Wayne W Walls

 Bloggers want to have their sites rank well in search engines. Not only because it is pretty cool to type something into Google and see your own website show up, but because it means an increased number of people will read what you write. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) advice for how to improve your website's rankings in search engines comes in many shapes. The most commonly shared strategy is to increase the number of backlinks to your content, because the more backlinks to your site, the better your site will rank in Google. Another strategy is to post regularly on social media , and include links to all of your new blog content. The thinking is that people will discover your posts on social media, then click through to your website. Also, having activity on social media platforms that references your site may be a ranking factor that Google considers. A third category of advice involves posting content to your blog consistently and more frequently . The more posts you hav...

 I started this blog and continue to write for it in the hopes that it would someday generate significant traffic. I also hope that it will generate an income for me which is at least as much as I currently make from my job so that I can quit my job and focus on building this blog. Currently, those are still just hopes for the future. This blog does not attract many readers, and it does not make me any money. I think that lots of people who start blogs have roughly those same goals. They are sick of their jobs and hope that their side hustle of a blog will allow them to quit. But I think that's about where it stops for most people. They want to use their blog to replace their income. And if the income from the blog grows, great, its just more money to spend, save, or invest. But there isn't really a bigger goal. But I hope to use the money from the blog to do something more. I have written about my plans for what I would do if this blog ever takes off in another post, and this...

 As I have written in other blog posts recently, I struggle to find the time to write blog posts because of my job, family, and other time commitments. If I could choose the ideal time to write , it would be in the mid-morning, but that time is taken up with work. When I look at my day realistically, the time left available to me to do discretionary things such as writing is at night before I go to bed. Roughly 9:30pm onward is the time I can sit down and punch the keys to produce a blog post. The trouble is that I feel very tired that late at night. Not so much physically tired, but mentally tired. As if I'm just not operating at peak creativity. And I really need to feel at least a little energized and creative to be able to write. If it were some routine physical task, I could do it while exhausted, but something like writing takes more of you to do. But I really want to write more , so I need to find a way to make that time work.  At first I looked into taking a quick nap ...

 When you search the internet for information about how to increase the traffic your blog gets, you find all kinds of suggestions.  Do whatever you can to attract or create backlinks. Write guest posts. Write comments on other blogs with links back to your own blog. Use email outreach to ask other bloggers to link to you. Use linking to control the link juice on your site. You can link to other high authority websites to indicate to search engines that your own site is high quality as well. Using internal links to direct readers to other posts on your site can help keep people on your site longer. Post on social media regularly to find and attract an audience on those platforms, and gradually send them over to your blog. Post links to all of your blog posts as you publish them. Perfect the non-written content aspects of your blog. Use photos, videos, and infographics to create appeal. Improve your site speed. These are just a few of the ways that are typically suggested that y...

 I started this blog because I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas. And when trying to come up with blog post ideas, I usually want to pick topics suitable for essays. I want a thesis, claim, or topic, and then use the blog post to fill out the idea. That is the goal. But writing that sort of article can be very time consuming and take a lot of effort.  I struggle to find time to write blog posts, and the time I usually end up with is late at night before bed. And by that time I am mentally pretty exhausted. And not feeling overly creative. So an essay-type topic is pretty tough to work on then. But that doesn't mean I just want to throw up my hands and not produce any content. I might sometimes just want to curate content, and add a little commentary. I wrote about that desire in my post about acting as a recommendation engine . But as much as that is something I want to do, and even something I committed to in that post, I haven't done a whole lot of it. I've tended to ...