The Reluctant Blogger
In April 2014 Watermelon Web Works hired two external consultants to figure out why Google hated the site they had redesigned for me.
One of the consultants’ conclusions was that Google penalized the site because it had “thin content.”
The site had 4,200 cartoons on it. What did they mean it had “thin content”?
Google, according to Watermelon, likes blog posts. Lots and lots of them.
Blogs, according to Paul Clerc, Watermelon’s top web guru, were “like candy to Google.”
And cartoons? They were like boiled Brussels sprouts to Google?
On my old site I never needed to blog to get visitors, an average of 1,200 a day. The new site had 3 on a good day.
I did have a blog on my old site, but it only had sixteen posts, and I hadn’t posted anything since 2010.
No matter, Paul said, blogging was key to saving my site.
One of the other web gurus at Watermelon once wrote me, “Blogs are considered highly sharable, so write great blog posts for people to share!”
Write great blog posts for people to share? Did Watermelon think writing was a snap, that I could whip something out while waiting for my morning coffee to brew?
English was always my biggest challenge in school. It takes me hours to write a coherent paragraph, and I have no idea whether I can ever write one worth sharing.
That’s why I’d stopped blogging in 2010. Blogging kept me from what I am good at: cartooning. A picture is not only worth a 1,000 words, a picture doesn’t have dangling participles … whatever the heck dangling participles are.
Still, if blogging was what I needed to do to save the business it took me 33 years to build, I would blog. It wasn’t as though I was busy drawing cartoons. Since the redesigned site went live I hadn’t had any new cartoons commissioned.
As Watermelon says, blogs are considered highly sharable, so feel free to share–especially with anyone you know who’s looking for a web designer.
Next: My Site is Lost in Cyberspace
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Came in the middle of the series? Here’s a link to Part 1.
Read Watermelon’s response to this review.
Computer Cartoons for use in newsletters, ads, etc. So cheap you can afford them even if you’ve paid your web designer way too much.