Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Upcoming Blog Changes

For anyone who has stuck around long enough, I started this blog back in 2012. The whole point of this blog was to keep people informed about my art projects, my shows, and whatever I put up for sale. This blog was in a way a rebirth of the blog I used to run continually on Myspace up until 2009 or 2010 (I can't quite remember). Nowadays, I find it hard to believe that there was this 2+ year gap where no information was getting out other than Facebook posts and event pages.

Not too long after the blog started, I came to realize something. A lot of people do not like to read. As a society, we've become very lazy. We expect images and sounds to provide us with our information instead of walls of text. From that point on, I came up with a strategy. Most of the posts on this blog would be more focused on images with some text to provide commentary. The informative parts of the blog would instead be presented in the form of Youtube videos, though text-based posts would not be eliminated entirely. The first part of this plan did come to fruition. Anyone who follows this blog will notice that over the last 2 years or so, the majority of the posts have been very strong with images. The second part of this plan, the Youtube channel didn't take off, or at least not yet. I actually did make a series of videos that planned to edit and turn into Youtube videos, but unfortunately, I did something stupid that I won't go into detail about, but let's just say that the videos were accidentally deleted. So I need to start over with that part. Still, despite that, the blog views did increase for a while.

So now that I've been focusing on image-oriented posts for some time, a new issue has arrived that I need to address. I recently decided that I wanted to try and monetize this blog. While I don't expect to become rich off of an obscure art blog that only gets a few dozen views every month, I figure anything could help. Also with luck and perhaps a little help, this blog could potentially reach out to more people. So I applied for monetization. I got a response saying that I was rejected. The main reason why was because of a lack of content. Even though I have dozens of posts, they don't consider images worthy of monetization, most likely because computers can't analyze images or videos like they can with words. It was recommended that I should focus on making blog entries with more sentences and paragraphs so that their algorithms or whatever can determine what it is my blog is supposed to be about, which I'm assuming is supposed to determine if the blog is advertiser-friendly. So now I need to make more blog entires kind of like what you're seeing right now.

Now we get to the part where we actually discuss the subject of this blog entry. Yeah...everything above that is nothing more than one long intro that was divided into three paragraphs. Although, in my own defense, I was slowly presenting the problem whereas now, I'm presenting the solution. Anyway, I thought of ways of how to reorganize this blog yet again in order to meet new demands. The image-heavy posts aren't going away. They'll still be here just as often as they always have been (about once or twice a month). However, I also plan on doing a weekly update. Unlike the monthly Progress Report posts, these weekly updates will contain little to no images and will instead consist of a brief, yet more in depth updates about what I've been up to and what projects I've been working on. The Youtube videos will be coming...eventually. I think those videos, when they eventually do come along will focus on the specifics of particular projects or the methods of doing what I do. Hopefully, this increase of text-related blog entries will eventually allow this blog to become monetized. If that happens, then I'll need to figure out how to increase the views, but I'll save that discussion for later. Although this next part has little to do with the monetization, I'm thinking of giving the blog another visual overhaul as well.

That's all I have to say for right now. I can't say exactly when the next post is coming. It will hopefully be in a few days. The next entry should most likely be the March 2017 Progress Report. So that's something to look forward to since March was somewhat of a busy month for me. Oh, and another thing. If anyone has any suggestions on how this blog can improve, by all means let me know.

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