{"id":1750,"date":"2020-01-23T23:27:53","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T06:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/?p=1750"},"modified":"2020-01-23T23:27:53","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T06:27:53","slug":"returning-to-the-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/returning-to-the-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Returning to the Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This blog has been a real story for me.\u00a0 i enjoyed blogging for a few years and, for a while, I didn’t bother to look at the\u00a0Comments<\/em>.\u00a0 Then, one night a long time age, I decided to check out the Comments<\/em>.\u00a0 They were stupendous!\u00a0 I had never ever imagined the kinds things people were saying to me about my work.\u00a0 “Wonderful blog!\u00a0 I have learned very much from your offerings!”\u00a0 “Excellent.\u00a0 I will return to you blog in the future.”\u00a0 “Etc.”<\/p>\n

I ran to my wife and dragged her to my computer – “You have GOT to see this!”\u00a0 After she read three or four comments, she was equally impressed.\u00a0 It’s nice to have your partner impressed by something you’ve done.\u00a0 (That’s a pretty universal sentiment right there, I’d think.)<\/p>\n

A few days later, I decided to read more comments to get my ego up.\u00a0 I mean, there were 360 of them.\u00a0 (It had been a long time that I hadn’t even thought of looking at\u00a0Comments<\/em>.)\u00a0 Down around the 10th one, I noticed the second\u00a0Comment<\/em> that said, “Wonderful blog!\u00a0 I have learned very much from your offerings!”\u00a0 Hmm.\u00a0 Not such a great sign.\u00a0 So I did a search for the phrase “Wonderful blog!” and something like 25 of the\u00a0Comments<\/em> were identical.\u00a0 Then I started searching other phrases.\u00a0 Every time I got a handful (or a basket-full) of the same phrase (mostly from businesses who were trying to manufacture traffic, I deleted the\u00a0Comments<\/em>.\u00a0 At the end, I was left with exactly zero original replies to my comments.\u00a0 Zero.\u00a0 My wife and I laughed about that for a long time.\u00a0 Oh well, lessons learned.<\/p>\n

But, I began to wonder if anyone read my blogs and if nobody did, I figured I’d put my energy into other stuff.\u00a0 (Plus, in the very beginning, I had used a photo of a golf ball going into the cup to illustrate one blog post and 5 years later I got a letter from a law firm saying I had violated somebody’s copyright and, of course I had, without thinking about it, and suddenly I was paying a few hundred dollars I hadn’t anticipated.\u00a0 Thus does the world of blogging erect hazards to the unsuspecting.)\u00a0 But, back to the\u00a0Comments –\u00a0<\/em>I eased off on my posts – my practice was doing fine and generating Google traffic with “new content” didn’t seem worth the effort for the reward achieved.\u00a0 I seem to be doing fine without having people see me on Page One of a Google search of, say, “Bellevue Mediators” or “Couples Therapist” or “Joe Shaub.”<\/p>\n

But then in the last month or two, I’ve had some people who come in to my office, comment (or should I say\u00a0Comment<\/em>) that they had read my website and blog and my brain said, “WHAT?? Someone is reading my blog?”\u00a0 So, with renewed belief that maybe one person is reading this, I think I’ll start tapping these out again.\u00a0 What’s the worst thing that can happen?\u00a0 Maybe I’ll generate 20,000\u00a0Comments<\/em> from Russian bots in the next 9 months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog has been a real story for me.\u00a0 i enjoyed blogging for a few years and, for a while, I didn’t bother to look at the\u00a0Comments.\u00a0 Then, one night a long time age, I decided to check out the Comments.\u00a0 They were stupendous!\u00a0 I had never ever imagined the kinds things people were saying Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[28,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1750"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1751,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750\/revisions\/1751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}