The Eighty-Seventh One: It’s the End of the World As We Know It. Maybe.

Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t have selected such a drastic title, but it just popped in my head and I went with it. This particular post is not filled with humor, so I apologize for that, but I need your help.

Here’s the deal. As some of you know, I have a number of blogs that I try to keep up. And “try” is the operative word here. “The Sound and the Fury” gets the most love. But I do work on the others, and when I do, I don’t always have time to also post on this blog. Bottom line, all of the blogs are neglected from time to time, and some of them have basically been abandoned for months.

This is not a good thing.

You see, at some point I plan to do this blogging thing full time, hopefully sooner in my life than later, meaning that this would be my source of income. In order to make money doing this, you have to grow a considerable base of readers who consistently visit your site (or at least get a feed from your site).

The number one rule in growing a reader base is that you must post every day, no matter what.

This is where I have failed, and the stats for my blogs show it. When I went to Paris, I got some great material, but the traffic on the blog slowed to a crawl. When I had family invading the house during Christmas, and didn’t post anything anywhere for over a week, all of the blogs flatlined. No traffic at all. Zero.

So what I plan to do is make “The Sound and the Fury” the entry point for all material that I create for any of the blogs. Everything will be posted here. If the material is actually meant for one of the other blogs, it will subsequently be posted on THAT blog as well.

This means that most of the blogs will still be active, so if you only like the material on a particular blog, you can still go directly to that site and only read the things in your area of interest. The big difference is that it will be posted here first. (If you happen to be a fan of all of the blogs, then you get the bonus plan. You can read everything here.)

Now, there are a few downsides to this new arrangement. The one that troubles me the most concerns the “serialized” stories that I often do on The Sound and the Fury site (The Paris Chronicles, etc). Now you will see off-topic posts appearing in between posts that are pertinent to the ongoing story I may be working on at the time. I’m sure this makes a few of you itchy, because it breaks the flow and you may not want to see that other stuff.

To initially Remedy this situation, I’m going to insert links at the end of all the serialized posts so that you can jump to the next relative post without having to click through things you may not want to see. Eventually, I will create another blog that is just for the stories, so if that’s all you want to see you can go there.

Another issue is that, with this “double posting” going on, you are going to see double notifications in Facebook, which may be irritating and confusing. I will most likely turn off the Facebook notifications for the secondary blogs, so you will only get a notification when I post to The Sound and the Fury. But since EVERYTHING is being posted here, you’ll still be notified.

To make the notification process cleaner, for all posts that will be going to the secondary blogs I will be inserting the name of the blog in the post title. For example, if you lust for the Dr. Brian posts, you will see “Idiot Fondue: Case Study #15”. For the music video reviews, you will see “Backup Dancers From Hell: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance”. And so on. That way, when the Facebook notification comes in, you can decide whether you care or not without having to go to the actual blog to find out.

And I’ll be dropping the bit about “The Eighty-Seventh One” from the post titles. Those numbers are just getting too long to type out. (Bit of trivia, the reason I did that for so long is that the very first post I made way back in the day was simply called “The First One.” The pattern stuck. Although I would really like to see the day when I reach the Two-Thousand-Three-Hundred-Twenty-First One, I really don’t relish having to type something like that every day.)

Okay, I don’t want to ramble too long with this technical and somewhat boring monologue. (If you’ve stayed with me this far, thanks!) The bottom line is that I think this new method will help me grow hits on the main Sound and Fury blog, because this way there will be at least one thing new every day. There won’t be those gaps where you check for a few days and find nothing, then you get bored and don’t check anymore and the stats plummet.

I really want to do the right thing to keep the readership level high, so I need feedback to know that you are happy. If you find that you don’t like the new format, let me know that. If you are just fine with the new format, let me know that as well. In fact, comments of any kind are very valuable to me. Writers need feedback, regardless of what the feedback is.

If you don’t want to, or are unable to (I understand some folks are having technical issues) post comments directly on the blog, please post comments on the notifications in Facebook or send me an email. I would really like to hear from you.

Okay, I think we’re done with this dry and official-sounding entry. I promise to bring the funny with the next post.

Peace in.

Brian.