Frustration!

I am trying to gather a wider audience for my writing. I like to write and it's much more fun when people are reading what I take the time to write! So this morning I have been researching ways to increase traffic to my blog. There are plenty of websites about this, some of which have good advice and some of which are nonsense.

All of the websites say to publish good content and to publish it frequently. Ok, that makes sense, and I am working on that. I am trying to keep my eyes and ears open as I go through my day so that I find inspiration around me for interesting things to write.

Many sites talk about Search Engine Optimization. I am still trying to work out exactly what that means, but it seems to be writing so that you are using keywords that other people will search for. There are ways you can do research on keywords that people use when searching google, and if you write to appeal to those searches then you will get more page views. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I want to write what I want to write, not what I think people will search for. On the other hand, if there are changes I can make to what I wanted to write anyway that make it easier for people to find me, that's not bad. I haven't spent too much time on this in general so far.

One website suggested switching over to Google+, so I did that. That was annoying, since it required re-establishing my profile and then double checking all the details, but I managed it. It also suggested listing your blog at sites like Technorati, which I had never heard of before, but which is a blog directory. Listing through them is another way to get an audience. So I went to the Technorati site and signed up. It has not been simple. I got tripped up over it asking for me Feed URL. I looked that up and followed the directions to obtain it, and then it rejected it saying it didn't look like a valid URL. Really? Because it pulled up the blog site when I used it in my browser, which I thought was the definition of a valid URL - it directs you to the website you thought you were going to when you clicked it. Anyway, after about seven tries I finally got it to accept the feed URL (not changing the actual URL... maybe persistance just wore it down). Now the last step: I have to put a claim code into a post. I don't love that. I don't want to post stuff here that is nonsense. I do understand where they're coming from, since they are trying to make sure this is really my blog and I'm not just claiming someone else's work. But it's annoying, and not how I like to do things. So I decided that at least I would write a rant about this whole process before entering the code. Hopefully I've entertained someone, and at least I've spoken my mind and relieved my feelings somewhat.

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