...how long it actually takes people (other people, that is) to write blog posts? Mine are all over the map: 2 minutes or less (for sharing a picture or cartoon) to well over an hour (for a review) or 4-5 hours (for that post about Harriet Klausner and the ARC reselling).
Lately, they've been hovering in the 5-15 minute range. When I'm really into something, I can type pretty fast. If I'm not that into something, or I really don't have any time, it probably shows. I've been busy at work lately, which cuts into my internet surfing time. (Because, you know, if there is something to work on that's work-related, I'd honestly prefer to be doing that. I want my bosses to be satisfied with the documents I turn out so I can, like, keep my job and possibly earn raises or bonuses, you know? And I always feel guilty for surfing the web, even when there's nothing else to do. I'd much prefer to be doing actual work. Because I actually do have a conscience, believe it or not. But I digress.)
Anyway, a lot of bloggers slap a picture up there (to which their use rights are likely questionable, and which takes up the entirety of my 15-inch laptop screen) and provide a list of bullet points about how to increase blog traffic or how to make time for writing or how to find freelance jobs or some crap like that. I hope that at least once or twice a week, I can provide a laugh, or an inspired post, or a good rant, or something. I am certainly not interested in recycling tired, old bullet points that I found somewhere else online.
Hell, I'm surprised I've kept blogging for this long. I think this spring'll be two years. (Blogger might list the blog as older but I deleted a lot of old posts and started writing consistently about two years ago.)
Anyway, if anyone out there actually writes a blog, I'd be interested in hearing what kind of planning (if any) goes into your blog posts, how much time you spend on them, stuff like that.
Oh, man. I spend way too much time on mine. This week's probably took me five hours - two hours for the post and (no kidding) three for the pictures. How dumb is that?
ReplyDeleteBut I keep reading how important pictures are, especially for longer posts, and I catch myself in that same reader behavior. (Take a 1500-word Cracked.com article and another from the NYT - it's much easier to catch myself skimming the latter.) So I'm trying to put up interesting pictures, and ALSO trying not to get burned further down the road for copyright infringement, so there's this massive hunt for the perfect image, and then to think up the perfect caption, and then to sort of haggle with the Internet to see whether I can get the pic for free or whether I have to buy it from a stock site... bleah. Not the best use of my time, but I struggle so much with every other form of social media that I feel like I have to go all-out on the blog.
Your way is probably better.
Nice to know you actually try to get the pictures legitimately. I don't have ANY budget for a stock image site. (I basically don't have ANY budget at all for anything. I can pay my bills and that's about it. Getting a puppy was probably not the brightest idea, financially, though I'm glad I did it, nonetheless.)
DeleteI struggle with social media too. I mean, I just post a stream of stuff. But I doubt I'm getting much return. I'm kind of just going through the motions.
However, I'm not actually expecting to make money off of this. It started out as a way to collect my thoughts about reading and writing fantasy and I keep it up out of pure stubbornness. (I get much more Adsense revenue from a video of my dearly departed Rottweiler licking a lemon on YouTube than I ever expect to get out of this blog, and even THAT hasn't earned a payout yet.)
As for long articles in the NYT, I read those on paper with my breakfast in the morning...