Am I Hot, Or Not?

First, if you want others to rate your articles, you'd better rate them yourself. If for no other reason, it makes you stop and think: why am I posting this article? Am I trying to interest the reader, to amuse him, to prompt him to action? If you don't have a clear purpose, you probably shouldn't be writing.

I know I said earlier today that I write mostly for myself. But even then, your writing needs direction and focus. If I'm trying to be funny, I should NOT switch over in the middle and say something sharp. I see a lot of guys that try to make their blogs news aggregators, and I just think that's been done to death. I'll post stuff on my blog that I think is interesting, but only if i think I need to keep it or remember it for later. Or if it really makes me stop and re-evaluate something. But a pen that is also a USB drive? Engadget can do that. I can't compete with those guys, and it doesn't add anything to me personally repeating press releases for other companies. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but if you're looking for readers, news aggregation is just too competitive in my opinion.

Secondly, getting customers on the internet is like speed dating. You only meet them for a few seconds, and many times you're left with an empty feeling of not knowing where you went wrong.

Rick over at FutureLawyer dropped by a while back.. He loved the tool, loved the monkey article, and had a lot of nice things to say. So I spent an hour and set up his configuration file and wished him luck.

But he never installed the tool! I tried to chase him down a bit -- was it too hard, was it too ugly, was it not what you wanted? But he seemd pretty busy and I haven't heard back from him. I think maybe he's just been too busy to fool with his blog. I can certainly understand that. But durn, I'd really like more information from a customer relations standpoint. I meet these people, they seem happy to be here, and then -- nothing.

In a way, I really like it that way. It reminds me a lot of when I was dating. I would try to be presentable and be entertaining, but many times it just didn't work out. Sometimes the girl had other issues, sometimes I screwed it up some way (try not to have your car breakdown in the middle of a date!), and sometimes I just never knew. Internet selling is even harder, because you don't have all the non-verbal cues and the communication time is so short. Did Rick really like the tool or was he just being nice? I think he liked it. But taking a look at our blog roll, most of the sign-ups never followed through and installed the tool.

Wonder why?

UPDATE: I heard from Rick jsut now. Turns out he didn't like the font and didn't like the flashing cursors. So now I've got more informaiton. Yippee! Fonts aren't a problem. Not sure what he means about the cursors, though.