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I’ve never been very good at taking advice. People would tell me how to do something and I’d try my own methods and they would call me stubborn for not taking advice.
There’s a lot of advice floating around on the Internet about the best methods to get a lot of people to visit your website. You should concentrate all your efforts on one subject. If you want to write about two subjects. Fine. But not on one website. Built a second website to talk about your second subject.
But since I don’t take advice I’ve been thinking about all the subjects I could talk about on this website. And in doing so I run in to something of a brick wall. There are thousands of subjects about which I could talk. But there’re only a few subjects of which I know enough to make my writings really interesting.
I been asking myself why it’s so difficult to make a choice between taking the advice and, maybe, creating a website that a lot of people will visit or being stubborn and doing things my way.
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An example
Looking to my stats it’s certainly true that most people reach this blog looking for something that has to do with drawing. But couldn’t that just be something of a self fulfilling prophecy. I write a lot about “drawing” so I’ll attract a lot of people who are looking for the subject “drawing”. If I where to write a lot about “cars” I would attract people looking for the subject “cars”.
Some time ago I tried to draw an excavator and a few people from Russia came looking for “drawing excavators”.
This morning I got to think that something else might be going on:
There are several hundreds of millions pages on the Internet but if you’re Googling for “drawing excavator” you’ll get to the 7th page before you’ll even find anything that’s remotely about drawing. Everything before that has to do with building excavators.
After I realized that, I thought that maybe the advice isn’t so much about what I’m offering. It’s about what people are looking for.
The next step is comparing the subjects I offer to the subjects people are looking for.
What do I write about?
- Drawing
- Autism
- Me
- Promen (the sheltered workplace in Gouda)
- What ever comes to mind.
How does that compare to the subject people are looking for.
- Hundreds of thousands of people are looking for the way to draw portraits, trees, cars and a few Russians want to know how to draw excavators.
- Thousands of people want information about autism.
- A few of my colleagues’s and family members know I write a blog. But usually they have the URL so they won’t be looking for me on a search engine.
- A few hundred people a year are put on Promen’s waiting list. They might be looking for information about Promen.
- What ever comes to mind is so vague that I can’t expect people are looking for it.
What’s the problem?
So why do I have such a hard time following this advice? Why, in general, do I have such a hard time following advice?
After thinking about that for a while I realized that is because most advice doesn’t hold true for me. People advice my to use skills I never learned. They don’t consider advising me to use skills I do know. Neither do they help me acquire the skills I miss. They just tell me I’m stubborn for not doing what I’m told.
It’s like telling someone with a spinal cord lesion that the best way to get to the second floor is to scale the stairs.
Which of course is the problem. Nobody knew that I had autism. I didn’t know. But now I do. Now I can start judging which skills I’ve learned, which skills I should learn and which skills are impossible for me to learn.
It also means that I should start thinking about which advice I should follow and which advice I won’t follow.
In this case it’s clear that I should follow the advice about what to write about on my blog: Mainly about drawing, the skills involved in drawing and the way I conceptualize drawings. Secondly about how autism and other circumstances influence the drawings I make.
Tentacles
After trying for a few days to draw a color fountain I felt I should try to do something else with the connection between water and colors. Maybe I can have colors flow in a kind of river.
To try this I made this drawing.
Tentacles
But as always when I start out with thinking of a title instead of just drawing one of the pictures in my mind, I’m finding the drawing won’t fit the title. Since the drawing is much more important that the title I’ve changed the title.
Link
Wasted beauty is beautiful site with eerie pencil drawings.
{ 2 comments }
Wow, Henk. Thanks for writing this. I know how you feel, because I feel the same way sometimes. I suppose we’re both struggling with the decision of how broad or niche we want our site to be.
I agree with you. Aim for a happy medium. You don’t have limit yourself to just the “drawing” category, but if you write whatever comes to mind then how would this site be different from a personal journal? Focusing on a few key areas such as drawing, conceptualization, and the circumstances around your drawings will allow your audience to have an expectation of what’s coming next.
At the end of the day, it’s a question of the best way to use your talents and strengths to benefit other people. As I said in Permission to Err we need to give ourselves permission to experiment and make mistakes, otherwise how will we discover the best way to achieve this?
Keep up the cool work! I for one have enjoyed your drawings so far, especially the latest one. I know we’re both going to learn a lot from the blogging experience.
Yes Kekoa. We’ll certainly learn a lot
I don’t necessary agree that a blog has to be “topic specific”. If you can get your writings and drawings to fit under the “umbrella” of the blog’s name, or description, you will be found by the search engines. It appears that keyword density is one “trick” to getting a good position on the search engine pages.
If the word “drawing” isn’t doing it for you, you could try words like “sketch”, “art on line”, “watercolors” or whatever methods you use to produce your beautiful drawings.
Don’t get discouraged. The probloggers have spent long hours and years of hard work, getting the recognition they have today.
BTW: I am working on a new post and category for my blog. The new category will be called “Blogging Buddies”, and I will be providing links to all persons who comment on my blogs. Since you visited me, you site will be listed.
I didn’t necessary agree with everything you said, however, some of what you said had merit, so I thank you for the comments.
Here’s hoping a link on my site will generate a few new visitors to yours.
After some more thinking about it I’m finding that being “topic specific” is a challange to give your best.
I’ve started reading about art history.
Without the need to be “topic specific” I probably never would have done so. While reading I’m finding art history to be a subject that’s much more interesting than I remember from school and it gives me all sorts of new idea about drawings I might make and methods and techniques I must try.
Henk
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