Back to Blogging

April 19, 2013

Now that I am mostly settled into my new place, I’ve decided to get back to blogging.

“But Monique, you’ve been posting for the past two weeks pretty regularly, what’s changing?”

The past blog posts were auto-pilot Monique. I was posting, doing some SEO here and there, but mostly just neglecting this site and my goals and my mission and my direction and my classes and just my everything in general. And I’m feeling like I need to spring into action again. So as my loyal blog audience, I’d like to share with you a few things I’m changing on the blog. Changing in the best way possible. I want to do things better around here, so it’s time to clean up shop.

First thing on the list – the way you receive my posts in your inbox. The format? It’s ugly. It just says “A Novel Quest” in the subject line, and it’s dull. The other night I switched all of you over to Mail Chimp, an email marketing service, instead of Feedburner. Now when you receive my posts in your inbox, they might be a little different. Tonight is the test run. I’m really not sure how they’re going to look when you receive them, but I’m subscribed myself, so I will see how they turn out. I’d like the title of the blog to go as the Subject line in your email, and then I’d like it to be prettier when you open it.

Second thing on the list – advertising. The best thing about blogging, at least here, is that I can be extremely candid with you about everything I’m doing. Because I work for an internet marketing company, I know a thing or two about advertisements, and how annoying they can be. I refuse to put any kind of disruptive banner, pop up, or interstitial ad on my site, as the user experience is what’s most important to me! But I have found an affiliate program that automatically links words in my content to products you might be interested in. If you buy them, I will get a small cut from that sale. So I’m in the process of creating a Disclosure section of my blog, where I fully disclose that I will sometimes make a small amount from the stuff you guys buy, if you choose to buy something ever. Which you definitely don’t have to do.

Third thing – I’m thinking of a new design. I’d really like my logo to be up there somewhere, and I’d like this place to be spruced up a bit. Given that I’m no designer (need to catch up in my classes for that), I might have to hire an expert of sorts, or download some kind of easy, elegant theme. But that is going to be a work in progress.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but right now, those are the things on my agenda. I’ve already begun using an affiliate program, but I’m not set up to disclose that properly yet, so I need to put a section here somewhere that talks about that. At any rate, those are on the agenda this month with regard to le blog.

Other than that, I just really want to focus on my business school e-book, and finishing up that HTML class I started weeks ago. I feel like since I’ve moved into this new place I’ve just been half assing a lot of the things I used to put a lot of effort into, and I don’t want that to become a habit.

In other news, it’s FRIDAY, and my friend Alyssa got her documentary funded! I am so happy for her and her next step, I can hardly breathe. When you’re finally able to fund your dream…well I can’t even imagine what that feels like.

It’s a beautiful thing. Until next time…here’s a pony dancing.