REASONS TO BLOG ... even if no one is reading _ IWSG Post

 

It is July ... right before the 4th.

Many are too busy with the fiery celebrations and the summer heat to visit your blogs.

Me? I am imprisoned in my apartment by a Shelter In Place from a leak in a local Bio-Lab. 

I didn't even know we had one. So if you don't hear from me. Ah, it was bad.

Your number of visitors may tumble.  Don't worry.  

It's all good.

Sounds illogical doesn't it?

What possible reasons could there be for blogging if no one is reading?


1.) SEARCH ENGINE BENEFITS
 

This may be the most obvious benefit of blogging. 

Search engines give preference to websites that have fresh, relevant content.

 Hubspot research shows that updated blogs get 55% more traffic than blogs with old posts  —

 even if there are no readers!


2.) INFINITE SEARCH ENGINE

 Your content keeps working for you month after month!  

I research my most often visited posts.  Many of them are years old.  Some are from last week when I was sure no one was visiting.

People Google all manner of subjects.  

Who knows when someone will be looking up something you wrote a post on?

We work hard to gain followers.  Me, I am on my 16th year.  My followers are my friends.

To lose one would hurt.

It is often harder for people to remember to visit if you change addresses ...

Sometimes that one extra step to visit costs you a frequent visitor.  

Why take that chance? 

A thought:

Several of my friends have switched from blogger to Wordpress, thinking their old posts would always be there on Blogger.

Not so.

Now, their addresses have been given to food and fashion blogs.  Two of them in languages I cannot read.

I work hard on each of my posts.  

They are my cyber-diary entries.  

To think all that effort and creativity would evaporate into nothingness feathers the insides of my chest with icy wings.

Just something to keep in mind.

3.) A VERY COST EFFECTIVE AD!

If you write interesting posts, readers will glance at your sidebar 

and perhaps decide to take a chance on one of your books ... 

even if you never mention them in the post.

 
4.) YOUR CONTENT ENGINE
 
Your investment in a consistent stream of quality content 

can be leveraged in many ways to support a content marketing strategy. 

I use links from blog posts in some of my comments on other blogs with posts that relate to them. 

They may garner visits.  They may not.  

But links provide the possibility of more visitors, right?


5.) PR


A constant stream of new posts will encourage old readers to drop in after a time to see what new things you are talking about.

Should an old or a new visitor speak of your post on their blog or web site, 

you have an opportunity to garner a new audience for your work.


6.) NOT EVERYONE Does Social Media

You provide new content for those lonely Non-Social Media souls looking for something new to read.  

Your blog may be stumbled upon by someone who hears of you from a link or from an email.


7.) YOU MAINTAIN THE HABIT and KEEP THE DREAM ALIVE.

Get out of the habit of steadily writing new posts, 

and Life will find a way to fill in that vacuum of time.  

You may find yourself without new content for weeks after July -- 

especially with December Madness looming over the horizon.

 WHAT KEEPS YOU WRITING YOUR BLOG?

LAST BREATH

 

“Your life, like snow, while ongoing masks your passage, when finished, marks your path.”

– Darael

Labored breathing.  I’d heard the term often but only now realized the reason for it.  Every breath hurt as if I were giving painful, hard-won birth to it.

The dead are never far from us. 

They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final grasp for air

From just outside my hospital room door, I heard the nurse snap, “Mr. Evans, I can only tell you that your tenant is in guarded condition.”

“I just want to know how soon I’ll be able to rent out his apartment.”

“Mr. Evans, he may well recover.

“Ha. If that’s him breathing, he ain’t got long for this world.”

“Then, you have your answer, don’t you?  Please leave.”

There was a long silence followed by heavy steps heading away from my door.

A face of flint stuck in from a crack in the door.  “Did he bother you?”

I shook my head and wheezed, “He only bothers himself, nurse.”

Her face softened.  “How can you be so forgiving?”

I managed a weak smile.  “He has to live with himself 24 hours a day.  How can I not feel sorry for him?”

She sighed, shook her head bemused, and quietly shut the door.

By the dim mirror light, I tried to make out the plaque on the opposite wall.  It was an ornate rendering of Margaret Fishback Powers’ poem, Footprints.  

 I snatched back the snort before it cut me in two.

Others had lived worse lives I knew, but when the blows came for me, I never felt carried.  Never.   

My footprints had always been solitary, lonely ones.  Women went for the Bad Boy never the ugly, poor Nice Guy.

I could have become mean, bitter, but what kind of company would I have been for myself then?   

Better by far to give encouragement and a smile to those who entered then left my world.

I spasmed a series of wet coughs that cut me in half, bending me in a fetal position.  The world blurred, became black.  I blinked my eyes to clear them. 

It truly wasn’t worth the effort. I saw shadows moving in the corners of my room.  Though I should have been alone, I wasn’t.  

Words, feeling like mine but were not, slithered into my mind: ‘You will die alone, unloved, unmourned.  Yours was a worthless life.’ 

Maybe the words weren't mine, but were they speaking the truth? Were they?

“Enough!” softly rumbled a Voice above me from the back of my bed.  “Did you not hear the nurse?  He is in guarded condition.”

Wails of pain and outrage pierced through my mind.  Then, the Voice of distant thunders spoke but one word.

“Go!”

The inside of my mind suddenly was all mine once more.

I turned to see who had spoken.  Fingers of soft steel took my shoulder and stopped me.

“No.  Not just yet.”

“Who are you?  What were those voices?”

“The unlearned call them demons.”

“Ah, I’m not important enough for demons to fool with.”

There was a hint of laughter underneath the rumbling words.  “Then, perhaps they were bored.”

The laughter disappeared.  “If you are in the light, darkness will always try to extinguish you.”

The Voice sighed, 

“You, born of Eve, look back on your lives and those of others and only see a meandering trail that wanders into the light and into the darkness to things you only imagine are there.”

There was a strange blur in front of me, and I hushed in a painful breath.  The plaque was gone from the wall.   

Somehow, I knew that the mysterious speaker was holding it in his hands.

“Her heart was in the right place but her perception off-course … like all those whose blood is that of Eve’s.”

“Who are you?” I wheezed.

“Those with cloudy perceptions call me Archangel.”

“And are wrong?”

“And right.  Life for you of tainted blood can be confusing.”

“An Archangel?  I’m just small potatoes.  I’m not worthy of someone like you.”

The undercurrent of laughter was back.  “Really?  Remember what I said of flawed perceptions?”

A flurry of mists billowed in front of me and out of it floated a slowly spinning globe of the earth.  A breath smelling of cedar and honey blew over my shoulder.  The masking clouds wisped away.

Tiny spots of golden light dotted every continent, appeared in isolated places on the seas.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Footprints.  Your footprints.”

“No.  I never left this city, much less this country.”

“Oh, but you have.”

 “How?”

“There are Nexus Points in every soul’s life where a shared laugh, a compassionate word, a needed affirmation of another’s worth, or desperately needed money left anonymously in a mailbox can start a ripple of random acts of kindness whose wake goes on and on.”

Steel fingers softly squeezed my shoulder.  “Those acts became a way of life for you.   

So much so that they became a part of you … and a part of all those you touched and a part of all those they in turn touched.”

My breath just wouldn’t come anymore as the Voice whispered in my ear. 

“Just now, the nurse you think of as Nurse Ratchet, because of your forgiveness, is withholding a bitter retort to a small child whose heart would have been shattered by those harsh words.”

An elephant seemed to be sitting on my chest and an ice-pick stabbing deep into my heart.  It hurt so badly I couldn’t speak.  I choked.  I heard a wet rattling gurgle in my throat.

The Voice murmured, “One last soul touched by you.”

Steel fingers settled on my chest.  The pain disappeared.  All became honey-light.

The ghost of laughter was back.  “Boot Camp is over, good and faithful servant.  Now, the adventure begins.”

One life well lived is long enough.

Goodbye, June