Web visibility. Search engine optimization. I am learning to make a site –
Elsas Word Music Idea Emporium - that has a chance on the web.
The Creativity Blog explores: creative work in search.

OCTOBER 9, 2006

THE BUCK STOPS HERE -
OR ANYWAY, THAT'S ONE OF THE GOALS

It isn't easy, getting a site visible on the web. Everywhere I turn, there are get-rich-quick recipes for web success. One million browsers in ten days. Two million dollars overnight, if you have the formula just right. Get people to pay to advertise on your site, lots and lots of people. Sell an online course or workshop or a product or something, anything. Be passionate, and sell your passionate interest by creating lots of content that will make loads of other people ready to advertise on your site, so you will end up with oodles of money showering down upon you.

The goal - the buck stops with you, loads and loads of bucks stop with you, swamp you with all the money flooding in.

****

I have been taking a slow road, but faster than I ever expected. It's only a year - less than a year actually - since I bought a space on Sitesell. (More info and another link to Sitesell at the bottom of the page, should you be interested.)

October 31, 2005. I buy a space for my site on Sitesell.

It was May - almost 8 months later - before that first site, a vacation rental site, was up on the web.

And it was only then that I started work on the creativity site, this site.

****

This is all history now, which I go over and over in amazement, looking back to what seems carved in (virtual) stone now - 2 sites, each gaining ground.

I am not an overnight success story - anything but. But the creativity site did have 3,992 page views last month. And the rental site had 5,160.

There has been no buck stopping here, though. In fact, I haven't even figured out how any bucks might stop at elsa's creativity emporium. The goal has just been to get a good site going, one that attracts lots of visitors. What do I want?

I want to be heard. I want my ideas heard, my spoken word pieces heard, my preteen story heard - and I want to create a good space for lots of other people to be heard too.

So i sit here, learning ever more (including a totally different web program as the old Dreamweaver has been replaced by a Dreamweaver utterly different, at least for this technophobe).

****

The buck stops here. What it means, in case anyone isn't familiar with the expression, is that responsibility stops here. No more passing the buck, the blame, to anyone else.

In that sense, the buck is stopping here.

I am not reaching out to anyone else anymore in an attempt to get my work out to a public. I am not applying for a grant. I am not submitting my work to a publisher. I am not going to a small cafe.

****

It's easier to see results with the rental site. We advertise on huge megasites, and get a lot of queries from people searching on them. Once they query for one of our properties, we show them our full selection, all together on one very well-done site. Plus, increasingly our own site is generating queries. And once again, that leads to bucks.

****

The creativity site. One thing after the other - one section after the other, one unfinished thing after the other. I get some small pieces of help - paid for to get me knowledgeable about the new web program, from fellow travelers in other ways. But so far, no making a buck at all.

It has been satisfying - I feel nourished by every page I know is one the web, every hit I get. Maybe I'm a bit like a gardener who glows watching a well-tended plant sprouting, and seeing that some other people stop by the garden.

It's more than that, actually. Some of the pages make me feel like a scientist broadcasting news of some potential remedy for an old ache. The pages in the Idea Emporium come to mind. Listen here, listen here, look, see, test, try it out. I may have something to lance the boil of raging self-righteousness and of some stupid opinions. It's not infallible. It's not a cure-all. But take a look. The remedies could be potent in some cases.

I think of Aids researchers. They'd love a vaccine, a one-and-for-all preventive. Even better would be a quick cure. They've had to content themselves with a million small discoveries, ten thousand shifts in treatment - which have added up to a hugely different prognosis for First World people diagnosed now than twenty years ago.

I am of course showing that I think rather highly of my ideas - and I may be wrong. But it would be so much worse if they never got into the light of day. Someone else would get there - lots of people are covering the same ground and coming to similar conclusions.

If Salk hadn't come up with a polio vaccine, someone else would have. If Banting hadn't figured out how to use insulin to control diabetes, someone else would have - though they probably wouldn't have done what he did. He refused to make any money from insulin so it could be available as cheaply as possible to all people suffering from diabetes - remarkable and yet it makes so much sense to me.

Rather than trying to make a buck with the creativity site, I am trying to put my two cents worth into the world. I am trying to pass the buck of my ideas into the world bucket of ideas, my stories into the world bucket of stories, and so on. Maybe some of the ideas will prove useful. Maybe some of the stories and word pieces will touch people, make their own kind of difference.

****

I have such a sense of moving into the world. It may be a false sense, based on hope - and hope springs eternal, but success is elusive.

But I know of thousands of things done - many that I only learned I should do through Sitesell. Search engine optimization through dozens of different things from keywords, search engine submission, site name choice, title tags, headings, article submission to web article sites. That last - article submission - is what I've moved on to the past few weeks, as has Philippe who has written three articles as well, all on Provence -

My Provence, Tamed and Wild
My Provence - Mistral, the Wind of Wrath
My Provence, Tips for Renting a Villa

His articles and mine are up on four article sites so far, and will soon be up on a dozen.

Why do all this? I could say, I won't play the search engine game.

I don't. I say, I will pick my battles. And right now I am struggling to get into the world, so I am trying to find out how best to do it.

First I had to spend ages to learn all the rules on how to get a site seen at all. And then, though the results amazed me, I went on to more - because it became obvious that more was required to get where I wanted to go.

I do resent the time it takes. Because I could be spending the time making more pages - not learning how to use the new Dreamweaver, not learning about search engine optimization, not figuring out how to do all the magazine submission - and I know it won't stop here.

It doesn't matter. I look back, and see the distance traveled. It makes the goal - still achingly far away - something that feels ever more attainable.

I go on to the next step.

What good would it be to have a thousand page site if no one saw it. I say as I move onward.

I don't know if each next step is needed. Through Sitesell, I am learning what generally works best. They have the blueprint, the outline, the knowledge.

Now (again Sitesell has let me know this would be likely to occur) Google is listing lots of the pages of the creativity site because it has loads of content - so maybe just the content would have done the task, and all this search engine optimization is just a detour.

Maybe. I don't know.

I know that until now I have not been heard much - not my ideas, not my creative works. Some of it was me, some of it was luck. Sitesell has given me steps to take, and the tools needed to take them. I've been able to see the outcome, day by day.

No regrets with the road I'm traveling on.

I have a sense of some control, some knowledge of where I am and where I could get.

A bucket has stopped leaking - the bucket of time leaking away, with so much done but not getting out in the world. Instead, I say, it's been just a year, and not even that.

Instead of feeling that I am bucking the tide to try to get listened to, I have a sense that this past year I've placed myself into the tide, so I will be carried further along into the world.

As always, welcome into my world.

signed,

Elsa

OCTOBER 9 , 2006

copyright © Elsa Schieder 2006, 2011
publishing house - FlufferDuff Impressions 2006, 2011

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