Thursday, September 7, 2017

Where Have All the Link Logs Gone?

Status update: So far this week, I've earned $40 in real-world sales. You still need to support this web site. Paypal buttons still use "i-frames" and therefore don't work in this part of the world. At least one of these six links should work for you:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4923804

https://www.freelancer.com/u/PriscillaKing

https://www.guru.com/freelancers/priscilla-king

https://www.fiverr.com/priscillaking

https://www.iwriter.com/priscillaking 

https://www.seoclerk.com/user/PriscillaKing


You can also mail a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322.

A discussion on ProBlogger reopened the topic of backlinks. Yes, people still want them. Yes, I used to distribute them liberally. What happened? Here's what I originally intended to post as a comment there, although the system spotted advertising-type words and prompted me to paste the comment here instead:

"
I was posting "Link Logs," and lots of people liked them, especially the people whose blogs I was reading regularly and linking often. Then I put them on a pay-per-view basis. So far they've not been paid for.

I have been paid to post at my blog specifically about topics related to other people's blogs and sites...things like "How Do You Like Your Coffee?" with a link to a coffee business, and "Beards, Fashion, and Fiction" with links to beard care and hat sites.

To get back into a Link Log, you wouldn't pay specifically for a link to your site. You'd sponsor my site, which Patreon lets people do for $1/month, or you can send money directly to the post office box. That guarantees I'll follow your blog faithfully, and link to anything at all I find good there.

If a sponsor had turned out to have a really vile web site, maybe a porn site loaded with spyware, I'd take their money, not link to them, and consider reporting them to law enforcement...but if it's just something I don't normally post about, like fantasy sports leagues or Bollywood actors, I actually like learning more about that sort of thing. And so do the kind of people who follow a book blog.
"

Immediate reaction: this web site logged lots of traffic from a blog post about an add-on that promises to monetize any and all links. I'm not sure how that would work; one thing readers may have liked about the Link Logs is that the majority of links are to writers' sites, not business sites that directly sell anything. When a reader clicked on a link to e.g. +Kim D. 's blog, the reader might have seen a sponsored ad there, but the reader was getting a blog post about another pet lover's cats. How or why would a sponsor monetize that traffic? I'm not sure how Amazon would like that either. If you don't like Google Adsense (I don't either, actually) or Taboola (I don't either), and don't like Amazon either (although I do; book links and even an occasional product link can actually be useful to readers), you might be interested in http://mrdracko.blogspot.com/ .

If you like backlinks...

Hey, I'm not as stupid as some people may want to imagine. I know that although most of us are so deeply ashamed of elitist bigotry that even what comes out as racist or sexist bigotry is often a cover for elitist bigotry, the fact is that a lot of people may not want to be associated with a blog about someone who's been a have-more and become a have-less. A lot of people desperately want to believe that this blog isn't telling my "real" story, which they want to imagine would involve some sort of sinister melodrama, because if middle-aged legally White Americans weren't bad or at least extremely stupid people, we'd be rich. In real life a lot of people who wanted to be known as my friends and relatives, as long as there was any hope of my claiming my husband's estate (without their putting up the money Maryland law demanded), suddenly didn't want to talk to me after the statute of limitations on the estate went into effect. In cyberspace, when I started posting about being penniless, a similar effect was observed. And if you want to discredit me and whatever I'm saying because I'm not rich, and what I'm saying happens to be supportive of what you're saying...I can see why e-friends didn't want to sponsor those Link Logs. Though that also tells me something about them, and how faithfully I want to follow or support their writing...not so much, any more.

If you want my respect or support, you have to admit that it's possible, in these United States, for a nice person whose approach to work, money, ethics, and "people" made that person financially successful between 1983 and 2005, to have become and remained penniless since 2005. You have to admit that it's possible, in these United States, for Black racist bigotry to do that much damage to a legally White person's business, and for White laziness, cowardice, and elitist bigotry to fail to reverse the damage. And yes, I do know that that involves a lot of cognitive dissonance.

I still find it hard to believe that I didn't get my husband's estate, or that people back home did not immediately flock around to take advantage of the tremendous undeserved blessing of having me and my talents back in my ancestral home. That people think the idea of a little old lady still doing odd jobs sounds like a joke, I can believe; that people who want to pay for physical labor usually want to pay young men, I can believe. That people can't visualize how a Christian-themed, book-focussed Internet Portal store could work...disappoints me, because similar stores are working in less hidebound corners of the world, but I can believe that people who feel no calling to make it work, themselves, have not been able to imagine that someone else could make it work.

(Or that they don't want to..."I'm retired! I always hated work, and I'm not going to work any more, and I don't want you to work either! I want a playmate!" whined a sorry specimen of used-to-be manhood, a few months ago. Feh. I do not feel inclined to "play" with anyone who's not a good strong workmate. Lazy men disgust me; "old," sick men may deserve a little empathy, but they certainly don't excite me.)

But then...that people were willing to pay me enough to live on, for hack writing, while I was on Hirewriters, and that for the past two years people have continued to ask me to come back to Hirewriters, and that none of those people has found me or been willing to pay me to continue writing in accordance with my country's tax laws (which Hirewriters refuses to obey), is also hard for me to believe. That I have lived on less than US$2000 for each of the past two years, and so far this year I don't see my income getting back above $2000, is also hard for me to believe. Each of these things does have that snow-on-the-fourth-of-July quality, even while I'm living through them. Yet each of them is true.

In real life I never have been the most "believable," ordinary, predictable sort of character. You have to remember that, according to the medical science of their day, my parents, at least two of my grandparents, and at least one of my great-grandparents "could not possibly" have even been alive when and where they were, in fact, active. My typing-and-odd-jobs business was the last living Horatio Alger story in America, too. And the way my small, underfunded school routinely wins state championships wasn't supposed to happen either. And my husband's color was supposed to have been some sort of impediment to his career, back when he was alive. And when my Significant Other left Vietnam he was supposed to have been totally disabled. My whole town exists in blithe defiance of expectations. You can come out and see us all bumbling about...like the bumblebee, which, according to physics, can't possibly fly, but in fact it does. So if the reason why you're not going beyond paying for mere blog posts and funding the dang store already is that you have trouble picturing...picturing things before they happen tends to be a problem some people have. I am a black swan. Release your picture-thinking. I've done a lot of things you would not be able to do.

Anyway, if you want my support, or if you have any chance of getting it, you have to be able to face the cognitive dissonance. Take a deep breath. Repeat aloud: "This lady does not fit into any of the existing little pigeonholes in my mind. This lady has everything but money. When I invest some money in her work, Heaven only knows what she'll do, but it'll be awesome."

One thing that makes my reviews and comments-on-links awesome is that I don't say more than I believe to be true.

This does not apply to hack writing. If you hire me as a hack writer, you can send me a first-person story like one I received from a bicycle business, recently, about being a young man cycling around Finland, and I can write that up as what a young man cycling around Finland might have written if English had been his native language; no problem. But that post went on the bike store's blog, as written by Greg or Dave or whatever generic baby-boomer name the store used. (And was Greg or Dave real? Was the story I rewrote for U.S.-English-ness fact or fiction? I neither know nor care.) If the bike store had paid for a post here it would have been about watching the local bicycle race (which I would have felt obliged to go out and do, first), or about the long-ago times when I lived in relatively flat, warm places where it made sense to me to ride a bicycle, or about children riding bicycles...

On this blog readers get some things that came from other people for re-sharing, displayed in between quotation marks; this web site used to post all kinds of things from other bloggers but, due to potential ethical conflicts, adopted a policy of doing that only for elected officials. In theory they might get posts directly from Grandma Bonnie Peters, although that seems increasingly unlikely to happen since she's given me her computer. In practice they get posts directly from me, the writer known as Priscilla King. If I say I've done something, read something, seen or believed something, I really have.

So...I still read some things e-friends post, just for fun, although I no longer feel obligated to follow writers who've not funded this web site. I still find some of them good. If their blogs have Twitter buttons I even click on them, occasionally. And if even one person wanted to fund the Link Logs, I'd still be giving those free boosts to those links in Link Logs...I would, of course, read the sponsor's blog and Twitter feed religiously, and the other people's content when I found the time to read it.

How many links would you, specifically, get at this web site, and how enthusiastic would the comments be? That would depend on your content. As with writers' sites...Writers can impress me as "good" in different ways, on different levels. I read and linked to things Real Professional Writers posted for free, that were up to the standards they set in their books; I read and linked to things beginning writers, including young foreign writers for whom English was obviously a foreign language, posted too. A blog post can be "good enough to satisfy fans of a world-famous writer" or "good enough that people whose native language is English have an idea what this foreign student seems to be saying," or "good--funny," or "good--sad," or "good--interesting news," or "good--as poetry," or whatever.

Obviously it's going to be more natural for me to like and link to poems or travel photos than to like or link to posts about the financial success of an Indian digital TV service that's never been available in the United States...but once I've been paid to research the history of the Indian digital TV service, then, yes, as a matter of fact the company does interest me. Anyway, if I find something interesting enough to put into a Link Log and then the readers ignore it, no harm's done...readers obviously can't read everything I read, on top of everything else they read.

Still want backlinks? They're still available. Scroll back up, pick a link, and tell me you want more Link Logs.

Amazon link? Why not one for the product that sounds like "Link Logs"? I had a lot of fun with these things between the ages of three and ten...


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