A Couple of Experiments Just for Kicks and Grins

Twitter has always been a "funny" place to me in that it's like a ghost town on my profile page. I have enough "followers," but still, getting any real traction on anything I post there is difficult. For whatever reason.

However, I do think some of the stats shown aren't always completely accurate. For example, link clicks, if I am sharing a song or sharing a post, tend to always display as zero. At the same time, if I am posting something to share there, I do also often see a jump in views.

I know when and where I share something mostly. So, where else would the views be coming from but link clicks even if the stats say no one clicked?

I wrote a post yesterday on here that remained at zero. Hey, this particular blog really has no audience and gets very little traffic. I always consider it just a quiet place to write something just to keep the pen moving, have a little fun, and keep the mind fresh and active.

I rarely actively share what I write on here.

But I became curious. Would sharing the former post on Twitter bump up the view count? I am not sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will.

So, I am checking to see if that actually happens. But there is another experiment I want to try out. The fact is that I am not very active adding to this blog. Usually on my main blog I limit my posts to only one per day. I won't get into the details of why that's my rule. I will just say that it is.

So, even if I write two or more posts in a day, I won't publish them right away. Instead I will schedule them in a way to be published so only one per day is added to the blog.

In any event, the second experiment is to see if I post more on this blog, will it push the posts more?

It's helpful to also understand some changes that I could make on my primary blog that might actually be beneficial to it and drive in way more traffic. In the end I have nothing to lose. No one sees this blog hardly anyway. And for whatever reason I have not been able to monetize this one as I have with my primary blog.

Onward and upward and we will see what happens. I will be sure to post my findings even if I am also absolutely positive I might as well do magic tricks in front of a blind man.

No one will see it. 

Hey! Think this blog sucks? Maybe you're right. How about giving me some spins on some of my music that sucks too? I could use the income to keep writing things that suck. You can find my quirky Pink Flamingoes (misspelled on purpose) album on Spotify. If you are so kind, perhaps there is a song or two that makes your favorite playlist?

By the way, the picture that accompanies this post has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. It's just a picture of a 1980 Ford Fiesta, which also happened to be my first car. But mine was powder blue.

What The Hell Is The Point of this Blog?

I have been blogging for a long time. While when I started this whole thing—not here on THIS blog—it was a more "serious" approach that I took. My main blog, which gets quite neglected these days, The Springboard, centers around mostly politics, money management, the stock market, and as I like to call it, "the occasional random thought."

One of the things that began to distract me a bit from this more "serious" writing were sites like Bubblews, PersonaPaper, MyLot and others. You can even go ahead and toss in an old site I used to be quite active on that was called WebAnswers.

The thing is, these were sites where you could essentially write about nothing in particular, and yet at the same time still make a fair amount of money.

I am currently on MyLot doing that sort of writing.

What is The Springboard Journal? It's an experiment of sorts. It's a quest to identify if writing about nothing in particular can be effective to attract any sort of traffic here on Blogger. It's a quest to see if a similar amount of participation on other blogs can have the same effect on traffic to any post as it did, or does currently on a site like MyLot.

The point of this blog really is simply to carry over the idea that is the basis of any of those other sites I mentioned and see whether or not it can work in a similar way as it does on those sites, but to also determine whether doing it here instead of there can be more profitable.

At the end of the day it is true that many of us write blogs at all because we like to write. And because we like to write, writing about anything—or in this case nothing—is just an excuse to put words down and play around a bit with the whole process of it. But we also like to make a little bit of money too. Getting paid to do something you enjoy is always a worthwhile venture.

So what really is the point of this blog? Just to see what happens. To write about anything and nothing and just see where it lands.

While writing about nothing, I will do my best to at least try and keep it somewhat interesting.