Wasting time with time wasters

A long time ago, in a version of Thomas far far away, there existed an internet forum that he moderated/administered. This was quiet a bit of work because not only did he have to monitor and dispose of spammers, tend to the many personality conflicts and arguments, but he also had to develop interesting articles for people to read.

These articles took a long time to create. Each one based on hours of research as the audience was very well read and any mistakes or inaccuracies would be pounced upon in an instant.

Yet all this work netted Thomas one thing: Frustration.

Why? because he was interacting with people uninterested in the message, uninterested in the content and solely focused on flame wars and aggravating an already aggravated forum administer due to personality conflicts. Not all the audience was like this, but a few select band of individuals got great pleasure from it. On stage during live performance; they're known as hecklers.

So eventually he did the only thing he could do, he left.

The work was hard with long hours, it was unpaid and most importantly, unappreciated. So after a long rumination process that had been building up for months, Thomas did the only thing that would benefit him. He left and never looked back at forums ever again.

All that work had to be left behind, as well as the online friends that had supported him and rallied to his cause. All the stress and conflicts were also left in the past.

It was four years of work wasted.

But he did learn a two priceless points out of the whole endeavour.

1. Never argue with idiots
This world is filled with them, they come at you from all angles. Never engage them, or if you accidentally do, stop as soon as you realise you're dealing with one. There is an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can never make him drink, and it applies to the morons on the internet. You can't make them think or even see your way of thinking because they are too wrapped up in their own sense of over-bloated self important opinions.
Don't waste time or energy on time wasters. You'll only have yourself to blame!

2. Don't ever take it personally
I've written more words than I care to admit. Writing comes easily to me. Yet with the most carefully constructed pieces of personal reflection, I get people who disagree and volley in personal attacks merely because they have no other way of engaging the material. You can't ever let this get to you. Never return the insults, simply delete the comments outright or ignore them and have a laugh. Once you've invested so much into your words that any criticism hurts you personally, it's time to take a step back from the writing.

Over time, I've learnt to engage with people on different levels and subtly redirect conversations when they get out of hand. But my days of hanging around internet forums are forever over and I am honestly happy about that because there are much better places on the internet to interact with people.

I'm not saying that forums don't have their advantages, but they are fast becoming more and more selective with their users as most users turn towards Social Networks, which offer a greater level of control over your experience.


-Thomas
Adventures in Advertising
Pensive Video Gamer
Short Stories and other Curiosities

Fatigue and guest posting

I've been working too much lately. Seven days a week, five within an intensive retail environment. This is why I haven't posted anything for the last week. It's difficult to construct something worthwhile when fatigue has built up.

Fatigue I can handle, especially as I'm an insomniac. Fatigue is my modus-operandi. That and using outdated Latin phrases or wanky French words, which I just cannot resist. I love the French language and cannot wait to learn it fully, but first I must learn Mandarin for my upcoming journey to China.

But it's the stress of the position that prevents me from writing effectively. For example, if you look at the previous paragraph, you'll see how it's half finished because I went off on a tangent. Now, I love tangents, I'm always exploring them in my mind and when I'm stressed, I'm more likely to get sidetracked.

Now, even though my friends have found my randomness to be witty and humorous, it doesn't translate at all to writing. When I'm on one of my tangent fuelled rants, people have a lot of trouble following my logic or even what I'm saying. So there is a lesson to learn about writing. Keep it focused and on point, otherwise you'll lose your audience. Writing requires energy of a different kind to physical energy. You can still be exhausted after a long day's work and still write. But if you're distracted or stress, forget about it.

Despite not having the energy to post on my own blog, I have been posting regularly on other peoples Blogs as a guest poster. I'm going to start a new section tag for all the guest posts I've done (mainly to keep track of it for my own benefit), but here's a link to my first article which has been featured on the Idea Lady's website.

It's not my best work, I'll readily admit, but it's still my words being featured on other websites. And this is all part of social networking and getting your own brand name out into the ether.

Today, I'm entering my 17th consecutive working day without a break. I wonder how many more I can go?!


-Thomas
Adventures in Advertising
Pensive Video Gamer
Short Stories and other Curiosities

Being yourself, only don't; it depends

I'm going to let you in on a secret about myself: I'm a social chameleon. I don't just change my behaviour in different circumstances, I also shift my personality as well. This has freaked out past girlfriends who've gotten close to me because they see me as this vibrant enthusiastic upbeat kid and then see that's not me at all once alone.

I'm not saying I'm an flesh eating snarling ogre, just a quiet and withdrawn troll.

This comes in handy when copywriting because you have to take on the ideals, the lexicon and even the mannerisms of the person you're writing for. You have to be them, sometimes literally, which is what ghost-writing is all about.

But when it comes to my own writing, it's really hard for me to find a middle ground. My writing for this blog isn't me, but it is.

It's Thomas at a job interview.

You won't see me being dirty or dropping f-bombs like they're going out of fashion. You won't see me pushing boundaries, which is something I love doing in my writing. You won't see me being ultra sarcastic or using hyperbole to the extreme.

It's true, I'm a self indulgent childish writer!

This is something you have to keep in mind when writing your blog, copy or any piece of writing that someone will look at. This is a record of you as a person. Your personal brand. One of my favourite bloggers covered this better than I could.

One of the hardest skills I've learnt (or have I?!) is the one about self censorship. I write this blog as though a potential employer, university professor or researcher might come across.

I'm still me, but not.

For every hour you spend writing..

Over the past few weeks I've been monitoring my copywriting output against certain factors. Also from what other writers have written I've found a rule of thumb when deploying content and it breaks down like this:

For every one hour you spend writing copy...

Spend double that interacting with people on blogs with similar content and networking your name. This is also know as promoting your brand.

Spend double the time you spent interacting and promoting your blog by reading more blogs, information, books and making sure that you know the subject matter your talking about. This is considered research and will reduce the amount of times you end up looking like an ass.

Following that wont guarantee you success, but it will reduce the time you spend removing your foot out of your mouth, especially if you're as much of an over-opinionated wind-bag as I am!

If only I could follow my own advice sometimes!

But, I did find some interesting advice along these lines through another blog called thecopyblogger. Interesting insights into things to keep in mind when writing.

So, this post took me 10 minutes to write, 20 to post and advertise and an hour to research other material. To be fair, I actually spent around 2 hours because I follow links and get distracted by other things like candy and TV!

The death of the introverted writer

After writing that title, I realised how redundant and inaccurate it is. And yet, I've decided to keep it because there is no way for me to explain it more succinctly. My writing influences have changed since I went to university because I became versed in the great writers of our times, which is pretty much why I went to uni. And as with all of the great writers in history, they are not easy to read.

Great writing needs to be interpreted, it cannot ever be blatantly obvious.

But that's not all because the real thinkers in literature; the ones that successfully challenge convention and redefine the boundaries of creative thinking are all introverts who struggle with success. One example is Franz Kafka a fellow born in my old hood of Czechoslovakia.

If Kafka were alive today, he would be blogging his angsty little heart out with practically zero page hits. As with all introverts, they live mostly in their own imagination and struggle with regular social interactions. In this day and age to be successful in writing (regardless of your medium) you need to have social networking skills.

You need to be extroverted if you want recognition.

But then again, Kafka's genius wasn't discovered until after his death, so perhaps his posts would stagnate on his blog. That is, until his neighbours discovered it on his computer while investigating the stench of his decomposing corpse. Thus would his work become known to the world.

I find myself doing more social networking than writing lately and what I write can hardly be considered my best or most thought provoking work. Yet it has garnered more attention than anything else that has been unleashed from the unrecognisable mess that is my mind.

It seems paradoxical to me.

But that's the way this world works. You find love when you're not looking for it, you find happiness unexpectedly, or success in another field than the one you want.

Unless you're introverted. Then all that comes after you live a horrible life of neurosis and self doubt. It's only after you've punched your ticket that people realise how unique you really were.

And I really don't want to be that guy shoving his "uniqueness" in peoples faces.

Target and engage

The singular focus of being a writer (which is my ultimate goal) is simply to write. With blogging that can also be the primary focus as content does matter, especially worthwhile content. However, that isn’t the full picture and if that is all you focus on, you'll most likely fail. I’ve written plenty of funny blogs which stagnated after a while due to lack of interest. Despite a few odd hits, I never really advertised, figuring word would get around naturally about how awesome I was.

The trick to making any blog successful lies not only with clever writing that captures peoples attention, but also engaging your target demographic and putting yourself out there as someone with an opinion. I’ve been experimenting with this blog, keeping the simplistic layout but also using Google analytics to keep track of my daily traffic and other statistics.

Whenever I’ve responded to certain blog posts about stuff I have an opinion on, I’ve linked my blog and watched how many people came visiting from that post. I should start to link back the posts to the blog, but relevance of the target traffic hasn’t matched my niche subject matter for this blog yet.

What that means is that this blog is very specific, dealing with subject matter in a non-topical way and therefore is very hard to find a niche or audience for. However, by linking posts back to this blog and directing the right kind of traffic back here, I’m slowly gaining headway with site visits that don’t just include my friends and family. This blog is now my most successful with regards to raw page hits in the shortest amount of time.

So there are the two things I’ve learnt and found that works within the blog marketing sphere:

1. Engage other bloggers
2. Know your niche

Incidentally, a big thank-you to my mother for being the only subscriber so far. Thanks mum, I hope you’re enjoying reading it and get some sort of entertainment value out of it!

I wonder if it's possible

My natural writing voice in very sarcastic and antagonistic. I do this on purpose because I've noticed that any piece of writing I do will receive more attention if I'm antagonistic towards the audience.

If I craft a thoughtful essay tightened and neatly constructed, very few people will argue with it or bother even replying because there isn't any wiggle room in my piece for them to refute me.

So part of my new role in copywriting is to deliver interesting pieces with hidden agendas. I wonder if I can write in that manner and somehow keep my off beat perspective about life and my adventures within.

This blog is my attempt to keep an interesting record of my experience, without being offensive or antagonistic in any way.