You found me! You're reading this, right?
You came in through search engines, subscriptions, recommendations and maybe even my AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.
Once in awhile, I do the AMA thing about blogging. I have people ask me how to blog. But lately, the questions are about backlinks, SEO and keywords, which to be honest, in 20 years, I've never dealt with any of that, at least not consciously.
I find that people that are more concerned with any of that are not writers or bloggers. They are people looking to post clickbait.
If you are a blogger, you want to write. You hopefully have a niche market and want to write about that. One guy asked me if I write and wait for feedback. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds totally stupid.
I write to spread the news about something. In this blog I write about blogging, in another I write about my cartooning career and personal life, in another I have lists of 10 things. I have one that is run as a newsletter for my online business. I don't wait for "permission" which is what waiting for feedback sounds like.
People are afraid to make a move without permission. If that's you, then blogging is not for you.
Another person wanted to know how I built my backlinks list. What backlinks list? Does he mean a blogroll? Do they do that anymore? I remember when I started blogging in 2005, that was a thing. But backlinks are for websites, not for live blogs, where hopefully the content is fresh on a regular basis.
And writing to keywords is insane. Totally.
Recently Val Kilmer passed away. All newspapers and magazines wrote about it. They ended up being at the top of the search engines. I'm sure they didn't study keywords, they were trying to be the first with the news. Just the fact that it was fresh content and used the name Val Kilmer was enough. It was at the top of the search engines, above his movie info, about his Wikipedia page and above all else - the fresh news was at the top.
That's what blogging does. Your fresh stories will be at the top of the searches. Search engines thrive on fresh comment.
One guy asked me if I get bored writing a niche blog. No, because you should be writing about something you like, not just write to get to the top of the search engines. If it bores you, then your readers are bored no matter how many keywords or backlinks you have.
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