A brand new blog for a brand new attempt

This blog is intended to be something between and continuation and an expansion of my existing blog at Live Journal. I have had minor success writing at Helium and Associated Content, but I am given to understand that I'll never make real money if I don't promote.

Now, promoting is not as straightforward as it sounds. I thought I could just link to myself in a few places and talk about my writing on my little blog and that everything would build. It isn't quite that easy. Not only do you have to talk about yourself, but you have to talk about other people, what they're writing, and where. Then they find their link on your page and perhaps mention it on theirs. Bingo - another link in the chain.

All of this theoretically puts your blog (and thus your self-promotion) higher in the search results for the topics you are covering. So does adding to to blog rolls and various listing sites, if I am to understand how this all works correctly. I just didn't feel that Live Journal was the place for me to do that. There isn't squat for visibility over there and finding communities and folks that shared my interests was very difficult. That was because of both difficult navigation and a lack of folks who were doing what I was doing.

The point of this blog is to do all of those useful and well-behaved things and to see (and post about) what happens. Of course, I'll post to my new articles as I write them. Heck, after a few weeks I'll probably write an article about being here! So this is one step forward for me, hopefully on the long road to building a real name for myself.