The Lousypoet

Did you know that aside from 12 days I have posted something new every single day since July? I think that’s more than I have ever done on any incarnation of The Lousy Poet.

With this post, I will have 467 posts, 39 pages, 37 approved comments, 2533 spam comments, 31 Categories and 161 Tags. And most of that is within the past year because this incarnation started at 0 in November of 2007 (and I only posted things on 1 day in November and 1 in December of that year!).

Just thought I’d share

So yesterday I wrote about my plunging Google pagerank and wondered what I should do about it. Varsha Vijay wrote a comment on that entry that is naturally very simple, but did get me thinking about this site and what I should be doing with it. He wrote;

Advice ? Write good and people will come to you. BTW your blog name (lousypoet) created the curiosity to come to your site but could not find anything relevant to poem`s.

Now there’s the thing. There is nothing about anything on The Lousy Poet. Currently, this site is a mish mash of my ideas, things I see and do that interest me, and a series of blog posts that only exist to make me a few bucks. While I don’t see anything particularly wrong with doing the odd paid post, there is not enough original material to balance it out. This site is more than just the eclectic place that I promote it as, it is, simply, a mess. There is no balance and no sense of direction. And yes, Varsha, you are right, there is very little here that has to do with poetry even though the name would suggest some connection to the poetry world.

So I spent today thinking about this site. Where it is, where I want it to go, what kind of niche do I want to be a part of. This brought me back to the very reason I started this site to begin with.

About four years ago, I wanted so very badly to be a writer. I had a number of old poems and short stories laying around and so I thought that I wanted to put them in one archive online, that would then serve as the growing archive of my own written work. I thought this place would inspire me and that by now my first book would be written.

Well, here we are today, and I haven’t written that book. I haven’t even written much of anything. The old stories and poems are still here in the writing archive, but they’re just a reminder of what I had wanted to do, and demonstrate how today I am still so far from that goal. So where does that leave The Lousy Poet? Well, like I said, this site has degraded to a general sloppy mess. I haven’t done anything with it to provide it with some purpose because, frankly, I have no purpose. I try to be a good father and husband and employee, but when I sit down on this computer, I really only have a goal to earn some extra cash to keep my websites online and maybe put twenty or so dollars away each month.

So after reading Varsha’s comment, I decided I am going to do the following things. These may not be the only things, but it’s my starting point;

1) I will continue the Word of the Day
2) I will be adding a Literary Quote of the Day
3) I will be adding a weekly feature called The (Not so Lousy) Poet of the Week
4) I will be focusing more on articles that aspiring writers and poets can use, such as getting published, writing cover letters, self publishing versus getting published and more.

These changes will take place over the next several weeks. I’d love to say that they will start tomorrow, but I want to get a few things in order and done ahead of time, so if my schedule gets heavy I can keep things going up on time.

I’m hoping to make this an interesting place to visit. I know that I might not be able to compete with some of the really great literary and poetry sites, but I hope that with these added features and a few other things I have in the works, the Lousy Poet will prove to be a fun, informative and interesting site to visit.

Here’s to better days!

So the other day I was searching for Wordpress themes to change the look of the Lousy Poet (what do you think BTW?). While flitting from one blog to the next, I came across a great article that I would like to share. You can read the article for your self by following THIS LINK.

In a nutshell, the author demonstrates how having effective, and at least 10 comprehensive articles on a single topic will set your site ahead of others like it. His example is simply that setting up an e-store can be done by anyone nowadays, so the only true thing that sets sites apart is their content. By providing consistent articles that start with the initial 10, you can gain some love from the search engines, and have an audience that consistently comes back to check on your site.

It made me realize how the manic and inconsistent quality here at the Poet is probably doing no favours to my visitor counts. However, it also made me start to question just what topic I knew enough about, and loved enough, to write at least 10 quality articles about. There was a time when I could think of some, but life and living on a budget has taken me some distance from pretty much all of them. It’s something I’m going to be giving some considerable thought over the next few days. Meanwhile, I’ll continue with the site re-vamp.

Well, I think it’s about time for a change here; so I’ve decided to change my Wordpress theme.

This will probably be a work in progress for some time, so bear with me.