The Struggling Writer and the Advertising Scandal

I am a struggling writer! I struggle to write something worthwhile!

Just the other day, during my brains agonising struggles, it dawned on me that over the last two months I had not written one article, not one sad 'memo-to-self' nor had I entered one word into my sad Blog, yet I have been sitting at my computer struggling about it all! I now see myself as the struggling painter, the one who has achieved nothing more than re-coating the drab-grey front door of my sister-in-laws house; she assuming that she has helped me somewhat on the road to enlightenment.

I looked around the other day (or twenty) for some path to follow, some enlightenment on the search engines for struggling writers and realised that here was the last place that I should be looking and that I should after all just write something and write it well instead of searching for the answer!

When I started writing four years ago I took pains to correct my grammar and to re-read closely the finished works. Then after one year I simply wrote for the sake of writing and forgot all about the presentation factor - I fell into the trap of quantity over quality! I would hastily write one article of about 2000 words, usually in-less than one hour, and then spend three or more hours publishing it to my Blog or website and any other websites who would take it!

To look at the Internet more deeply; the statistics last month (March 2007) show clearly that 500 people hopped along to my website! Now, of those 500 people, 400 of them did not stay longer than 5 seconds! In fact, of those 500 people only 12 of them spent longer than 30 minutes. This states that less than 5% of visitors spent any time reading anything at all! 95% of them just flicked through, skip read a couple of sentences and then moved on! And it could be possible that of those 12 people who actually logged on to my website for longer than 30 minutes, three of them fell asleep with my website still up, another three couldn't get away from it as their mouse had failed, three more were Chinese and were just looking at the pretty pictures and the last three were all family members who felt sorry for me (I was one of them)!

I certainly have questioned these horrible statistics; do they go to prove that my articles and writing are not worth being read and that a simple skip over proves this or are the large search engines simply providing wrong results? I talked this over with a friend of mine and he said "if a web searcher does not find what he is looking for within 3 seconds he/she will promptly move on"! That is the average time it takes to make a judgement on a website and regardless of a sites alternative worth, if it does not immediately captivate and hold, then 'swish', away they go! In other words; if a searcher is looking for tips on modern-day cannibalism then an article on headhunting in the 18th century would not hold sway, however well written and researched the article maybe!

A person going to the bookshop can spend hours meandering along the shelves, reading snippets on 'Travel by Harley Davidson through Tibet', a book on 'how to translate in sixteen different languages all at once' and laughing out loud at some graphically boosted diary titled 'life at sixteen as a bitch". And they only went there for five-minutes to pick up some postcards for Granny! Surfers who use search engines do not typically retain the same relaxed approach; they speed through results on a mission, they sit on the edge of the chair and rattle through websites with unexplained nervousness, typically boosted by a teaspoon-standing jug of coffee laced with an unreasonable amount of artificial sweetener!

And in this tone; the major search engines that host adverts relish in this type of behaviour from its customer base. Take Google, Amazon or Yahoo for example, companies whose revenue is largely generated through surfers clicking on opportune adverts! If a surfer clicks on an advert the hosting website is paid a certain fee; advertisers pay the likes of Google and Yahoo to host their advertisements on certain websites and these stay up for as many clicks on these adverts as they have paid for. Following on therefore, I can only assume that a website that has no content and is filled simply with adverts is the most ideal website possible for these search engines. Web crawlers will not be wasting time at websites reading interesting articles; they will be clicking on an advert to move away from this extremely boring site!

Since I started writing (and from the day that I started to submit my articles to article banks and websites in the hope of becoming known and extremely popular) I soon realised that I was becoming well-known but not in the way that I wanted to be. My articles started to appear everywhere, on sites that bear no relation to the articles content and in many cases amongst a mass of adverts - quite clearly the webmaster hosting my articles hopes that the reader will find my articles sufficiently boring as to click on an advert to escape and thus generate a couple of cents, pennies or rouble's for the pockets of the host.

Today, I typed in 'Seadolby Articles' into the Google Search Engine. A few of the results that came up were;

1. The Grumpy Edinburgh article. I wrote this piece many years ago, a look into the typical grumpiness of the Edinburgh inhabitants through personal experience - a trait that still remains today. This article appears on a page with 16 different Google generated adverts and two affiliate money-generating links to Google products. The article is clearly displayed on a page with the title "Asia Information". The last time I looked Edinburgh was in Scotland not in Asia, or was that the village of Edinburgh in Indonesia?????

2. My Article titled, Surviving Retirement, which is basically an insight into saving money for old-age, can be found on a website titled, Beach Umbrellas. This article is displayed there simply because I mention the word 'umbrella' in a sentence; "The financial security umbrella that most wage earners would like to shelter under after retirement is …". Of course the article is liberally inter-spaced with Google adverts!

3. A Website titled, "Dental health, good gums", has a link to my article on Free Gifts in Taiwan. The connection here passes me by! This website is filled with adverts from Amazon.Com and Google. Strangely enough the Google adverts give links to five-star hotels which confuses the issue even more!

4. And the one that I laugh hysterically about in a depreciating manner is an article that seriously criticises website advertisers and states how terrible they are, titled, The Online Advertising Scandal. This attacking article appears on a website titled "Website Advertising", a site whose sole purpose is to gain income from potential advertisers. Naturally this website comes resplendent with adverts that certainly give colour to the site and also lots of income, despite my article telling all and sundry that they are being ripped-off!