In order to be effective in online writing, such as a website like this, you have to enjoy what you’re doing. If you’re trying to make money with it at the same time, you not only have to enjoy it, you have to know how to make it interesting for your readers and the search engines at the same time. I’ve been doing it for more than five years and I’m starting to NOT enjoy it. Please follow along as I explain why.
Comment Spam
Despite having two good plugins in place to prevent automated comment spam, I can’t seem to stop the people who really want to get their spam into place. Allowing comments is important for interactivity, but comment spamming is abusive.
Most of the comment spammers I’m dealing with are paid to spam by someone else. I get comments that come from India, Indonesia and the Philipines, identified by the IP reverse lookup, and they use domains from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada in the author links and the CommentLuv links. The comments are usually only loosely related to the articles they’re placed on. It’s freaking annoying!
Abusive and Negative Comments
I don’t normally delete comments, even when they’re hateful. I don’t have thin skin, so I can take a lot of punishment. Unfortunately, there are a couple of people I should be deleting the comments for every time I see them. These people are just plain abusive. In other words, they’re assholes who have no idea how to carry on a conversation. They’re probably like that in the real world too.
I even told a commenter recently, after he commented on my latest alcohol abuse article, that I would be deleting his comments from now on. That’s something I thought I would never do.
Search Engine Fiascoes
Every time I start to get better rankings in any of the search engines, they change something to make it harder and harder to do what I like to do. I don’t manipulate things – I spend very little time or effort in building backlinks or using social tactics to get more website traffic.
I don’t like dealing with search engine optimization at all. I don’t like changing things around to please the search engines when my readers are perfectly happy. Unfortunately, in this day and age, if you don’t show up in search, you won’t get any readers unless you’ve got other things going on.
The End of Untwisted Vortex?
Well, not quite yet. I’m looking for other avenues of expression that don’t have anything to do with online writing while focusing my online writing endeavors on other websites. This one has become a chore. The only problem is finding a subject to write about that actually interests more people than just me.
I tried working on a technology-oriented website, but there’s just too much competition. It was wasted effort. I don’t like wasting effort on anything. I tried to work on a movie/TV type of website and due to the competition, it was wasted effort also.
The “chore” factor outweighs the value of an aged website. This is one of the reasons I accept so many guest articles. It doesn’t take much effort to run them through a spell checking and grammar checking routine.
Too many people have stopped blogging from the days of 2005-06. I have almost stopped myself. I find it a chore to begin writing on a topic and find that I’d expressed myself on the same topic a few years ago. Aged blogs have this issue.
I found that changing the website appearance frequently worked well, but then again the same tiredness falls into place.
But writing does keep the mind sharp. So I try to keep up with it as much as I can.
I just decided I would no longer accept keyword only commenters. It should make things a bit more bearable.
What’s a keyword only commenter? Someone who uses a keyword instead of their name? If so, I’ve always just deleted those on sight – I want comments from people not keywords, LOL!
Exactly.