Having struggled to find personal blogs with enough life to fill a space cruiser, today I decided to take a short break from the search and logged in to Quora instead.
In contrast to the yuppie bloggers who smugly photoshopped their clothing and weekend brunches and then used an online thesaurus to find words longer than two syllables, threw in a couple of explanation marks and called it interesting, here was an endless supply of people who wanted to have real discussions about their actual problems and who stood to benefit from the outcomes.
I answered one question. Then another. Then another. Every so often, a user would "upvote" one of my answers, which I found incredibly gratifying. "Why don't people like talking about death?", "How can I deal with my mum's borderline personality disorder?", "What are the pros of being an unmarried man?" There were plenty of people in need of assistance.
The stats were interesting too. Apparently the answers I'd made in the past had been viewed by about a hundred people last week. I'd only responded to half a dozen questions. If I upped that to 60, would I start getting a thousand views a week? That was decent newbie traffic. Especially if they liked the answers they were reading.
Sensing that I had become distracted and was tumbling down a rabbit hole, I reached out and posted a question asking the other members if anyone knew a blog that was a) about the person that wrote it, b) not linked to any typical themes (beauty/fashion/food) and c) read like fiction eg. Judy Blume or Roald Dahl's Boy/Going Solo. Quora might not have contained any blogs but maybe it contained people who knew where I could find them.
In contrast to the yuppie bloggers who smugly photoshopped their clothing and weekend brunches and then used an online thesaurus to find words longer than two syllables, threw in a couple of explanation marks and called it interesting, here was an endless supply of people who wanted to have real discussions about their actual problems and who stood to benefit from the outcomes.
I answered one question. Then another. Then another. Every so often, a user would "upvote" one of my answers, which I found incredibly gratifying. "Why don't people like talking about death?", "How can I deal with my mum's borderline personality disorder?", "What are the pros of being an unmarried man?" There were plenty of people in need of assistance.
The stats were interesting too. Apparently the answers I'd made in the past had been viewed by about a hundred people last week. I'd only responded to half a dozen questions. If I upped that to 60, would I start getting a thousand views a week? That was decent newbie traffic. Especially if they liked the answers they were reading.
Sensing that I had become distracted and was tumbling down a rabbit hole, I reached out and posted a question asking the other members if anyone knew a blog that was a) about the person that wrote it, b) not linked to any typical themes (beauty/fashion/food) and c) read like fiction eg. Judy Blume or Roald Dahl's Boy/Going Solo. Quora might not have contained any blogs but maybe it contained people who knew where I could find them.
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