Do Blogging Jobs Exist?
If you haven’t figured it out, general blogging about your life can be a giant time-suck. Please look at the title of this blog. I am making no apologies for not being a famous blogger. I have other online projects that I keep focused on particular niches. I don’t necessarily “blog” on all of them. This is my own little playground and I don’t expect to get famous for it. I hope that visitors find these posts useful, but I really just needed a space where I can let loose a bit. I’ve spent several years building niche sites and other online properties without really doing anything indulgent like this. Welcome, but if you don’t like it, you’ll just have to deal with it. If you made it through the post about my obnoxious neighbor unscathed, you’ll do OK.
A List Bloggers
A lot of folks look at the A-list bloggers and figure that they want to do what they are doing. These people deserve kudos for at least having an inkling of what they want to do with their lives, but they have most likely drunk too deeply from the giant pitcher of Kool-Aid set out by A-listers. The problem is, the top dogs are there because they got in early and already had either writing experience or a following when they started. Granted, some of them are truly gifted writers, but some of their advice ignores the fact that you have to have a purpose for your blog. It can’t all be pointless drivel. The painful truth is that no one wants to hear about your boring day to day life, unless you’ve got a good hook that relates it to them. They don’t want to hear about mine either if I’m just going to spend time complaining about things. There has to be some benefit for readers. There needs to be some reason for them to want to bother reading what you have to share. They are trading their valuable time. If you just piss it away, they’ll never come back.
Blogging Jobs
My friend Robert knows that I have been making some money by building websites. He told me that he wants to find a blogging job. Good luck with that. If a company wants to start a blog, I’m sure they can find someone on the inside of the company to do it as part of their current daily workload. I don’t really think that “blogging jobs” exist in the form that Robert wants. He wants someone to pay him to stay home and blog for them. Bad news, writers are a dime a dozen. Now Robert could certainly go ahead and start his own blog, but when he does, it should be after he learns about keyword research and performs some due diligence on his topic of choice. I’m sure I’ll write more about that at some point, but keyword research is more than a one paragraph topic. The short version, and my point is, I think most companies could get a mid level management person to write one or two serviceable company blog posts per week without having to pay them anything extra.
And You?
How about you? I’m guessing that if you happened to find this post, you were probably looking for something about blogging. Are you a paid blogger? Do you work in a place that offers a paid blogging position? I’d love to hear about it! Please comment below and share your experience!
The Evolution of Hunting
Well, it’s that day again. Deer Huntin’ day. The day when thousands of people, still filled with the bounty of turkey they bought at the local Shop n’ Save, head off to the woods to bag themselves a trophy deer. I don’t know about where you live, but where I am, today is almost as big of a deal as Thanksgiving. Truth be told, to some people it is the biggest day of the year. You should see the folks running around in full camouflage gear. They’re everywhere. Faces painted, bright orange hats keeping them safe, and plenty of ice cold cheap beer in the cooler. Yep. Them’s good times Cleetus.
I never got into hunting myself too much, but I have nothing against it really. I grew up surrounded by nature. Our little house was nestled up against woods that went on for a few acres. It really wasn’t all that exciting or unusual for me to see squirrels, pheasants, or even deer walking around peacefully, right outside our living room window. In fact, it was standard procedure to make sure that the coast was clear before letting my dog, Delta, out to pee. She was a mutt, but she was filled with hunting blood. Retriever, mastiff and I suspect some Bloodhound. If there were deer out there, Delta wanted to take them down. It was an instinct I guess. I think my neighbor Jeff has it too. Even with Jeff carrying a hunting rifle though, I think my dog had a better shot at actually bagging a big buck.
Don’t get me wrong. I really don’t have anything against hunting. I know that the hamburger I ate for dinner didn’t come from a suicidal cow bent on self destruction. In fact, when my relatives go out hunting, I’m always happy to take some deer jerky off of their hands for them. My father-in-law is 100% polish, so we usually end up with some kielbasa too. It’s good stuff. I lost my taste for hunting when I was about 13. I went through all of the hunter training courses with a friend of mine who had told me what fun it was to kill things in the woods where his grandfather lived. I had my doubts, but I wanted to be a good friend. So the big day arrived when we were going to do some small game hunting. I left my backyard filled with squirrels and pheasants and rode in the back of a pickup truck for three hours to get to his grandpa’s house. After three hours in a tree stand holding a shotgun, I had seen one nervous squirrel about 100 yards away. No one got anything that day. The whole thing seemed silly to me.
Back at that time, I was a pretty good shot with a hunting slingshot. I think the one I had was called a Wrist Rocket. A friend who was a little older than me had taken my money into K-Mart and bought it for me. I would use iron pellets that fell off of the trains that ran by my house as ammo. I could shoot a twig in half at about 30 yards, but I had never shot any animals. It would have been too easy. After we returned home from our hunting trip, for whatever reason, I walked into my back yard with my slingshot, and just to prove I could do it, I shot a squirrel out of a tree. I guess I broke his leg. He escaped, but I saw him dragging that bad leg around for weeks from a distance. That really put me off of hunting. I didn’t need the squirrel for food. In fact the idea of eating him seemed kind of gross. But I digress.
Back to this week in “sports”. Last Tuesday, I heard my neighbor Jeff talking to another neighbor about his plans for going out hunting. As he was standing there, hiking his belt up over his generous beer gut, I think I actually heard him mention something about putting deer pee on himself to disguise his scent. Now this is a guy who spends 364 days a year as an accountant. One day a year (today) he decides that it’s a good idea for him to head off into the woods with a high powered rifle along with about 10,000 other Jeff-like individuals. Wow. Sounds like a good idea to me. I’ll be inside writing a blog post.
So Jeff was going on about how hunting is a man’s sport. The way I see it, if he headed out to the woods in a pair of shorts, carrying a hunting knife between his teeth, it might be a sport. Darn amusing to watch too! I think that covering yourself in deer pee, using a rifle that can kill from hundreds of yards away, and adding on a $300 rifle scope to the mix, takes a little of the sport out of it.
So, that is where we stand now. I guess we’ll see tomorrow whether or not there are any dead deer hanging off of the neighbor’s front porches. That’s always a pleasant thing to explain to the kids. No, that’s not Rudolph Sweetie. That deer’s nose is red because its covered in blood. At least maybe I’ll get some deer jerky for Christmas.
Got any good huntin’ stories? Please share in the comments section. I’m sure that there are a ton of ”Jeffs” out there!
My Take on Dealing with Difficult People
It’s normal to have a challenging relationship or two in your life at some time. Some folks make the mistake of obsessing over it and letting make a mess of other relationships too. Here are a few simple things that I’ve found can help out when that “special someone” in your life is really working on your last nerve.
The first thing I do is actually make a commitment to making the relationship work. I once worked with a guy who struck me as a conceited jerk from the minute I met him. I can’t say that I was wrong, but when I found myself thinking of what a fool he was on my days off, I knew that something had to change. There was no way I was going to give him my thoughts when I wasn’t at work. Since thoughts of his arrogance wouldn’t willingly leave my mind, I decided that I had to either quit or learn to get along better with him. Quitting was an even worse option than dealing with him, so I went with “making nice”. I started every interaction with him in a friendly manner. I noticed that I had a very strong urge to start our daily contact still ticked off at things he had said or done days or weeks before. You’ve got to let go of that kind of feeling. It’s poison, and things will never get any better while you are starting each day with that kind of attitude. You make yourself a big part of the problem when you expect trouble every day. If you look for it, you’ll find it.
Sometimes difficult people act like...
You have to remember that how they act is all about them. It really has nothing to do with you or what type of person you are. My work “buddy” was basically a horse’s patootie. I didn’t make him that way. He might have been that way since he was just a little jackarse. I had to resist the urge to fix him so that he fell within my acceptable limitations for basic human behavior. That’s a weakness of mine I guess.
If you have actually had a run in with the person, or it is abundantly clear that you aren’t really hitting it off, you might want to try something sort of strange. Just ask them if there is something that YOU can do to improve your relationship. It could just be that they got a bad “read” on you from the time you met. Sometimes doing this can work wonders. Of course, sometimes the person really is a doofus, in which case, move on to the next step.
Do your best to forgive their stupidity. OK. That doesn’t sound too good. What I mean is, forgive them for any kind of wrongs they may have perpetrated against you. Will it change what they did? Nope. Will holding a grudge about it change what they did? Nope. At least if you forgive and forget, you can let it go.
If you must deal with them, and you still don’t like it very much, you can always try to focus on something else. Maybe looking forward to not being with them can make something like going home and cleaning the fish tank look more attractive! Try scheduling something enjoyable for the time after you have endured their bone-headedness. Maybe playing some racquetball and drawing their face on the ball might help.
You also might want to ask for some help from people who know both of you. Have you ever been amazed at how your friends like someone that you simply cannot stand? Maybe they see something about the two of you that you are both missing. Let them make some suggestions. It’s possible that they could shed some light on things that will help you to get along better with the other person.
Hopefully the person who is annoying you is not a family member. If it is though, you can try the same techniques, but you will probably want to be even more committed to working things out. No one likes it when fist fights break out at family functions, even if it does make for great videos. Once you have exhausted every avenue, you can at least feel the peace of knowing that you honestly tried to make things better and improve your relationship. Make sure that you aren’t the one who is being a jerk, and then move on with your life.
If you enjoyed this post, you can find out more about why I’m not a famous blogger, by following the link. If you have any good tips for dealing with social jackwagons, please use the comments section below to share them with the world.
