Challenges I faced as a New Blogger.

So, I have a compatibility issue.

And it’s not with my partner. Not even with my mother-in-law. No, not with my dog, which I don’t have! It’s really a battle between my one ability & disability.

Writing as a talent was all good until the heavens above decided to make the ride a little too bumpy for my comfort. Thus, it thrust me on this digitally acclaimed world embodied as a Luddite. And for most of us who don’t know, `luddite’ is a term used for people like me who are vastly technologically disabled. And so here I am, trying to make two things:

1) peace between both my traits and;
2) a place for myself in the blogging world while remaining technologically challenged.

Bloggers with a similar condition; yes! a condition I’d call, would know what it means fighting this & what it is. It is a condition in which the victim cannot differentiate between a website, domain and a URL. After three published blogs, I still half-know. Maybe, they are not even different; they are synonymous. Furthering explicitly, it is also a condition which gets you googling the moment you need to create a hyperlink. Acronyms like HTML, CSS, GUI seem too malnourished, jargon is what I call ”semantic markup, cache & cascading style sheets” while comically technical terms like breadcrumbs, bounce rate and SOAP make me wonder if the tech guys anticipated I’d be here to fool around. And God forbid, if the blog needs something more complicated (forgive me, for I cannot give an example; I am that handicapped), then you just pack your bags and leave.

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Fortunately, I am a tad saved because I am blessed with a partner who is a technophile, just the opposite of a luddite (you keep reading my blogs, I keep adding to your vocab kitty; it’s a deal!). There you see, even God makes amendments, sometimes!

Thus, his being techno-savvy coupled with his availability due to the current lockdown, ensured, little remained of his sanctity. The poor guy, day in and day out was bombarded with questions, teeny weeny but in a count of hundreds. Nevertheless, he obliged though he secretly wished there was a way out.

Writing the blog was a cake-walk but designing my website & putting it in the loop was the idiomatic Jurassic park walk. Hiring a professional at the very onset was seemingly too lavish. What if my blogging didn’t take off? What if it was a joke? What if………? Somehow, with trials-n-errors, speculations & tutorials, I sailed on the first hurdle. Google is anyone’s best friend in such trying times!

Now, the blog product was ready to hit the market but the next steps, its promotion and its predecessor, website ornamentation- making the site user-friendly, equipping it with tailored functionality while pepping up a gorgeous look was the real chafe and challenge. This caused tiresome days & worrisome nights. A completely new kid on the block, I was still brimming with ideas, though sincerely clueless about their implementation. But I fought for pride with an indomitable spirit, blind-guessing my way forward. This was a prolific period of my life as I churned out technical solutions for my needs instead of words’ pearl string.

Acceptably armed, I now, took it forward. Promotion!!! Time to go!! I shot from all my social launch-pads & flooded my WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram platforms. I made sure I was ubiquitous, everywhere- my knowns just couldn’t escape me; I barely left them a chance.

And if that left room, I even signed up on a few more platforms of which I hardly had any idea. Those were the likes of Linked-In & Twitter. There, I had absolutely no presence but Voila!! I was arriving. Come, I had, but there was no one welcoming me except the automated message. I was lonely & befriended another loner there, my husband.

Together, we would rock??/!! (no prizes for guessing the punctuation). Jokes apart, growing popular and suddenly expecting followers by leaps and bounds was a lousy joke. I tried to make most of my connections but they failed to clone.

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Funny things started to happen as I tried to make my presence felt. I desperately tried to woo the Twitterati with quality posting and consistency but no! they just wouldn’t come; they were no shining knights on white horse-backs coming to court me. The fact was; they had to be lured; but how?

 

I set up a bait. A gorgeous display picture with an engaging & interesting bio about myself, it was. This was a mandatory, the social gurus said and I obliged unapologetically, for the “tips for 100 followers in a day” asked me to. The kill was made but look at the catch; what I attracted mostly was male followings interested only in direct messaging. Somethings never change. There was only one certain thing & that was, the stunning profile picture tip works.

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Evidently and you would all agree, this wasn’t the paramour I was looking forward to, right then. (Understand! Needs change

). So here I was, all soaked in disappointment. Nothing seemed to work. There were no followers around. `Organic followers’ was a dream and these impotent texters (just for the sake), I realized would not convert into real followers. Once, I even drove off a follower who refused to retweet my blog link even after I bribed him with 15 minutes of direct messaging. Now that, you will agree, was brutally unfair on his part. And I like to pay, pay back always.

Another popular tip floating around for the Twitter handle was to keep tweeting at least ten times a day. I don’t even argue with my husband ten times a day; how could the tippers expect tweeting (poor logic, I know)?? Thus, I kept working on tips and ideas, following some and binning others.

I was losing a lot of self-worth, self-respect in the process. I was doing things I never imagined I ever would. For one, I was forcing my contacts to promote my blogs even if they were not comfortable doing so. I started to accept friend requests from random people which had been hitherto lying on the backburner for years or the ones I had no fancy to. I ignored my better equal-half’s sensible suggestions & almost temporarily hijacked his social media accounts.

I clearly was getting paranoid about this, I realized. A fix was urgently needed, before the situation could get alarming. That’s when I decided to pull a plug on it. This had to go; this obsession of mine. I must act in balance, I promised myself. That’s when I decided to remodel my style of functioning. I resolved to dump a few tips & follow only the ones which did not end me up crazy & those which did not consume me, my time, energy and self-respect.

My life is a lot better now. I have made truce with myself. I don’t have as much anxiety; the stress has dwindled. I don’t bother people as much or so I think. Quality of my life is slowly being restored to normal. Things are falling in place, I sense.

Importantly, I have chosen passion over recognition; my newly found calling of blogging over attention/fan-following. Now I write only to deliver quality content, if it be called so. Of course, I promote my work but not fanatically. And understanding the long-run economics of using professional marketing help, I have started to look for the same. But ain’t carrying a begging bowl anymore! I am going to respect my literary work. I must; more so, because if I don’t, nobody will. Let my words find their own way to reach an audience who enjoys their play & effect and is connected to my work for its virtue. But definitely, my address is not (a) Fool’s Paradise. I’m all eyes and ears to valuable suggestions, deeply interested in reader preferences & ready to adopt smart techniques like catchy, quirky hashtags & other easy hacks, if they sail me over and if they be the rule of the day.

And I go on.

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