Storm Damage!

I'm BACK, maybe....

Okay, I gotta say, it got pretty depressing, to post really entertaining and interesting (to me) content, for many, many months, and I couldn't even get my own (grown-up) daughters to read my blog! It gets pretty demoralizing, to have written my heart and soul day after day, and not get one comment, not one re-tweet, not one new follower for months on end.

It's debilitating.

I had to take a break, and decide if I'm writing this blog for you or for me.

Still not sure. I cried a lot over how unpopular I am, and then decided to just quit posting to my Blog or my Twitter, and see if anybody noticed or even cared. Well, they didn't.

So I moved on. I decided that much as I hated it, you have to have a NICHE on Twitter, to make it easy for people to KNOW what they're following. My account (twitter.com/tarathralls) had only managed to get 712 new followers in over a year and a half, which, quite honestly, sucks. People could not GET me. I had too many subjects that I was tweeting about, and I couldn't be filed into any one box. If I got one new follower a day, it was a lot.

I noticed that people who Tweeted Quotes got re-tweeted way more than most other Tweeters, so I decided to try an experiment. So I started a Quote Site (twitter.com/tinyquote). The focus is left wing, and current quotes (if you saw it on Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart today, the meaty quotes are probably already up on TinyQuote).

It WORKED! People can easily figure out my focus - QUOTES! They can decide, without having to go to my Home Page, whether they want to follow me or not. AND, I am slowly incorporating quotes about many of my other interests, now that I have a loyal following.

TinyQuote was started on December 27. It was growing slowly...and I was only posting occasionally, with pretty much the same hash tags every time #politics #quote #dailyquote and #p2. After a few weeks, spent gathering quotes from all kinds of people, on all kinds of topics, I got a HootSuite account, and tried scheduling my Tweets 5 minutes apart, and branching out with my hash tags. VOILA ~ it worked! Suddenly I started getting between 10-25 followers PER DAY! And, as of today, I have surpassed by other Twitter site (tarathralls) in both followers (747 this minute) and LISTS (37 oops, 38 as of today).

It's amazing. Every time I post new Tweets, I almost always get lots of Re-Tweets, and new followers. I even get followers when I haven't put up any new content! I've learned something!

Also, reading all these inspirational quotes has really helped me in my life. When I'm about to go off and get angry about something, or say something mean to someone else, I'll suddenly remember that Buddha quote I posted about "inner peace"...and it is affecting my behavior in a good way - things like that keep happening.

So, I've solved my Twitter drought, but I still have not addressed this blog just yet.

I don't know what to do to get people interested in my Blog, but I've decided that I'm writing this blog for ME, and if you happen to get off on it, well, that's stellar!

So, I will post when I feel like it, without a manic compulsion to have to post something every day...if it does turn out to be every day, that would be awesome, but I'm going into our busy time of year, so I don't know how often I'll be posting...

But, in the meantime, I've been taking some lovely photographs, so, Happy Spring!!

: )