Thirty Thousand? Blogging?

 

Dear Writer,

This morning I was knocked off my perch by a blogger who said they made $30,000 a month blogging.

Thirty thousand?

Gee-sh, I pay to blog. What am I doing?

You don’t advertise, you silly galoot.

You don’t know about SEO.

Well, I know what it means, Search Engine Optimization. How people find you. I’m not so dense that I don’t know if people don’t find you, they won’t read what you have to offer. Simple as that.

For a price, this blogger will tell me how to do it. Ah, that’s how she makes her money—courses.

 

Okay, here’s where I run into a wall. If I had printed out her ad/information/sales pitch, it would have been about three feet long. Every time I get involved in one of those long spiels, I get mad. I don’t have the time to spend reading all that. Just tell me.

 

However, there is a rule in car selling, condo selling, and copy writing that the longer you can keep a person reading or listening, the more likely you will wear down their resolve and they purchase what you are offering.

 

But, we’re busy. We have books write, books to read, places to go, experiences to have. Life’s waiting.

 

Therefore,  I won’t dwell on my irks but will list what one great writer offered to tell a great story.

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling – Brain Pickings

 

1.     Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.     Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.     Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.     Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5.     Start as close to the end as possible.

6.     Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.     Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.     Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

 

Carry on, do good work,

Jo