By Christopher Harris The Rights of Fans

Each week the new weekly excerpt can be found here:

Learning To Become a Part-Time Writer. A Blogging Diary. Intro up to Week 3

 I reach the end of week 3 of my journey and amongst the frustrations and failures, quite possibly a very important triumph. I have no idea if I’m reading too much into it. But first the trials and the tribulations.

I’m away for 10 days at the end of next week, and I am still continuing to do a lot of background work with the business so I can prepare myself for a hopeful semi-retirement and more time on my writing.

So I haven’t really been able to sit down and spend any long period of time on the project, but I’ve grabbed the odd hour here and there.

Eventually, my partner helped me get the LinkedIn account back up and running. This would be great if it wasn’t for the fact that I didn’t really understand what LinkedIn was all about. I posted three blogs on there, and frankly none of them are going to be of any interest to anyone on LinkedIn. Some of my blogs will be pertinent such as ones connected to my own business, potentially building my writing career, I’m going to start another strand of blogs on the creation of my first book, and basically anything that can be career orientated. However, I’ve posted what I’ve input into ChatGPT to verify that it’s done correctly, and have, so that’s essentially a ticked box now.

ChatGPT has been instrumental in helping me with Pinterest. I’ve had a number of Pinterest accounts and they’ve all been a big fudge, despite lots of effort. I will shortly be writing a blog about this matter, but trying to find how to make Pinterest function through Google search is nigh on impossible. The number of blogs and videos I’ve watched all of which assume you’re not stupid, and that I’m not basically totally techno illiterate on some things. I have probably spent the equivalent of a couple of whole days of my life trying to work out Pinterest and failing, so it was fantastic asking Chat GPT to generate what I should be doing and all of a sudden within 5 minutes I knew and it all made sense.

I had a rethink over Twitter, I will always call it Twitter as X associates it with Elon Musk. I now have a Twitter account up and running. It’s a shame but I just couldn’t get into my old account which actually had 1000 followers, but happy to start again. Also, it’s handy because now I’m posting on there I can post the content directly onto bsky.

So we are actually gradually creating a social media and also publishing platform campaign, albrit currently ineffectual. I have taken the view that I am going to actually post content for a few weeks so I can establish what I’m all about, before I start reaching out for followers. I know if people want to follow me, I always check their bio or whatever it is called! I don’t have this infatuation with having as many followers as XY or Z, I just want good quality followers.  If I’m reaching out to connect with people, I want them to be able to look, let them see exactly what I’m all about, rather than just have a couple of posts which say nothing about me.

The more I read up on it the more this is literally going to be a two year campaign. Tens of thousands of people every year start doing what I’m doing and only 10% stick with it. I’m determined to be part of that 10%. The main reason why the 90% drop out is literally through impatience. I know now I can spend an hour writing a blog and it’s going to be read by a very few people. I can understand why if someone does that for a month and they just give up. Still, I know for a fact that my football blog is incredibly successful and that is just because I posted good quality blogs consistently, so I am fortunate to know that, actually, if you do stick with it, it will work.

Another of the things I’ve been brushing up on are the hashtags, all of the different social media and publishing platforms have different ways of doing hashtags for the maximum effect, specific numbers and layout effects how Google will pick them up.

Importantly during the three weeks I’ve been doing this, I have published over 20 blogs. As I’ve said before, if I publish one of my football blogs, I’ll sometimes get 1000 views, and on different subjects, sometimes I’ll only get one. But checking the stats on my blog yesterday there was some really encouraging news. Presumably on the back of much better hash tagging, for the first time I have had over 50 referrers from Google in a week. Nirmally all of my traffic comes from the Facebook sites I post on. This is a huge increase on what I used to be getting up to a month ago, incrementally it has increased the last few weeks at a fair rate of knots. Obviously one doesn’t want to get too carried away and one needs to keep an eye on it, but if I am, through my efforts, gradually getting more people in from Google searches then that’s incredibly important.

My football blogs are of the moment, on other subjects they well be evergreen and all still pertinent in 5 years. So, while I may write a blog and in a week get one view, I am obviously hoping that in two years it will be read regularly by a lot of people on my must-visit blog!

I’m also aware that I write quite a lot of stuff about punk bands from the 70s who are still very popular, and the place for me to publish these is on Facebook groups. Obviously if I just post them and I don’t interact the moderators will fairly soon block my posts, serious spam, so one thing I will be doing when I come back for my holiday is I will be joining a dozen Facebook groups from four or five of my favourite bands that I will write about, and just spend 10 minutes three times a week interacting, so I can then get my blogs shared and reposted. Gosh, so much to do.

I feel that I’ve not started lay the foundations, but I’ve certainly dug a hole for them. To be honest I’m finding the whole process of discovering how to work and how to use the social media and publishing platforms absolutely fascinating. I love learning new things and having my faithful friend ChatGBT to reference for help on research, I’m hoping that within a few months I will have nailed how they all work, and I can focus more on writing and how to reach new friends and followers to help pick up all readers.

#Blogging Journey #Content Creation #Social Media Learning #SEO DIY #Writing Goals