Comment by EvaPeron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvaPeron | Hacker News Reader

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I feel your pain also as someone who is often called "talented" but seems to not quite be able to work corporate politics enough to land very overdue promotions. Unfortunately the IT field seems like any other field - talent is one thing, but "playing the game" also is needed, something to this day I neither relish nor do particularly well, not seeming to have the stomach for it. If there is one thing I could proffer by way of advise (at the risk of blind leading the blind, ha) - doing websites/IT work for friends / family on a contract basis I do from time to time to try and cover over some financial rough spots - i.e. just charge a flat hourly rate (say, $50/hr) to help with somebody's website/LAN issue/what-have-you. Needless to say the blogosphere, so-called, is saturated, so it is more difficult than ever to "monetize" any site, however good. So just going the route of saying, hey, I'll do your website for you for X amount per hour is at least one way of raking in some dough, speaking from personal experience. As Socrates might tell one, sometimes being smart is not enough to get around political bullcrap, sometimes the smart folks end up with the hemlock. :-) So from personal experience I really feel where you are coming from. So best thing I can say is while it is good to continue to think long-term of how to monetize your sites and so on, for short-term pain, one might want to think of doing individual contract type of projects, to sort of tied one over the hump as it were, something I have done more than once. Good luck.

Thanks. I am not an IT professional. I am someone who got myself well against long odds and is viewed as either a great inspiration or a chatlatan. I am someone who raised two very challengin children and whose advice was valued by Harvard graduates and similar ilk when I was able to help them deal with their kids, sometimes after all kinds of paid professionals failed them. I write. People send me emails and gush at me about how wonderful my writing is and all this crap. I find out later that they are big names, in the news, etc. Every last one of them refuses to promote my work. They tell me it is amazing, awesome, their life is so much better for knowing me etc etc. None of them will tweet about it, blog about, and so on. I have asked. I have been pissed on for asking. If I named names, you would likely recognize some of them. If I do, I am cutting my own throat. If I don't, I am viewed as a delusional egomaniac and teller of tall tales. If half the people who gushed at me promoted me eben once, I would have traffic, probably of the kind that crashes servers. Instead, I get called a troll for trying to figure how to get money out of something which ckearly has value to people. It is extremely crazymaking and at the moment I am pretty goddamned bitter about it.

But thank you for the feedback.

Have you tried any other forms of traffic building than asking for someone to spread your name? If you're as good as you say you are (I've never read your writing) then I would try getting a guest spot to blog on large parenting and family blogs, the type that gets thousands or tens of thousands of hits per day. Try getting in touch with bloggers for these types of sites, or the people that run the site, and point them back to your blogs. Tell them that you're interested in guest writing blog posts for them.

That should get you some good traffic if you could pull that off with a few big blogs.

Don't rely on word of mouth advertising, go out there and research alternatives that may be more attainable to you.

I hope you find something that works.

I am trying to figure it out and work on it. I am getting some increase in traffic but a lot of the things people suggest do not really work. Someone suggested I do an AMA on Reddit. I did. It was largely ignored. Promoting myself in the ways people suggest seems to never work out. I mostly have not asked these people to promote me but when I have I get told that even if they found my writing personally life changing, they say "but it has no commercial value" and then refuse to help me turn it into something with commercial value..and so on. So amazing people with connections etc. tell me I am amazing and made their life better but bite me bitch if you want anything in return. Um, what? WTF???? It makes me crazy. Then if I try to talk about my frustration, other people say I am delusional and egomaniacal. Can I gnaw my left arm off and escape this trap already?

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