Acting, interacting, social networking .... aaarggg

I don't know about the rest of you but I have trouble keeping up with everything internet. There's the posting and commenting on facebook; the tweeting, retweeting and readtweeting on twitter; the confusing and blankness of googleplus; the kindle boards; the blogger sites;  linkedin; the ____ (You fill in the blank.)

Add to that email accounts and the mobile apps by the way.

How do you manage all that and still have a life, one that doesn't involve a keyboard or a screen?

I know I can't.

I have solved the problem for myself. It's not the best solution but it will have to work for now.

I log on to my facebook account daily and scroll through, reading the pertinent (family and friends) posts, comment if I think it will add something, then log off.  I check both my email accounts, my amazon seller account, my local newspaper headlines and then I either go off to my part time job or begin to putter around the house ... you know, doing the dirty word (chores).

Once a week I check in with twitter. That's on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, I read the posts of blogs I follow.Thursdays I check out the kindle boards.

I compose my weekly column for on Friday nights and email it immediately since it's due on Saturday.

I've limited my blog posts to those moments that inspire me. 

Let me ask again: How do you manage your social networking and interacting and still have a life?  

Getting readers to your blog

I'm on the hunt for readers.

Actually, I've been hoping to increase my readership since the day I started blogging. That's why I subscribe to bunches of newsletters and blogs that focus on luring interested folks to my party here. The trouble is, since starting this little gig, I haven't seen anything new that has increased my readership!

Of the dozens of tips I've explored, just a couple have brought positive results. But for the most part, each has been little more than a repetition of another. It's been so frustrating, I'm wondering if I should just rewrite some of those repetitive blogs. After all, they drew me in; maybe I can use them to draw someone here.

So far, I've resisted some of the hard-sell stuff because, athough it would be nice to see some green, my focus isn't on money making.

I look at the blog as a journal I've never been able to keep, a place to lay down the random thoughts that come to me like fireflies at night, to let the voices in my head be heard, even when they don't make sense to me.

It make sense to me to do this because I have an interest in random thoughts and advice -- not just from other writers but from readers of everything and anything. It's an unfathomable universe out there with a huge amount of information. And since life seems to be a never-ending learning experience, why join the hunt?

I can't see how search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click would do much more than take readers away from the blog.

But then ... I'm not about to second-guess the people who are touting their advice for blogging so I'm off to explore some of the ideas I've tabled.