Guest Blogger who sacrificed to protect our freedom!

http://www.mojosteve.blogspot.com,/
Good morning from sunny & miserably hot South Carolina!

Don't worry about being new to blogging, as we all had to start somewhere.
At times I feel new to things myself, despite the bright shiny packaging I
present on my site. I've been writing in one form or other for years, and
in all honesty my first few blogs that I posted had been what I jokingly
called "my rants" that I'd had saved on my hard drive for months or years.

After writing a couple dozen posts and putting them into my blog on
MySpace, one of my best friends (who sometimes gets listed as Guest
Blogger Chris) said that I was wasting my time just showing things to a
few friends on MySpace and that I should find a way to go global. Another
old schoolmate hooked me up with a friend of hers whose blog had been
recently voted Best Blog in Portland Maine, and he pointed me towards
Blogspot.

I felt that I still was barely receiving any traffic until I added that
thing from Feedjit and found out I was getting between 500 and 1000 hits a
week. A lot of my site itself is tongue-in-cheek funny, from the photos to
the very title of the site itself. I've found in my 40 years of
people-watching that most folks absorb crappy news when it's wrapped
inside some humor, or at least something that points out the relative
absurdity of what some people are doing.

I tackle a wide variety of topics, from national politics to international
relations, from crappy music to just utter dumbness that I observe. I
receive, by far, more traffic from my pictures than I do my articles, so
the visuals are as important to me as the writing itself. I have as much,
if not more fun sometimes, putting together some of my outrageous pictures
as I do in writing. I borrow some pics from other sites, but in most cases
I take a standard Google-searched photo and add a caption or quote. The
ones I do about Islamic fanaticism/Muslim extremism tend to be my
favorites.

The photos are almost like bait to bring people in to read the articles. I
also found that a great way to get traffic is to comment on other people's
blogs and to be on heir bloglists. Networking is KEY to getting
readership. Once I started to branch out and leave comments on other
blogs, their readers started to come check me out. I'm tickled by my
readership. Now if I could just get paid to do this, I could have my dream
job.

Thank you for your kind words about my military service. I loved my
enlistment and had it not been for some disillusionment I was mired in at
the end of my four years, I might have stayed. I had fun being an MP, and
still surround myself with a lot of friends from the services. I come from
a long line of military people, so it's very much in my blood. My
much-younger half brother was supposed to carry on the tradition as well,
but he was also disqualified from service, in his case due to a car
accident at 18 that left a rather large titanium rod in his leg.

I noticed you used the words "we" and "our" in referring to your site; are
you writing in tandem with others? I sort of do that too. A couple of my
ld Army buddies write on occasion but don't either have the time to
officially blog or wish to remain somewhat anonymous. They feed me stuff
that I list as being by one of my Guest Bloggers, with additional comments
from me underneath. Such is the case with the blog about Gates. The first
part came from Guest Blogger Jim, a guy I was an MP with and who is now a
police officer in the midwest. He likes to stay low-profile.

I try to write 2-3 times a week as long as time (and my wife's patience)
permits. I find that mostly the more I write and stay in the habit of
writing (I carry a wee notepad with me at all times to catch stray ideas)
that the easier it becomes.

Okay, enough. I've talked your ear off....Have a great day and welcome to
the glamorous world of unpaid semi-professional opinion-giving!


Steve


Steve "The Lightning Man" Kalinowski
Noted Wit and Blogger Extraordinaire