and to try to focus the blog more specifically on PF how-to’s and advice.

At the urging of new blogging friends, I decided to move FaM to Bluehost so I could monetize it. This occurred with the help of Mrs. Micah, who at the time was running BlogCrafted, the website consultancy she had started. FaM soon started to earn money. Not much, but something.

This development changed the drift of what I was writing, because of course it changed the enterprise’s underlying mission. Instead of writing for the hell of writing—a kind of busman’s holiday—now I was again writing for pay. This meant I had to focus more sharply on personal finance issues and try (at least on occasion) to write for the widest possible readership. And I also had to spend a lot more time on SEO and various efforts to publicize the blog.

Doing anything for money tends to sap the fun out of it. Instead of entertainment, it morphs into a job. Now I was spending one to three hours a day (often more than that) at work: on top of a real paying job and on top of trying to run a side business. True, the blog also served as a podium from which to vent about that paying job and about my blessedly former employer, the Great Desert University. But still, blogging had become a job.

Today FaM has almost 500 subscribers, plus an unknown number who, like me, do not subscribe to blogs but manually revisit a specific set of favorites. It averages about 14,760 unique visits a month. So far this year it’s already had over 1.3 million hits. People all over the planet are reading this thing. As one-man bands go, it seems to be moderately successful.

With this small success has come a steady flow of “offers” from would-be advertisers. Most of them—a good 99.99% of them—are pretty sleazy: payday loan operators and loan consolidators. Many of them do not try to do business with me directly, but instead hire wannabe freelance writers, who seem to be ignorant of the implications of what they’re doing, to offer me FREE! guest posts laced with paid links. Others wish to pay me to write posts similarly laced with said paid links.

Paid text links violate Google’s terms of service. They put a site at risk of losing its page rank, the very quality that makes advertisers wish to place paid links on your site. You can get around this risk by entering code that makes their links “no-follow” links, which, as I understand it, tells search engines to ignore them. This conflicts with the text-link peddler’s motive, and so most of the time when you tell them you’ll publish only no-follow links, they back off.

I’m sure FaM could make a lot of money selling space to these shady operators. Briefly. As soon as Google knocked out my page rank, however, the text-link crowd would move to some other sucker’s site, and FaM’s AdSense income would tank.

Practicalities aside, fake “guest posts” whose sole purpose is to plant advertisements masquerading as helpful links are unethical. They misrepresent themselves and your blog to your readers. Like print advertorials, they pretend to be something they are not.

So, I made a conscious decision not to sell space for paid text links, and never to accept guest posts from people I don’t know or to run do-follow links to any commercial sites. This includes all the Amazon Associate ads that run on FaM: they all have been converted to no-follow links.

I seriously considered demonetizing Funny altogether. Adsense clutters up the site, makes it look junky. And it doesn’t earn much: despite continuing growth in traffic, revenues have dropped from around $200 to about $150 a month. On the other hand, it does supplement revenues from editing, and over the course of a year accrues enough to buy, say, a new iMac. So I’ve decided to leave Adsense in place for the nonce. If our proposed new client materializes this summer and actually pays enough to matter, I’ll revisit that decision.

So. Given that the site never will earn enough to substitute for a day job, I need to decide what to do to bring the endless time consumption under control. Here’s how I think I should start:

• First, quit posting every day. Cut the number of published posts from seven a week to three or four. At the very least, never post on weekends, when readership drops drastically.

• Next, do not write the first thing in the morning. Instead, take the dog for a walk and then launch into normal human activities. Write posts in the evening, after more useful pursuits have been accomplished.

• Mine student papers for guest posts. Each assignment elicits several interesting, well written pieces from the feature writing students. At the end of each semester, assess these and ask the best writers if they would like to publish one or more articles on FaM.

• Stop submitting posts to blog carnivals every single week. This is time-consuming, and, because I enter any damnfool thing instead of limiting submissions to the best pieces, not very productive.

• Quit writing the “Moments of Fame” series. It is time-consuming to plow through three or four carnivals a week looking for the posts that might interest FaM readers and then writing blurbs for each of them. Instead, post a tag in each accepted submission, linking from that post directly back to the carnival that featured it.

• Remove the Alexa toolbar from Firefox and never think about it again.

• Revisit the advertising question later, after this scheme has a chance to create some breathing space. Then consider other ways to monetize FaM…or whether to demonetize it altogether.

Tomorrow—assuming I post tomorrow—Funny’s 1,500^th post will go live. If not tomorrow, this certainly will happen sometime in the next few days. It’s a milepost! A good time to rethink.

Image: Macbook on a Wooden Table. Jeff Geerling. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.