These diary entries are a place for me to collect my thoughts and feelings about this whole process so feel free to ignore them!

I have today off work so I’ve spent the past three hours working on a plan for the content structure of this blog and I would dearly love to spend all day doing it, but at the most I can give myself another two hours. And I really should go get lunch soon because I haven’t even eaten breakfast (I know, that’s really really bad of me).

I think I have to revise yesterday’s goal for pillar content, I think I need to just see where this blog goes first for a while. See if I’m capable of writing decent content that others might think is useful. Or perhaps more I want to just concentrate on writing what I need to write rather than worrying too much whether it is “pillar” or “cornerstone” content. Hopefully, that will come in good time.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about ethical blogging recently. For the most part, I’m new to Internet Marketing (IM) - even though I was aware of many of the techniques, it really has only been in the past month and a bit that I’ve been actively studying them and reading blogs that incorporate them. And I guess because I’m primarily in this because I love publishing, much of the marketing and monetisation sides makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

Caroline Middleton hit a real nerve in a recent post when she said:

So much of Internet marketing gives me bad vibes. Facebook marketing, long sales letters, “the moneys is in the list”, sales funnels blah blah. When I was 19 I started a business - I provided a good service, I charged a fair price for it, everybody was happy. Simple. With the Internet good old fashioned business seems to have gone out of the window. It’s all sneaky, underhand, black hat these days and I’m just not interested in that.

I even left a comment on a follow up post:

Maybe a blog’s eventual integrity comes down to the driving motivation
behind the blog - is it to publish (and why not make money doing what
you love) or is it to purely to make money (through blogging because
hey, that’s where the money is).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people making money on the web. I’m not some naive romantic that believes that everything should be done freely - we all need to find a way of housing and feeding ourselves and why not do that through something I love? I personally would love to be able to earn enough through web publishing to support my family and my other goals in life. However, it is a question of value and trust.

For a blog to have integrity, it needs to attempt to provide genuine value and respect the trust readers give it.

And these two principles apply to more than blogs, it also applies to the email lists, the marketing and even the networking.

I could go on but I did want to get a non-diary post out today. It is definitely a topic that I will come back to.

Kitty