Wasting Your Blogging Time

If you must waste your time, waste it in a
big way on your friends and family
and not on blogging outfits that seek
to take advantage of you.

Image by tompagenet of London
via Wikimedia Commons.

Do you waste your blogging time? No, I'm not talking about skipping a casual blog post by indulging in an impromptu visit to the zoo with your children.

Instead I refer to the phenomenon of writing content for people who respect your work far less than they respect their own brands and their propensity for adding green to their pockets, designer duds to their wardrobe and exclusive family vacations to their itineraries.

While I fully appreciate the value of the concept that one must work their way up the ladder to bigger and better things, there are some organizations that are constructed without a ladder. There is the top and there is the bottom. No in-between exists.

Most of the time you will have to learn this the hard way because despite the uncouthness of the blogosphere, there are few blog posts and sites that will point blank identify the baddies you will never get anywhere with. I won't do that here either, but I will tell you the basic modus operandi of opportunities that rarely pan out.

1) Run 10 miles, walk over 1/4 mile of hot coals in your barefeet and then jump in a lake of freezing ice water. Swim to the bottom of the lake and retrieve a 10 ton boulder. We will provide a link back to your blog. I can't even begin to feel the need to explain why this is a bad idea.

2) Here is an email full of fun content. Here is a picture. Here are 19 points. Share this with your readers, like it on facebook, retweet it on twitter. We will pick three posters out of the 3,000 people we send this out to to win a $25 gift card. We will also never publicly announce the winners of the gift card.

Bad idea. I will explain this one a bit. Sharing the preformed content is going to fill your blog with words posted on a multitude of other blogs. Most recipients will directly copy and paste. To be original you will either have to write new content (for a chance to win $25) or make do with the prefab. Make do with the prefab too many times and your site will get a Google smackdown. This is even more likely if you are asked to include multiple links in the post.

There is no winning for you - only the email list asking you to do this benefits. That is not to say that you should never be generous with your corner of the world, but be generous widely and be generous with charities and other organizations that are worthy - not blogging conglomerates headed by wealthy individuals.

Don't waste your time on unworthy efforts. If you are going to skimp on blogging, do it for your family or friends, and not because you spent too much time and effort on posts that will bring you no return and only harm your site in the long run.