Matthew Gates 6m 1,474 #confessionsoftheprofessions
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
The Magic Behind The Scenes of the Confessions
Many of you might be wondering, or not, because you did not ask, but I will tell you anyway, how do I write so many articles for Confessions of the Professions?
I have a pretty active mind with too many thoughts. Whenever I have thoughts that sound interesting, I write them down. It might lead to something or it might lead to nothing. In any case, the goal of Confessions of the Professions is to confess. While I could sit around and wait or solicit professionals to confess, I typically just go ahead and write articles.
The original intentions of the website were to have just people confessing about how their jobs sucks or how great their jobs were, but I wanted this website to be more than just that. I wanted this website to be educational, informative, and entertaining. In order to make that happen, the introduction of articles, infographics, and ebooks were added with other interesting aspects of the confessions added as well.
I am probably not your typical professional. I wear business causal clothes to work and when I get home, I slip out of my shoes and strip down to shorts and a t-shirt in order to feel comfortable again. But hey, I have a lot of information to share, a lot of ideas, and that is what makes this website work. It keeps you coming back, doesn’t it? There is something going on almost every business day of the week.
Of course, there are a lot of other people who contribute to this website and make it work, and for that, I really appreciate you submitting your articles, your confessions, your infographics, and your ideas. Without you, this website would have never had the success it has today. For that, I am truly thankful, grateful, and so appreciative.
If I could afford to pay you, I would, but I am limited to just continuing Confessions of the Professions for as long as I, you, we, can go – so that everything I, you, we do to contribute to this website is exposed and easily discovered by those searching for it, especially through search engines.
So how is an article, confession, or infographic written for Confessions of the Professions? Months in advance, actually. Yes, what you see now – this article – was already written months ago, and is just being published now. Hardly ever is an article written and published immediately, except those who contribute that are not me. Any contributor that submits their article, confession, or infographic to this website and has met the criteria is normally published within a week or two.
There are plenty of people who suggest articles, ebooks, or infographics, but supply no supporting content for them, and thus, I eventually have to be the one to research and learn about those provided suggestions and turn them into my own ideas and my own words, which delay their publication for over a month. The policy on Confessions of the Professions is that we always like to provide supporting documentation that introduces an infographic or ebook. A picture is worth a thousand words to the human eye, but to a search engine, a picture is just a picture, and can hardly be found. By providing supporting text to introduce an infographic or ebook, we are pushing for that infographic to be discovered more easily.
There is actually a backlog of about 100 articles waiting to be published, mostly all of them have been written by me. I think up an idea, a category, or just observe something that happened at work, or recall something that happened at work in the past at my current job or a former job, and I write about it almost immediately or within a week of thinking about it. I may jot down just a few notes about what I want to write about, and I eventually just put those few ideas into a few paragraphs and tell my story or tell enough to get my point across. It then gets submitted to the website where it sits as Pending until I get around to it and review it.
Once I review it, I optimize it for SEO, write an appropriate URL, fix my spelling or paragraph mistakes, and tweak it if necessary to make it sound even better, then I find a Featured Image, along with any other images I want to include, and then I set it as a Draft. After it is set to Draft, it is then put into an area where all articles are awaiting to be published on a pre-determined date.
It takes time to figure out which articles I would like published and when, though there really is no order. Lately, I have tried to mix it up, so you – the visitors, readers, fans, and lovers of the Confessions – get variety – an infographic, an ebook, an article, and a confession at least every week. Once the date comes up for it to be released, I try to review it by re-reading it once more to make sure it make sense and re-write any sentences or paragraphs that may sound like gibberish, and after that, it is finally published.
There is no more publishing on weekends and no publishing on holidays in order to maintain a basic “work schedule” according to when the majority of people work and when Confessions of the Professions would publish articles. While Confessions of the Professions is not my job and is just a hobby, a passion, a platform for my thoughts, and a learning experience, it gives me the comfort in knowing I have off – it is time I do not need to be thinking about getting this or that article published, though I may still may write articles.
While the reader base does not decrease at all on the weekends, and in fact, only seems to increase — I figured it was more beneficial for readers to play catch up of all confessions and articles on the weekend. It also makes it easier for me to keep providing unique high quality articles to you and keep up with having content to produce. And to do that, I cannot produce an article every single day of the week. I still am delivering five article confessions per week, which is still a lot for most any website.
No one ever demands of me to publish articles, but I love this website as much as my fans do. It is my passion to continue it and learn from it as well. The skills I learn are anything from web design, writing, psychology, or just critical thinking skills in general. In the farther future, when I run out of ideas, or people stop submitting their own confessions and articles to this website, I will drop it down a few articles per week. In the meantime, I am not worried about it, as I write many articles in advance covering an assortment of topics for jobs, careers, and the workplace and extended to finances, living situation, college and university life, and eventually even going into healthy eating habits and healthy lifestyles.
The ideas for Confessions of the Professions are endless, and if you are in it for the long haul and continue coming back, I am certainly in it for the long haul, always trying to make things exciting. Even if you are not, I think Google loves this website, and I certainly love Google for loving it because that is where a majority of you are discovering Confessions of the Professions for the first time. Hopefully, it is never your last time.
You have over a year worth of articles to catch up on, and most of them are evergreen, meaning that the information rarely expires. There is no set expiration time, date, or year on them, because the information is always fresh and new. There are a few articles you could say are slightly outdated but the majority of them are as important and fresh now as they were when they were published.
I really appreciate your support, your visitation, and everything you do to help make this website a success. The fact that you keep reading makes me want to keep writing. I wish you would be more interactive and comment more often on these articles, but I never solicit comments from you, as I know either you agree with me or you don’t. But I figure your true comments come in the fact that most of you are sharing these confessions and articles with your friends and family and your followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and Pinterest, and again — I appreciate it!
Thank you for loving Confessions of the Professions as much as I do!
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