Blog-mania

“Have we had any more hits?” the kids asked about their blog.
“What does it matter?” Dadda wanted to know.
I knew. I could explain.
“Well, if your blog is a business one, the more traffic you generate, the more money you’re gonna make.”
“But your ones aren’t”
True.

But irrelevant!

I wonder if Father Bear remembers studying intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that year we both did the same post-graduate studies together….now there’s a recipe for motivation! one husband + one wife (to the power of both newly-married) = the two top grades in the class.

That kind of competition makes sibling rivalry pale in significance.

But I’m talking about motivation, not competition, am I not?

Blog statistics are a perfect example of any-type-of-motivation.
There’s nothing like writing for an audience. (Actually, there is one better thing – and that is when people leave comments – big fat juicy hint!!) And if you want to keep the audience, you have to keep writing.

So those blog stats ARE important to the kids.
Not so important for me, you know, because I’m big enough to get my motivation from deep inside these days. In fact, I’m even basking in the knowledge that I can do delayed gratification. How Grown-Up. It’s enough to know that in 127 years, my great-great-grandchildren will be reading my words. For now, 8 hits a day will do - one for each child. Just as well I’m not in competition with them, because they have way more dots on their wee ClustrMap than I do. In fact, with the exception of Antarctica, they have people from every single continent hanging on their every word (they think).
Just for the record, I don’t mind kids beating me at Tiddlywinks, but not at Important Things, at least, not just yet; I mean to say, none of them are even a third of my age yet! Oh, and about the ClustrMaps…..I used to have a nice red one on Blogger. But since shifting to WordPress, something has happened. My map tells me 67 people have visited – yet WordPress tries to convince me 152 dropped by on *one day*, so either one of them is wrong or conspiring against me or just plain outright lying. Or they both are.

Anyway, do you want to know a Very Motivating blog-tip?
Start up a Boots-n-all travel blog…..maybe one like Pilgrim’s Progress, for example. As of today, a mere 19 days after going live, we’ve had 499 unique visitors and they’ve looked at 3238 pages between them. OK, so that’s not as many as this very funny lady who got over 77,000 views in one day just because she listed something on Ebay (why doesn’t it work like that when I list stuff on TradeMe?) But 3238 in under three weeks is more than Up The Garden Path’s 209 total views ever. Actually, I’m glad for that. For two reasons. One, it means the path doesn’t get muddy. And, two, that blog is my filing system for my Important Notes To Self that I wrote on scraps of paper as reminders of What To Do Next Year that I kept losing. You wouldn’t go ferretting around in someone’s filing cabinet now, would you? (And that’s why I didn’t put a link to it!)