successful

Blogging Insights — Success

Fandango20 Comments

It’s Monday and Dr. Tanya is back with her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. She provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Jeremy Schoemaker, a web entrepreneur.

“I think I am about 5 for 500 when it comes to successful ideas versus flops.”

I’m not sure if this quote has much to do with writing or blogging. I suppose when you’re talking about money-making schemes, if 495 out of 500 ideas end up hitting being flops, that might be okay if 5 out of 500 are hugely successful. But if I thought only 1% of my ideas for blog posts were successful, I’d find some other way to spend my time.

To me, successful ideas, when it comes to blogging, are those ideas that result in posts that I’m proud of, that readers seem to enjoy, and which engage readers enough for them to like and/or comment on them. Using that criteria as a guideline, I would hope that my idea success rate is better than 1%.

Blogging Insights — Spammers are People, too

Fandango29 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Adrienne Smith.

“Successful people don’t spam.”

I don’t personally know any spammers, so I can’t say, one way or another, how successful they are. If the purpose of spammers is to lure people to their sites to buy whatever it is they’re selling, and if they actually do manage to get people to do that, then they may, indeed, be successful. After all, given the huge amount of spam being generated every day, whoever is behind it all must be achieving some level of success. Otherwise, why bother?

But my real question is this: are spammers even real people at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if most spam came from robots, or spambots, operating out spam farms in Russia or Belarus or China or New Jersey.

But maybe, just maybe, Adrienne was misquoted and what she actually said was, “Successful people don’t eat Spam.” And if that is, in fact, what she said, she’s 100% correct.

Blogging Insights — Just Do It

Fandango18 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Ron Dawson, a Special Educational Needs educator, psychologist, researcher, and author.

“The first thing you need to decide when you build your blog is what you want to accomplish with it, and what it can do if successful.”

I started my first blog in 2005 and I had no idea of what I wanted to accomplish with it or what it could do if successful. I just jumped right in and started writing and posting what I wrote. When I started This, That, and the Other, my fifth blog, in 2017, I still had no specific accomplishment goal or goals in mind. I just wanted a platform — or maybe a soapbox — on which to express myself.

I’m very happy with my blog and I feel that, based upon the number of visitors, views, likes, and comments my posts generate each day, it is relatively successful. What that “success” has enabled me to do is to be a part of a wonderful community of other bloggers, where we can share our stories, our poems, our photographs, our beliefs, our perspectives, our opinions, our passions, our experiences, our frustrations, and our lives with one another. And that truly brings me joy.

What Ron Dawson said about needing to decide what you want to accomplish with your blog before you start it may be good advice for some, especially if there’s a definitive niche you’re focusing on or a specific audience you wish to reach.

I don’t think, however, it’s essential for those of us who are “casual” bloggers. I say that, if you love to write and you wish to share what you write with a community of others who also love to write, you should just do it.