A Town of One

    I'm glad that Blogger wasn't a big deal when I started. I'm glad that it's not a big deal now. Sure, nobody reads what I write, but I went in knowing that would probably happen. I didn't have high expectations, and it meets my needs. I'm not a great Novelist, nor an outstanding poet, but I have a Blog on the Internet somewhere. Some would be inclined to say that it's lame, but when I think about what I would have had to do to have a place to be heard even twenty years ago, I'm grateful to live in an era where what I say matters. 

    I may move someday, decide another platform would be better suited to me, but for now I'm content to be a sheriff in a town of one. 

A Learning Experience

    Every day I spend working on this blog is a learning experience. Yesterday, for example, I ran into a weird glitch where Google flagged my blog as dangerous. I couldn't find anything that could be the issue, but luckily it resolved on its own. The most important thing I learned from this experience is that I really need to brush up on website building, even though I don't feel like the main point of this blog will be to advertise my web design skills. I really need to learn more about what goes on in the back end, so that in case anything does go wrong I know how to fix it.  For now, I'm just grateful that I didn't need to fix anything. 

My greatest regret

    I kind of regret not starting my Blog back in 2014. If I had, I would have gotten a lot more opportunities to talk about things absolutely nobody cares about, and I might have had more fun. I do love blogging, but I wish I was in a position where it could just be a hobby and I didn't have to worry about it being a dead end. 

Marketing Ideas

   I was tempted to not post today, since I did two posts yesterday, but I know that if I skip one day, It'll quickly turn into me not posting for months, if not years. I realize my writing leaves a lot to be desired, but at the moment my goal is to post every single day until it feels natural and I no longer stress about it, and to figure out how I'm going to market myself.
  My current approach is to market myself on LinkedIn. My thinking is that nobody is going to find me on blogger, since there's no way to just look at blog post on one page like you can on other platforms, so I have to make it easier for people to find me when searching. My thought was that the best way to do that was to make sure that people who are looking for new employees find me, see my blog, and decide to follow me. That way, they can tell other people in their social circle about me, show me to employees, and talk about me on their social media outlets. I expect these kinds of people will have more clout than someone on Facebook typically does, so I'll be throwing the net wider then if I just link my blog on another platform.
   I'm also looking at other blogging platforms. If the site goes big, that would be awesome, but judging from what I've seen of blogger, it's not the best platform if you want to track stats or grow your influence. I'm thinking that what I should do next is look for a platform where people can see my posts easily and an algorithm can do most of the work of marketing for me. I haven't decided which platform I want to try, but I'm thinking maybe medium's a good pick. The sites a little bland, but you can pick what you want from categories on the front page and there's a built in community, so I don't have to worry about optimizing myself, I just need to try and make the algorithm like me more.
   That's something for the future though, probably in about a year or two when I'm used to writing something every day and am comfortable with posting about myself in a public space. I figure that I can use blogger to work out how i want to brand myself, build up a community, and find a niche that I'm comfortable filling. Then I can move onto a platform where more people will see me and use what I've learned during that time to create a more successful blog.
    Or maybe someone who sees my blog on LinkedIn will be so impressed with what I'm posting that they decide to hire me. I can dream, right?

   Hi, everyone, my name is Kristen. Since my main hobbies are reading internet articles and watching Youtube videos, I figured I'd try my hand at creating internet content myself and start a Blog. The blog won't have a specific focus to start off with, it'll mostly be whatever I find interesting at that moment. Prospective topics are  reviews (of operas and phone apps mainly), short stories of the fiction and non-fiction variety, and whatever random thought's pop into my head. My plan at this point is to do a big post on Saturday, a question review on Sunday, and smaller random post throughout the week. As this is my first weekly post, I have decided to forgo answering questions for this Sunday.

Hope to see you next Saturday!