The Workday Liberal

So Kos went and tidied up his blog roll... and there are some hurt feelings because of this. Not that it matters to Kos, or anyone who was unceremoniously dumped but this subject fits in nicely with some recent thought I've had regarding Club Lefty.

When I first kicked off Club Lefty, I'll be entirely honest. I thought maybe I have what it takes to get a decent amount of readership, and maybe I would be able to get an ad or two to generate a bit of income on the side.

Well that dream was crushed about 6 months into the experiment. Club Lefty is mainly visited by inlaws, and a couple of other blog owners who link over... but really hasn't generated much independent traffic. Every now and then I'll post something cogent, written well enough to warrant a link from some other site. I'll never forget the post I wrote that got linkage from Crooks and Liars and resulted in about 400 hits that day. Or my post about Jamil Hussein which landed in a prime spot on Google and resulted in a bunch of hits, mainly by right wing types. But these spikes in traffic are the oddity, not the norm.

Another factor weighing against me in my struggle to get my opinion to a wider audience is my blogging schedule. I work during weekdays and that is when I blog. I'm on the computer all day at work so when I'm at home I don't spend a lot of my time on the internet. Which means if I were to get any sort of following, they would only have content on weekdays. Plus I'm not really prolific because I like to take a subject and link to sources, and basically parse out my response. So I further sacrifice quantity for quality, which makes for kind of a boring site. You hit Club Lefty once after I post on a weekday and you know whats happening here for the next 24 hours.

I've also come to the realization that my writing is just not top notch blogger quality. I'm not posting this in a huff mind you, this is just me facing the truth of the matter. My writing tends to be in long, complicated sentences with lots of comma's and elipses... and oddly placed pauses, often with mispellings, (sometimes intentionally so mind you) which can be very hard to follow unless you are reading it with my brain. And you have to be a great great communicator in order to kick start a successful blog these days. There are a million others just like me, all angling for a part of the spotlight so you have to be really good to be heard.

So I've long since come to the point that I gave up the hope of blogging for cash because I'm not that great a writer, and not prolific enough to warrant a lot of traffic. But since I'm so freaking opinionated I can not just stop blogging. So if you've read this far, you can probably tell that I've been in deep thought about how to proceed with this site. For the time being, I'll keep it as is, but eventually I see me moving. I think the moniker "Club Lefty" is pretentious. While I started with an intention of building up readership and what not to almost have a clubby atmosphere, obviously geared to lefty opinion, I've long long since given that goal up.

I've thought about shutting down Club Lefty and starting a new blog. Something started with a more realistic attitude. Make the title a bit more appropriate for the task I set myself, and just keep it as an outlet for my political venting. Maybe have a blog named "The Work Day Liberal" or something like that.

Really this is a post with no point now that I get to where I want to wrap it up. Just sort of letting anyone who may wonder know where I'm coming from, and where I may be going to...