Do I want a successful blog? Well, that depends on what one considers success. I can’t define that for the rest of society. I can define it for me. Do I want people to come to and read my blog and come back again? Yeeeaah. Do I want to make money from my blog? Inadvertently, by it’s content having people want to experience my work with animals. Is making money it’s primary purpose? Nope. One very well meaning offer (I hope he knows who he is, GJ, as this is not pointed at him) and several not so well meaning consisted of outside writers providing content based on SEO search terms so that I could have one, two and in one instance three posts to my blog, daily (I know I’m new to all this and some of you probably use such services with great success – by your definition – no harm, no foul), as well as provide other materials to gain email addresses and maybe even make some money just from this content. I asked, each time, how many of these writers had ever had a telepathic conversation with a companion animal so as to write this content from my POV. Can you guess the answers to that query? Do I want to chuck my blog full of heartless/mindless posts, white papers, ebooks and videos with little to no purpose just to drive traffic? Eeeeeeck, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve come up against this before with my website. I was told over and over again that it’s too wordy to keep the short attention span of the masses, formatted too poorly to achieve great SEO, over the heads of the majority of people surfing the web (really, are we all really that dumb? PLEASE . . .), etc., etc. You know what, I don’t care. I have a point of view and, I believe, an important message, information that can create really wonderful change. And, that’s shown to me regularly. Every other month or so, I get an email from someone, so impacted by what they’ve found on my site, it has changed how they look at their animal companions and animals in general, forever. Bingo, mission accomplished. Every single one of those emails is heartfelt and deeply touching and I don’t mind if it’s one person at a time. If I had to choose, I’d rather have those emails than a 100 tweets for my blog title today or my site listed on page 1 of google.

Do I have to choose? Who says I can’t have it all while keeping true to my path, my purpose and my voice. I firmly believe what you think you create. I believe it’s possible to do this in my own manner and still have the kind of web success I want. Which might not be your kind of web success. And yeah, be on page 1 on google and have 100 tweets, or not, for my blog without having to conform to the status quo. It’s similar to what I tell clients is a big part of the puzzle when embarking on what I term as the new paradigm or “being different” where the care, treatment and approach to life with our animals is concerned. More on that in another blog, maybe . . . In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

“We must honor our dragons, encourage them to be worthy destroyers, expect they’ll strive to cut us down. It is their duty to ridicule us, it is their job to demean us, to force us, if they can, to STOP BEING DIFFERENT! And when we walk our way no matter their fire and their fury, our dragons shrug when we’re out of sight and return to their card game philosophical: ‘Ah well, we can’t toast ‘em all . . .’ ”

— Richard Bach, RUNNING FROM SAFETY

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