 When you have a blog or online publication, do you really need to be on social media? What's happening? njroot22.com here with another vlog. It's sort of a general interest and it's sort of related to our industry. We make videos and we have a blog where we talk about things. Now, I should set this up a little background. You know, back in the day about, say, 15 years ago, all you need to get found online was a good website with some basic setup. You know, people searching for content would look online and almost always find the right fit. I can certainly recall feeling most results typically led us to like something that we wanted to find. It was helpful. Today a lot has changed. Not only do big content providers get the top few pages on searches, but social media seems to play a role too. They're always there. Less people are also searching the web, I guess Google, than using one of their social media sites to find content that they're interested in. The way the internet is being used these days has definitely changed a lot in the last 15 years. And so has everybody else's general mindset. Not many people gravitate towards ideas and general interest topics anymore. It's like trending things and they click charts and they wanna know what everybody else is talking about. It's something's happening at a very rapid rate here. To get ahead these days, you have to have some sort of schtick, some sort of weird schtick. You can't just talk about basic human ideas. And most of the time it's purely for entertainment purposes or to sell you something. It's like where is this organic learning, the real learning, not learning to make your body look better or other ego boosting things. You can't just sell friendly content anymore or attract people. But the remaining sites that do survive usually do so because they've been established for a very long time and had the time to develop a following back then when people could find you. And these days newer sites that do get traction usually do so because they have big financial budgets and known endorsements that are usually paid. In other words, they get a head start. Normal people like us who strive to build even a small following of like-minded people have to do it organically. And even then getting people to find you is very brutal work. It's almost nonstop marketing of yourself. And it takes a lot of time away from actual content creation and coming up with ideas. But what else can I say? So I guess the big question is here, how does social media help a blog and a vlog? Now we've been struggling with this idea that social media is even necessary. In the beginning, we tried hard and used major sites such as Facebook pages, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And the weird thing is that our biggest success was on Instagram. I don't know, we had 2,500 followers but it does nothing for websites and vlogs like ours. Because you get zero traffic from them. Unless they go out of their way, click your profile, find your link and then even then it's not a link to the article that you posted on Instagram. We think that Instagram only benefits inflores who get paid to promote products or established businesses that have brick and mortar locations and all people really need to know is the address that in your hours. It's like a big flea market for attention and money. On the other hand, YouTube is getting better for us as we're approaching a whopping 200 subscribers which is pretty good for someone who hasn't paid a dime to market. The funny thing is though, that our highest performing videos were ones we made on a whim. Like how to fix a laundry dryer. I have the, it's my biggest traffic get. I just filmed it like in poor quality. And I guess people want to know about that dryer. And as you know, most people don't try to figure things out for themselves anymore. They instantly go to YouTube for answers. But our conceptual videos like videos about healthy living and even fun videos like booze aren't doing nearly as well. We're growing slowly and that's a good thing. It's in the right direction at least. But as far as we can see, sending out tweets and other social media updates have done nothing for us. And we were very good with our usage. We were sending out 20 messages a day across those platforms. That's amazing for three years. And if those social media platforms did start picking up traction and started commenting, I don't even know if I would have the time to comment to everybody and ban people and do all this other stuff. It's like, you need, that's why these people have separate social media staffs at these businesses. We like spending our time creating not chit chatting with readers. I don't mind talking with the readers on YouTube for instance, because they have honest questions or decent constructive feedback. This past January, we stopped posting updates to pretty much all those channels. I think we have to Facebook and Twitter just to get the word out with the weird chance because those channels at least let you post a link to your website. And we were lucky by the way, we had an auto posting service that we just typed in our stuff on WordPress and it just sent out everything automatically for us. Not just once, but a day later, a week later and a month later and it did not work. Additionally, we have shifted our blog posts from seven posts a week down to three and it's just video for now because this whole big crisis that's happened in the past year has made it very difficult and unpleasant to go to various businesses and other fun places in New Jersey to tell everybody about it. Because I don't wanna tell people about mandates and regulations and what kind of rules they have. I'll never submit to them anyway so that's why we're not gonna talk about it. So while our site is headquartered in central New Jersey, we've kinda morphed into this video only publication for now. It's Low Carb Sundays, Carnivore Sundays. We have general interest stuff on Wednesdays where anything goes. And then I try to either do booze reviews or back in the day I would do local retail updates whether it's supermarkets or shopping centers. We forgot to tell everybody that Phillipsburg Mall is gonna be gone by June or July. It's a shame that you can't be a creator with fun ideas anymore and gain a respectable following in a short amount of time. One theory is that the market has become too saturated and the public's attention span has been divided into a billion pieces. And of course the natural phenomenon as well is that people are attracted to nonsense like bread and circus type material. Celebrities, sports, material and superficial things, ego driven things. You just can't be a jack of trades anymore. You have to be entirely niche oriented which is not easy for everyone. That is why it's harder than ever to get a YouTube channel into monetization. You either have to be a prolific filmmaker with more than ample time to create or have a very popular niche that you have a huge passion for and you have to have the personality and knowledge to back it up. Maybe the whole thing is rigged to some green. Maybe the people that make it are somehow connected to other people who are connected to the right people in the industry. I don't know. All we know is after three years of dedication and hard work it hasn't shown us many noticeable dividends. But the good thing is we will keep on keeping on as they say in that popular meme. As I saw back when Twitter started onto the scene we didn't like that form of communication and we still feel the same way. Really, I don't talk to my friends or anybody else on Twitter or other social media sites. It's almost like it's too much information. If you step back and see what it is it's the equivalent of like static in the air but people are paying attention to it. Gossip at mock speed. We're gonna try some other methods. I'm not too optimistic about it. There's just too many people that are stuck in the ghetto of the internet. The way humanity and developed nations has changed so dramatically in just the past couple of decades it has us a little worried. There has to be a better way to put our minds to use without social media.