The Friday Outa My Head for June 20th, 2008 - CYA

When everyone has a voice then it’s all just noise. Nothing could be truer when it comes to the world of Internet blogging, and this blog is no exception. I have come to the end of it I think, due largely to the fact that I have way too many irons in the fire right now. The weakest return has to go and the Raven’s Barrow is most likely it.

Since its start back in April of 2007 I have tried virtually every way I can think of to market it, and at its peak it got traffic of several hundred visitors each day. Respectable for spending no money on advertising I suppose. Then when Google spanked the blogosphere last fall and basically took away the page ranks of thousands of blogs that were selling posts for advertisers - something it does itself with Adsense and I suspect that’s the real reason it did it - my resolve to spend hours a day blogging and marketing were dashed. Not that I actually made any money from this blog - I took two paid posts, one for Rob Zombie’s Halloween and one for Sweeney Todd - but still I did it and I also had the Do Follow plugin installed so that my links out would be crawled by search engines as real links like any other web page. Google hates that and says it unfairly adjusts web page ranks in their search - what a bunch of crap these Nazis spew. To make a long story short I doubt if my links mean anything to a website I link out to now.

The effort to produce this blog has been a labor of love for me. It forced me to keep up with every email list and horror and Halloween site out there in order to compile the best of the slurry into a readable set of posts each day. This task necessitates that I get up an hour early each day, and if I were to market it properly it would entail another two because, folks, I just don’t have 500-1000 dollars budgeted every month to pay someone else to do it. This is time that could be better spent working on my own home haunt and the myriad of real life home projects I have going. Yeah, I could use the sleep too.

So I have to ask myself why would I do this at all. I haven’t made one thin dime from all the posts - except the two I mentioned - and no one ever buys anything from the Amazon links I provide to movies and books and music. Accolades perhaps? The bulk of my comments are essentially from spammers, and I can’t remember the last time someone new joined my email list. I suspect those emails are going the way of a mass delete in users email boxes anyway like I do with the many email newsletter I subscribe to. I do have a handful of loyal readers who give me feedback, which a blogger needs in order to know if their efforts are in vain or not, and I must thank them for their kind words and devotion. However, when weighed against the time and effort that goes into this blog I find that this is just one the many irons in my life’s fire that has to be pulled out in order for the others to get the necessary energy to glow bright.

So in short I will leave this blog intact until the end of Summer. I may return to it if I find I just can’t keep away, but at this point I doubt it. Maybe if I get twenty comments on this post by then that aren’t from weight loss or real estate or barely legal porn sites.Thanks for reading and coming along the dark and twisted path with me folks. I shall be hanging about on the lists and forums and posting about my haunt’s progress at www.CastleNottingham.com. Pop on over and see the happenings there won’t you, and yes, leave me a comment.

Beastly Wishes and Horrid Hauntings,

Patrick Nottingham

June 20th, 2008