The Two-Year Anniversary

Today is the two-year anniversary here at Random Human Neural Firings. If you've joined us for the first time over the past year, during the one-year anniversary I told how this blog came to be. So if you're interested.

The part that's important here is that it was created as an attempt to build a profile to try and get into professional journalism. Part of that involves writing quality pieces. I'm doing the best I can on that front; whether I'm good enough is really up to you. The other part of that, though, is getting that writing in front of the people who make such decisions.

There, I'm going to admit that I don't know enough about what I'm doing. It's frustrating. I have a marketing degree and yet I can't seem to market myself for some reason. The most I typically seem to be able to accomplish as far as getting links out there involves waiting for someone to bring up a topic that I've already covered at some point in greater detail, linking to the article in question as part of a response, and I get a couple extra hits that way. Submitting to larger places, I don't ever get responses, I don't know if I'm presenting the links to them correctly, I don't even know if, through the hit-counter statistics, the link has even been clicked.

The other thing is, with the soccer book also being worked on, I'm noticing that I'm not accomplishing as much marketing as I could be doing. When I get the blog post done for the day, I typically pivot straight to the book, as if to say 'okay, that piece of writing's done, now quickly on to the next piece of writing'. It's not a total waste- I am still getting book work in- but it's still a failing of mine on that front, and I need to figure out how to fix it.

That mea culpa accomplished, as with last year, what I'm going to do is provide links to what I consider to be my ten best articles over the past year, in chronological order. They are as follows:

2/14/11- The Arab World: What Next?
3/23/11- The Famewhore Experiment
4/29/11- The Tinkerbell Effect
6/8/11- Capped
7/1/11- The First Professional Wrestler
8/21/11- Stop Reading Chain Letters, Seriously, Come On
9/7/11- One Wonders How Dad Stays Rich
9/24/11- Skid Row, and Skid Row Lite
12/1/11- Getting Tough On 'Tough'
12/21/11- The Spurious French Connection