I've been wanting to break into problogging for quite some time. (Probloggers are those gifted few, like Darren Rowse or Yaro Starak, who get paid 6 figures from ad revenue for blogging.) For some reasons, I just haven't been able to. I'm sure the hard facts are that I haven't yet figured out who my target audience is yet nor have I been able to keep a consistent writing schedule. My posts are all over the spectrum varying simply over what I'm pissed off about this week.
Ever since I added a bunch of blogs to my Google Reader feeds, I've definitely seen what I don't want to do. I get very frustrated to see a bunch of new posts on one of my feeds only to find that they are little more than "A Summary of this week's posts" or "One year ago on Lifehacker." Even worse are when five or more of the blogs I follow do nothing more than echo each other. Chances are that at a minimum, I will read the same ten posts each week on Lifehacker, Lifehack, Dumb Little Man, and several others. To be honest, I've grown sick of hearing about GTD and I've unsubscribed from many blogs that focus on it. I think the term GTD cult is an understatement. I do maintain a few that present unique and interesting information, but I've gotten rid of many of the "Gospel of the Law of Attraction" blogs.
Another thing I'm growing tired of among the problogs are the lists. I know; Darren Rowse and many other pobloggers says that lists are a great way to bring in traffic but they're also a great way to have me unsubscribe from your blog's feed. I can only read so many iterations of "5 ways to smile" before I puke and terminate a feed.
When I first started blogging I wanted to do socio-political commentary, but that's little fun for me to read so why should I subject anyone who haplessly stumbles by my blog to it? I'm not sure how things are on the "liberal" side of the aisle, but on the conservative side most political news is whining, especially among Christian conservatives. I can't tell you how many email alerts I get with a subject similar to "The Liberal Media Is Ignoring Christian Issues!" No kidding. How is this news, especially when I get the same email from three different organizations six times a month? Sometimes I want to email them to say "Stop wasting my bandwidth!"
I'm not entirely sure where my niche in the blogging world is, but I think I may retool my format once again. I'm a computer geek but I also like history and philosophy. I also consider myself an amateur Bible scholar. There are a lot of things I want to write about, and since I'm not sure that anybody reads my blog, I guess I can write about whatever I want to anyway. I've decided that I’m not likely to get paid to blog, so I might as well have fun with it. I assure those few of you who type whatever search into Google that lands you here, I won't do blog tricks that annoy me. If I do comment on another blog's post, I will make sure that my comments are unique.
Technorati Tags: Problogging
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