Technophobes Beware!

 This weeks post...by Jaye Marie
When I started blogging in 2012 to promote our books, I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Not for me, anyway. They made it sound easy. Just choose one, click here and there, and you’re up and running.To start with, choosing which one to go with was not that easy. I wanted our blog to look amazing, be simple to use and not cost anything.
I tried a few before I got to Blogger, the one run by Google. Most of them said they were easy, and they probably are for most people, but my little brain seems to have a glitch.I have always had this glitch. People will try to explain things to me, but there will always be at least one little detail, that if I understood it, would make the whole thing make sense of all the others. Sometimes, after many attempts, the penny will drop. Now and again, it will refuse and I will have to give up.
Fortunately, I did succeed in setting up our first blog. After many false starts and dummy runs, several layout changes and mucking about in general, we had ourselves a reasonably attractive website. Domain and all.  I thought that was all I had to do. I posted regularly, but they were short and amateur. No images, and precious little imagination.Well, in my defence, I was learning.
Now, some kind of communication is important for people like me, and before long, I realised that Blogger does not have the capability to answer any of my questions. You had to post your question to a forum and hope someone just like me had run up against the same problem and knew how to put it right.
This brings me to my other problem. Whenever I do ask for help, the answers are usually so technical they mean nothing to me.Just lately, much has been said about the importance of your email list. Now, because there was a subscribe button on our blog, I mistakenly thought we had the makings of one. But I don’t think I do.The one that comes with the Blogger package is something called Feedburner, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t do anything at all. There is no list, no information and no analytics. At this point, I wanted to run screaming and hide under the stairs. But, because I’m stubborn and want to succeed, I looked around for an alternative.Mailchimp or Eweber were recommended most strongly as being, wait for it… simple to use…blah, blah.
I spent an entire afternoon with Mailchimp, shredding my nerves and any patience I had left, and got precisely nowhere. To be fair, it all went well, until I tried to import any lists I might have had already. They found none. More than two years of blogging and not one name.That was when I think Mailchimp went off me. I tried to move on, as they said building a list was easy. All I had to do was copy and paste this code into my blog to install the subscribe button. You could then run a campaign to attract more subscribers. You know, free books and stuff. Sounded great, but when I tried to set this up, it refused, saying that I had no list to send campaign to. Duh? That was when I gave up; resigned to the fact I had probably gone as far as I could with my limited patience and brain capacity.Same old story really. Close, but no cigar.



sometimes I feel like this...

Now, I say I have given up, that the blog will have to do as is, but I know I will probably have another go, just to see if I can make it work. This is how I have ever gotten anywhere, but boy it gets me down sometimes.I should just retire for real and get out my knitting, but I know I’m not quite ready for that yet.
Well, not all the time anyway...