What is your blog’s theme tune

(or where I try for the worst blog title in the world)

Sinking to a new low, I’ve decided to enter the competition for the worst blog title ever.  And coupled with it, the worst blog post ever.  Where do I sign up?  Seriously, I’ve seen so many bad, clichéd, rehashed posts in the blogging about blogging or make money online blogs that there must be a competition somewhere.

Hey now, be thankful I didn’t go with “Is your blog a ducker or a Diva”.  Oh man.  That was funny.  Even though I say so myself.  Even though you have to pronounce Diva wrong.  Oh.  C’mon, not even a chuckle?  Where’s the humour, where’s the love?  Maybe you didn’t get it.

So, seriously, when is everyone going to pull finger and stop just copying shit.  God, it gets so boring watching the same rubbish come round again and again and again.  Bad analogies here, terrible metaphors there, and stupid lists to try and get Digg on your arse?  Ptha! Yeauch.  C’mon, our blogs are meant to give insight, advice, ideas, inspiration.

Complete long term success from blogging can only come from being honest, not trying to shift snake oil.  Offer good advice and a better product, get some good targeted traffic and you will be successful.  You don’t have to stoop to being a second rate huckster in a stupid polyester suit with a daft pink tie to make you look the business.  Sell something you believe in.  Stop affiliating crap.  Stop writing crap.  Or at least, stop writing what everyone else is writing.

You know the sad thing I’ve noticed – posts that get the most comments on people’s blogs are the rubbish posts, the ones that pander to your ego, the ones that say “hey are you part of the cool club?”, “of course you are”.  The ones that get the least comments are the ones that give rock solid advice or ideas.

Oh well, can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em eh?  Let’s see how this post could be if we did.

If your blog had a theme tune, what would it be?  Are you wallowing in the depths of self pity standing at the back of the club, dressed in black, shoulders stooped, head down mumbling the oh-so-meaningful words to Mother by Lennon?  Or are you up in the front, in your face banging out a “work hard play hard” attitude song like “We will rock you” with your fists raised in the air, jumping up and down like you’re about to make your millions?

See, your blog readers will respond to your blog like they would to your theme tune.  If it’s all down and out and mopey and sad, do you think that your readers are going be revved up to buy your shit?  (Shut up in the back, that was rhetorical you f’ing heckler……) Where was I (shuffle notes um um oh yes) No!  they won’t buy a thing.  They won’t buy squat and your blog will sink to the bottom of the pile.  You will fail.  YOU will be a loser.

But, if your blog has the attitude of a blood boiling rock tune, you readers will feed off that.  They will know you are the man!  they will reward you with their loyalty and adoration.  They will want to be you.  They will buy whatever you throw at them.  Yes they will!  Because your attitude filled-song screams out your success to them (and if it doesn’t, turn up the volume and beat them into submission until they do what you want).

Do you want to be a loser?  Do you?  No! Of course not!  YOU want to be a winner!  You want to be like me.  You want to be great! (by the way, my book is only 9.95)  Nothing says WINNER like a great fuck off theme tune.

I challenge you to take a good hard look at your blog.  What would it’s theme tune be at the moment?  What would you want its theme tune to be in the future?  Now, write like your blog has the theme tune of success!

Bleauch.  I feel just a little bit dirtier now.  Maybe I should get out of this game.

Well, you’ve had a bumper crop of posts from me this week.  Next week sees the end of my Charity challenge.  Anyone who signed on, it will be time to pony up your cash.  I’ll put up my post on it and then I should spend some time on building some links to my sites that actually earn me a few pennies here and there rather than ranting about the state of the pro and semi-pro-blogging industry.

One more thing.  Would be great if you are going to try “fake it till you make it” and try and sell the same crap to people all the time if you learned the difference between “there” and “their”.  Oh, and “a lot” is two damn words not one! grrrrrr!

The horns they blowin’ that sound

(or where I muse on how you can get your foot in the door with one of the better bloggers out there)

You get a shiver in the dark

Well, it is winter isn’t it?  And it does get dark at something like 4pm these days.  Sucks for a kid who grew up in the southern hemisphere like I did.  So anyway, you browse on over to Upstart Blogger to warm the cockels of your shiney 24inch wide-screen monitor’s heart.  What?  You don’t have a 24inch monitor?  Oh.  Sorry……..you browse on over to Upstart Blogger to warm the cockles of your 800×600 monitor’s heart.

South of the river, you stop and you hold everything

Yep, you just read his invitation to the inner circle.  The idea is, you pay your money, you get a link at the bottom of his blog (and everyone else’s who joins up).  It’s a blog ring.  But one that has some serious weight behind it, because Upstart Blogger is currently PR7 with growing traffic.  Some of you are pissed, some of you are laughing, some of you are thinking “good for you man – go for it!” (I’m in the last camp myself).

A band is blowing dixie double four time

I can only imagine the speed with which the hate mail came into Upstart Blogger’s email box.  Double four time?  ptha….I bet it was more like slaughter of rapid-fire quintuplets (probably in the Locrian mode*)!  The blogging world is funny isn’t it.  Actually the world is funny.  People don’t seem to mind throwing their money at stupid faceless corporations, buying up all sorts of crap like celebrity gossip mags or designer clothes or overpriced luke warm milky coffee from Starbucks, but if you are simply a guy trying to run a blog and make ends meet, you catch all nine levels of hell from every infernal-asshat who thinks the world owes them a living.

And now you step inside

Anyway after announcing the inner circle idea, Ashley must have taken some flack from people who obviously think it is his duty to help them…..bollocks I say.  It isn’t his duty, it is his choice.  And kind of him to do so if he does.   So, a new post on Upstart Blogger announces that he is inviting some noob bloggers into the league with the big boys.  Or at least into the league with people prepared to invest.  I’m not sure if he knew he was going to get the backlash he obviously did, maybe he had a contingency planned – wouldn’t surprise me – the guy is pretty astute.

But you don’t see too many faces
Coming in out of the rain to hear the jazz go down

Well, you will see 2 lucky faces at any rate.  Chosen by Ashley, based on a sample post that they write.

You feel alright when you hear that music ring

Don’t worry though, I’m not entering.  I don’t really want to write a blog about pop music culture (’cause I rarely hear any pop music that catches my interest) or film and television reviews……I watch maybe every third episode of heros and the occasional film on TV…….I’m not a big watcher

And a crowd of young boys they’re fooling around in the corner
Drunk and dressed in he best brown baggies and their platform soles
They don’t give a damn about any trumpet playing band

This leads me to a small matter of manners.  I figure, whether you agree or disagree with the way someone is blogging, there is never really a need to get nasty with them right off the bat.  I don’t see the point of randomly insulting someone.  I figure you can call crap if someone behaves badly towards you, but mostly, I think if you approach someone with some civility, you will get treated the same way.  At least that should be your default behaviour.

I’ve had occasion to email Ashley before and I’ve emailed him more recently about one of his other blog posts.  You know what?  I’ve always found him to be a nice guy.  In fact, he has gone out of his way to help me.  Of course, I haven’t tried emailing him with a subject line of “Hey Ashley – you’re a w*nker”.  If I did though, I would personally expect my email to get dumped into the spam box where it belongs.  He obviously treats his blog seriously (and as a business), but he has always been courteous to me, and always replied to my emails, even though I’m pretty sure he gets a dump load of mail.

Good night now its time to go home

You have an opportunity to get into blogging in a big way.  If nothing else, you risk getting a domain and the kind of link love that a lot of us underdogbloggers scuttle around for.  Stop complaining, stop thinking you are owed something.  Here is an opportunity.  Don’t waste it!

*The locrian mode, for those of you who did not study your music theory properly, is often thought of as being the most unstable and unworkable mode in classical music theory.  However, it offers a good diminished tonic chord which creates dissonance and finds favour in, among other forms of music, some Jazz.  If you know anything about Upstart Blogger, I guess that makes sense to you.  If you don’t well, then you aren’t in on my rather brilliant homage here.

What your grandma doesn’t know about internet list building

(or where I tell you how I like to sign up to free “spam free” ebooks everyone offers to build their list)

Yearg – I forgot to add my aside into my post about having food in my fridge yesterday that turned out to be more about a fable than anything else.  Bad me.  I won’t do it again.

Oh well.  Never ye mind.

So you know how every blog and his dog has a little “sign up to our newsletter” or “give us your email and get a free ebook” type of thing?  They always say “don’t worry, 100% spam free”.  But you just know they will email you with “special offer” after “special offer” jiminy-jam packed with affiliate links.  Well, here’s what your grandma doesn’t know about THE LIST……They are all completely automated.  I bet most so called web-entreupreneurs who are faking it till the make it never even look through their list to see who has signed up.  I bet most of them just leave it on autopilot.  You know what I like to do?  I lke to sign up with strange names.  I like to see if anyone checks and weeds me out.  On blogs I really don’t like, I’ll put in something mildly offensive – just because I can be an asshole sometimes.  On blogs that I feel ambivalent towards, I’ll use something like Detective Van Halen,  or Humpty Dumpty.  Sometimes I like to put my name in as “just another sucker waiting for your marketing crap”, but that gets scuppered now and then when people put a limit on the length of your name.  On blogs I actually like to read, I don’t usually sign up

Obviously I’m using a spam email addy for all this.  But I check it now and then for fun.  I’m still waiting for the savvy marketer to look through his sign ups, notice me and send a humourous email back signed with an equally crazy name.  See, if that happened, then I would know 2 things:

1. That dude/lady has a sense of humour
2. They actually check their list from time to time

The presence of 1 means I might actually like the person and that they might not be full of shit like most make money bloggers trying to build a “money is in the list” list out there.  The presence of 2 means they might actually try to personalise something towards their readers.  You know what though?  I’m still waiting.  So far, nadda, nothing, zip…….If you find me in your list – send me an email.  I ain’t gonna buy your snake oil, but what the heck, maybe you’ll make a friend.  A cynical friend……but hey I’ve been know to give backlinks to my friends

Now, you know what, I think we need a series of “What your nan doesn’t know about the internet“.

If i have food in my fridge than i am we

Most bizzarre search phrase to bring me traffic so far:

if i have food in my fridge than i am we

Yep.  I kid you not.

Back in the day, when I was a young pup in my bedroom with a cheesy Samick guitar with genuine Floyd Rose locking trem and a rather shitty purple tie-dye like spray paint job under an inch of laquer and a cheap marshal amp, Joe Satriani was just hitting the guitar scene in a big way.  Well, him and Steve Via.  I never really got into Van Halen.  Though he be the demi-god drummer turned guitarist of two handed tapping, his music was too catchy….too pop for me.  I wanted different. I wanted unique.  I wanted cool.  I devoured every copy of guitar magazine I could get my hands on.  Learned stairway to heaven….which is practically mandatory isn’t it?  Yep, but I distinguished myself by learning from a transcription of a live performance rather than the studio recorded version.  Yeah!  Anyway, if I had been a moment or two later, I would have been into rave I guess.  Timing is everything.

I was reading an article in The Guardian about “greatness”.  Well I think it was about greatness.  Maybe mastery would be a better word.  I suspect the author was more interested in mastery.  The article explores why some people just make it and some don’t.  And by make it, the article largely assumes that amassing large quantities of money and or being famous or well known defines made it. Personally, I think that’s bullshit, money is our socially constructed form of barter, but it doesn’t make one person better than another.  And therein lies a lot of the problem with our society.  The notion that a person who has money is better than a person who doesn’t.  Bring a country…..nay an entire world up to believe this and you should not be surprised to find the kind of shit that we experience in our society.  There is an old fable about a man who used to walk around his village every day with his door on his back.  One day someone asked him – “grandfather, what is that door on your back?”.  The man replies “why, it is my front door”.  Asked again “grandfather, why do you carry your front door on you back all the time?” the old man replies “because every time I leave it at home, someone breaks it down”.

More on the article in the guardian another time.