Martha.net

Tales from a Messy Workbench!

Five Things I Learned From February

  1. It is entirely possible for me to post daily for an entire month, assuming I use posts about old model horse customs to fill the gaps.
  2. I really need to post more in Perish Twice, Everyday Dragons, and Martha.net.
  3. If I don’t start posting something other than Saturday Story Prompts, I’m going to go mad.
  4. Daily resolutions are all well and good, but I need to set time aside to do them.
  5. People who find this website through Google rarely get what they are expecting (if the bounce rate is any indication)

1. Daily Posting

Time Flies when you’re Procrastinating!

This had been a rough goal since the beginning of the year, and I’ve managed to go two months now without having a ‘missing’ day. This isn’t quite as impressive as it seems, since a good 80-90% of the daily posts have been centered around the old custom model horses that I’ve done.

 

Obviously I’d like to do better, but that really sort of means I need to sit down and figure out what I want to be posting. Otherwise I’ll end up with nothing but filler posts that are just about as helpful to building traffic as the ‘really old, not very impressive’ horse posts.

2. Empty Categories

This ties into the point above that I’m really not sure quite how this blog goes together. The three categories do have purposes to them (World of Warcraft Dual-boxing, Building a MicroBusiness, and Website Administration/Coding), but I have no real plan for what sort of content I want to have or how I want to present it. I’ve been very haphazard on how I’ve been building these blogs and I think it’s time that needs to change.

It’s time for notepads, pencils, and some old school brainstorming… and perhaps some judicious websurfing to see what other folks recommend in terms of content shaping.

3. Saturday Story Prompts

Every time I think of a good line or interesting idea, I open up one of the SSP posts and toss in a sentence or two. It’s a great way to get things out of my head an onto paper so I don’t lose them… but I almost never go back and flesh any of them out.

I have 46 SSP posts, which means I have 230 story ideas floating– and I seriously need to start learning how to finish things. Either that or try and find a way to make a living off of disjointed story prompts (and I’m really not seeing that working well.)

The point of Unquiet Bones was to a) sharpen my writing skills and b) end up with content I can earn an income from. Right now I just have a post once a week that amuses/confuses my Facebook friends. I need to get away from the filler and back into the serious writing efforts if I’m going to be somewhere different by the end of the year!

4. Daily Resolutions

While sitting down and writing out the list of daily resolutions has indeed made me more aware of what needs to be done (and what I’ve managed to do), I’ve found I don’t always remember to check my daily goal. I need to set aside a time during the day when I can sit down and focus on the daily resolution– otherwise I’m just not going to remember to get things done.

Since I’m still working on my ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ routines, I think I’ll just wiggle in a few minutes in the morning to plan and then a half-hour or so in the evening to actually accomplish things. Nothing I put on the list is that hard (which was the whole point of the list) and I really think I can get into the rhythm of getting things done by the end of March.

5. Google Wanderers

Keyword FAIL

Of the nineteen keywords used to find my website in February (per Google Analytics): six were looking for other Martha’s, four were looking for the tagline in the header, three were looking for model horses related information, one was a random string of words, and five were actually looking for this website.

 

Which, of course, means my bounce rate is atrocious. My earlier idea had been to adapt my site to accommodate those search phrases that were finding me, but there isn’t much to work with here. (I am very tempted to put a page that says ‘No I’m Not That Martha’ and be done with it, but that seems petty.)

I’m really not sure how to fix this, so for now I’m just going to mark this one up as a loss. Maybe next month I’ll have some search terms that are easier to work with.

Martha Bechtel