My eighth post, and I’m
still conflicted
about a choice I had to make when I set the blog up.
Going through
Blogger’s opening steps, under “Settings” I came to this: “Adult Content, Yes
or No?”
Wow; a tough question already, and I’d barely started.
I like to
think my ”content” is written at adult level for people who can read
accordingly. I can reach back far enough
in my memory to a time when I could have answered “Yes” -- if anyone had thought to ask. Of course I
had to check the “No” box this time, though, or be banned from polite blog
society. (I assume that’s why they ask.)
So where does that leave me? My writing is childish? [Oddly, that would
have won me a job: the buyers wanted material for their financial advisory
newsletter, but written at 4th to 6th grade level.
Versatile though I am, I missed on that one.]
The irony of it all is that my writing really is adult, while
“adult” material is juvenile, or sophomoric if you’re generous. It was fairer
when my stuff was adult and theirs was pornography, back in that earlier day
when folks called a spade a spade and a vibrator a dildo.
The really painful comparison, though, and I don’t often like to
remind myself about it, is the relative success and pay scales involved. Pornography is maybe the biggest business
there is, worldwide audience, and here’s me: Len Diamond Writes.
Eighty-seven ”views” of my page the first month, eighty-four of them my own as I struggled
with setting it up.
What about equal pay for equal work? A joke! Porn
stars make big money. Writers prostitute themselves all the time – think SEO articles
-- but for four or five bucks a trick.
But -- porn is off the table; so what’s the second biggest money-maker “content” you
can write?
If you think of gross, you immediately have to think about those SEO
articles. Not quite as big as and a little less obscene than porn, for sheer
volume of demand search engine optimization is a big industry. I mean, buyers
order SEO ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred yards at a time. (Just thinking about all
those words that could have been used better… ) But at the retail level where
the writer works, earning money with SEO is all about that kind of volume. Word for word, SEO doesn’t pay well –
in fact, word for word, SEO pays about a penny. So if you hope to make money at SEO, you have
to be able to stuff a lot of SEO into your SEO article. And do it
unobtrusively. SEO.
I’ll try to be fair; you can argue that this stuff is a
training ground for new writers. You have to break in somewhere. But it’s not for
me. I won’t do it. Not at those rates,
anyway. I’m gonna hang out on this corner and wait for a better offer.
Next: Oxymorons and homonyms
