I'm not good at making money. I would like to have lots and lots of money, but I never have had much. I think my difficulty with making money is one result of my autism. But I'm not sure about that.
For 9 years, the main thing I've been doing to try to earn money is writing this blog. That may be absurd. But I don't know what else to do.
I don't know how to market my blog. Some days I have very high page counts, some days very low. Some individual posts get many more views than others. But whatever happens, it's a surprise.
I daydream a lot about becoming financially successful. (Maybe that's a big part of my problem right there: maybe successful people never daydream about success. That would go directly counter to all of those motivational speakers and authors telling people to visualize success. But I don't think that necessarily means it's incorrect.)
The nearest approaches to success I've had so far with the blog, the biggest amounts of pageviews, have come when someone with a large readership mentions one of my posts: a popular blogger, or a magazine not terribly far from The Main Stream.
And so I daydream about people like Barack Obama doing things like tweeting about my blog. Seems like something like that could be a big boost toward my having something people would call a career. There are many people who could be a big help to me with a single mention, but I've been thinking -- daydreaming -- that perhaps no single person could help me more with a single tweet, than Barack Obama.
Then today I thought: what if Donald Trump tweeted about me? Would that help me even more than a tweet from Trump?
I can't imagine Obama tweeting something negative about me: either he'd have something nice to say, or, surely, he wouldn't go out of his way to diss a nobody like me. I can't imagine Trump tweeting anything but negative things about me. And as we know, he not above going out of his way to diss nobodies.
A tweet from Obama, something along the lines of:
"Here's a blog written by Steven Bollinger, an interesting writer who's not very well known. Essays on all sorts of topics, from wristwatches to renewable energy to politics to ancient Latin, and many other things. Thoughtful, witty, fascinating writing."
-- would almost certainly catapult me into what is known as a career. But what if Trump tweeted something like:
"Small-time creepy loser disabled autistic blogger, sympathetic to loser NYT and loser MSNBC and lib Dems, takes pathetic potshots at me. A complete loser in life, jealous of my huge success. What a pathetic jerk! Sad!"
? Many, many people now say up whenever Trump says down and night whenever he says day, and who can blame them? Almost certainly, many people would praise me and my writing just because Trump dissed me, without ever actually going to the trouble of reading something I'd written. Many others no doubt would actually read my blog because of Trump's tweet, and some of them might like it.
I wonder whether there's some action I could take which would lead directly toward my having financial success, something which has never occurred to me, but would've occurred to almost every non-autistic person in my position?
I wrote above that almost every reaction to a post on this blog is a surprise to me. There is one exception: posts like this one, in which I write about how badly I want fame and fortune, almost always get far fewer pageviews than my average post. That makes me sad for several reasons, one of which is that I think these posts are very interesting and entertaining. It's okay to laugh at these posts, it doesn't necessarily mean you're missing the point.
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