How to use Blogger effectively.
What does this mean? What is effective use of something?
This particular something is a publishing tool, with fantastic abilities, and its share of quirks.
Among its amazing abilities: you can publish something - it becomes available to an audience of millions, all those people could (not that they necessarily will, but they could) instantly get and read your publication. And your publication will be elegant and beautiful. Whether it's interesting is up to you.
What is effective use of the opportunity to publish? When you're answering your own questions, you have to go with what your mind gives you, in the way of answers, and my mind is saying "that's scary." Dealing with that is part of making your blogging effective, somehow. If your blog is really good, really useful for readers (really entertaining would be nice) ... that would solve an assortment of problems.
Making money should qualify as effective use. It seems I could put AdSense ads in my blog. That presents itself as the most direct way to make money on Blogger. Then I'd have to get lots of readers. Again, scary. And I've felt like AdSense wasn't working, like I wasn't actually getting payed. In other words, I had problems with the technology. I couldn't figure it out (years ago, when I gave it a shot).
Another very accessible way to make money blogging is with Amazon Associates ads. I know I can put those ads in a blog, which is cool, because I do like them. Probably, if enough people clicked, I could get payed, although I've gotten funny unresponsive responses from PayPal, so, there are technical issues that I still might need to deal with, and that's annoying.
Also, if I put a bunch of Amazon ads in the middle of my serious discussions of various topics, it might look, well, less serious. This highlights an issue with blogs: blogging makes it easy to create a giant mass of material, but that giant mass of material is not something readers are going to be able to easily navigate, I know people have had success just diarizing, meaning, they got big audiences of people who check every day for the latest post. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that concept. I kind of want people to come to my blog and navigate into the giant mass of material in it, with control. I've taken a small step, here, by creating an index post. It's problematic, though. If I add more posts, people will have to go from post to post to find the index. Should I move the index to the last post every time I add a post? Should I put a copy of the index at the top or bottom of every post? Obviously, these are things to think over. (I've set the blog to show just one post at a time. That kind of means I'm saying "the main way to navigate this blog is the index post ... although, you can put a link list in the sidebar. That a favorite feature!)
There is also, I think, a whole realm of effective usage that has little or nothing with the fact that you are (potentially) publishing to a large audience. Blogger is a great tool for writing because it produces a beautiful product. If your purpose is just writing for yourself, you get a nice looking product. You get an amazing product, because you can put in all sorts of colors, and pictures, with your writing, if that suits you. And the product is magical, in a sense, because you can change things, after you've created them.
But, is writing for yourself effective? My theory is, yes, it can be. At a certain level, it just is. But this seems something for a post of its own. Here's a question: will I come back to this index myself? Will it help me develop my blog? It's become maybe somewhat cumbersome, because I've written so much. We'll see.
