Zero

Social media sets us a holy grail of a goal of becoming an “influencer” , and that may be Twitter , Facebook , Instagram, YouTube or a blog , and like in other areas of the media say acting or music a very few hit the pay dirt of hitting the holy grail. Most of the time it’s being in the right place at the right time that does that for you.

However, like anything, sometimes you get nothing . I have a blog called “Seven Days In” that’s been going for fifteen years. I have six subscribers and in that time I have had nineteen comments on the blog itself (plus a lot on Facebook) , but that is the epitome of failure. No subscribers and no interaction. But I have had over 600K visits, that's an average of 110 per day over that time. Yesterday it had 600 visits and so far today 450 visits but sometimes it’s been as low as ten and as high as 2000.

I do use it mostly as a diary and to share music and ideas but it is nice if I can skim a little money from it although I feel that Google may be skimming some of the profits. I used to make £200 from Amazon , but then they put in a load of rules to deny payments (only brand new sales count, if someone returns you get nothing).

I then picked up on Vocal who have caused me to write a lot more , and also get paid for reads and to have correspondence with other Vocal creators and most days I see that I have some reads , so someone is taking notice of me, but yesterday I published a new piece here , and checked the following day and zero reads. Which was disappointing to say the least. Obviously no one was interested in what I had to say but c’est la vie , you got to get on with things. Then to almost compound the situation say a Top Story which was the same concept as one of my pieces , then you start thinking you are definitely not good enough.

Later in the day I dipped in and saw my piece actually had some reads , just that Vocal must have been a bit behind, and in fact the last few days my stories have had a lot of visits, and I am writing this so definitely not given up, and will not . I also have my blog as well, but I have made more out of Vocal in three months than from my blog over the last three years.

The lesson is don’t jump to conclusions or make assumptions , you never know what might be going down. Many years ago I bought something at a local shop and the payment was rejected. They tried again and it went through. It was not a standard amount , £11.89 I think. Anyway when I got home I checked my bank account for something else and saw a payment from that shop for £12.89. I thought “the gits” , and was going to ring the bank but thought I’ll be on for ages and it’s only a pound. I then thought I would go to the shop tomorrow and speak with the manager.

The following morning I checked my bank account and saw there were two payments , one for £12.89 two days ago and one for £11.89 yesterday , and then it dawned on me I had been in and spent £12.89 two days back. So by leaving it a while I saved myself a lot of embarrassment.

So give things a bit of time for everything to come through and you may be pleasantly surprised.

So a perfect piece for this would be the excellent “Zeroes” by Spacehog.