The Lousypoet

Several months ago, I created a Twitter account. I admit that I did it during a phase where I felt compelled to sign up for everything I thought might promote this here website. I suppose that drive came from an insane idea I had that by putting links for this site in numerous places, I might

a) Drive more traffic to the site

b) Improve my Google Pagerank

c) Make mountains of money from Google Adwords and Paid to Post programs

Well, I no longer do Paid for Post (as I stated back in May) and when I started using the new layout, I decided to fore-go the Google Adwords (no one was clicking them anyway), so all that linking was redundant.

According to my pagerank counter, I don’t get shit in terms of traffic each week either, so that was a huge bust.

And last but not least, my Google pagerank currently sits at 0, so that was about as big a bust as could be!

Now, this has been a long winded-round-a-bout way of getting to me being on Twitter. I never did use it until I convinced Carolyn that it might be a good networking tool; once I saw how much she was using it, I decided to join the fun.

One of my watches is Writer’s Digest. They’ve got a great mag, some really useful online content, and provide some great insight into the craft of writing. So they just posted a few tweets that I had to share.

The first is a cool little idea that could provide you with some much needed inspiration during those dry periods of creativity. It is to type a few words into Google and see the results that the autocomplete suggests. I’ll let them tell it in their own words, go check out How to Write a Novel Using Google’s Autocomplete.

Secondly, is a great list that might entice you to Twitter (if you want to be a writer). Meryl K. Evans (@merylkevans) wrote a great article called 50+ Writer Uses For Twitter. This one got me pretty psyched about using Twitter, and I added her to my following list.

I suppose it’s for links like these, and hopefully a whole bunch of others from Meryl’s list, that I’m trying to increase my Twitter presence. If you feel so inclined, you can Follow me on Twitter (@Lousypoet).

Thanks to Google and search engines in general, the web has become a wild place with people fighting for even the slightest improvement in their pagerank or seach engine placement.

Pagerank is something Google has put in place that assigns a numeric value to your site based on inbound links, content, and a whole slew of variables that I’m certain are well over my head. My site, which has been online since about 2004, has over 200 posts as well as a number of other sections had a pagerank of 1, and when I checked it this morning it had sunk to the lowest of the lows, 0. Now, my wife’s website, firewithinstudio.com, where she has a gallery and hasn’t posted a single blog entry, is a pagerank of 2! WTF??! I mean, I’m no expert, but shouldn’t the age of the site, the volume of content count for something? I don’t think my wife’s site has anymore links to it than the Poet, so what’s the deal? Maybe I’m being punished because I’m doing some paid blog entries, but I think it’s a pretty dirty shot at those of us who are scraping the bucket to survive to punish our websites for making us just enough money to pay for our hosting. It would be one thing if there was nothing here but affiliate links that were generated by a computer, but crap, I’m typing all this stuff myself!

And thanks to a low pagerank the opportunities for making some income from this blog have just been seriously reduced. I guess I understand a desire to filter those blogs that have been created solely for posting paid for posts, but really, shouldn’t there be some way to calculate the number of articles that are original content with no affiliate links and work off a percentage or something?

If anyone has some good advice, let me know. I’ve been trying to increases the traffic to this site, and in the process have swapped links with sites that might not match the content of this one, but so what? I’m a little miffed by this.