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10.9.7
Wow! I can't believe this is the third "Blog around the Clock" that I have written, but it is totally cool. "Blog around the Clock" is one of my favorite Grey Matters columns to revisit. This time it isn't going to be only about c2c guests or other "famous" paranormal people who have blogs, it is also going to be about paranormal blogging in general, where to meet like minded people and such.
Let me start with someone that probably has as many blogs as I do, or close to it anyway -- Nick Redfern. Probably the best known of Nick's blogs is UFO Mystic, which he shares with my friend Greg Bishop. A short note on Greg, he is one of the few people in Ufology that I have met and he is totally cool, so you should read his and Nick's blog. Aside from UFO Mystic, Nick has Monster USA (cryptozoology, zooforms), The Night of the Living Jackboots (Big Brother related) and the Celebrity Secrets blog. Nick also has a myspace page and a facebook page. Somewhere Nick also has a blog called Things I Like, but I can't seem to find it. Nick updates his blogs often with news links and also with his own posts.
Joseph Farrell has a blog, Giza DeathStar. He doesn't update it often, but he does read and respond to comments. When he does post, his posts are normally pretty interesting.
Some probably don't know this, but aside from Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman has another blog. It is The Copycat Effect. He doesn't update it often, but if there is a school shooting or something of that sort you will find lots of info about it.
Richard C. Hoagland's Captains Blog is not gone, but hasn't been updated in over a year. However, there is The Dark Mission blog. Dark Mission is run by Hoagland's co-author of the dark mission book, Michael Bara and sometime we may actually see a post by RCH there.
One of my favorite people, Jon Downes, has a blog. There Jon talks about Cryptzoology, Zooforms, exotic animals and just every day stuff too. Jon's better half, Corinna, also has a blog where she talks about a lot of the same stuff that Jon does, but from a female perspective.
I don't think I have mentioned Lisa Shiel's Bigfoot Quest before, at least not in "Blog around the Clock". Lisa is the author of backyard Bigfoot and she has a lot of valuable insights into the Bigfoot phenomenon.
Last, but certainly not least is Adam Gorightly's blog, Untamed Dimensions. I always look forward to Adam's posts which range from conspiracies and ufos to just plain weirdness and silliness.
Now, a couple of sites I am just plain addicted to are Facebook and Paranormal Meet. Facebook I am addicted to for silly reasons, like playing TV trivia for my team, which includes Tim Binnall. Nothing I do on facebook is the least bit esoteric related, even though my friends list is. Facebook is mostly just a fun site to chill out at and do totally mindless activities like, tv trivia, movie trivia, quizzes and leave goofy messages on your friend's pages.
Paranormal Meet is also fun, but in a more paranormal way. I believe it is operated by the same people who do The Paranormal Report. Obviously you get to meet new people who are interested in the paranormal. In the short time that it has been around I have met many cool people there and since they are mostly not bloggers, I may not have met them otherwise. If you are someone who occasionally likes to blog about esoteric subjects, Paranormal Meet may be the place for you. It is almost exactly like myspace, so you get to have your own blog there. You can also start your own group (I have one about internet paranormal radio shows), hang out at the forum, post photos to your gallery, create polls, leave messages on your friends pages and so on. It is not concentrated on any particular esoteric subject, you will find people interested in a variety of subjects, but most have some interest in all subjects. Really I can't say enough nice things about the site. It is the site I wanted to start, but didn't have the know how to do it.
Lastly, I want to make some site suggestions to other esoteric bloggers. My Bloglog, Blog Catalog and Bumpzee are great sites to join. They won't attract thousands of new visitors, but they will attract some. You will meet at least a few people there that you will want to visit their blogs and they will visit yours. I have several regular visitors that I picked up from joining those sites, there are also sites that I was made aware of that I visit a lot. Really if you have a blog on a certain subject matter, esoteric or not, it can't hurt to join these sites. On the other hand, voting sites like Spicy Page will do almost nothing for you. I think they are a complete waste of time. People don't even visit your blog, they just vote for you in hopes that you will vote for them.
Even after nearly 3 years, blogging is still a mystery to me. Often times posts that I think are the most silly attract the most visitors. There are other things that don't make sense, like my new blog Beyond the Dial. I have a blogger version and a wordpress version, I won't go into the long story of how that came about. The wordpress version kicks ass on blogger, so far as the amount of visitors, even though they both contain the exact same posts. Also, there seems to be up and down cycles to blogging. Certain times of year the traffic will be slow and then it will speed up to beyond expectations and eventually even out to more normal stats.
I admit it, I am often times stat obsessive. I like to know who visited, or at least from where, what link they clicked on, how they found my site and so on. When stats drop, even though I know there are cycles, I become worried that my blog has somehow failed to be as good as it was. Yes, I am a total dork.
Anyhow, I wanted to say that to let new bloggers know that they shouldn't become discouraged. When I started the debris field, 30 visitors was a really good day. Blogging is actually work, you have to post often enough to keep people coming back. You also have to realize that it may well take a year or even longer to build up a lot of regular visitors and to have enough posts in search engines that they attract a noticeable amount of hits. Mind you, there are different types of blogs and bloggers and certain people may not really care about stats.
Although, I do care about my stats at The Debris Field and Beyond the Dial, I don't care at all about the stats at my pet blog or Lesley Land. Those last two blogs are done merely for my own enjoyment, if nobody visits them I don't really care. Any blog should be started with nothing more in mind than your own enjoyment. If you don't enjoy blogging you aren't going to attract visitors and it is going to become far more work than what you want to do. I can't tell you how many promising blogs I have found that a few months later nobody is posting to or they are totally deleted. These are likely people that thought that with no effort other than writing posts, people would just find their blog and love it. That doesn't normally happen, we can't all be Perez Hilton, but I am sure he even had to work at building up visitors.
OK, enough about blogging for now.
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