Editor’s Note: This is a direct follow up to my most recent post, Taking Over the Mean Streets of Tumblr, documenting my attempt to get my piece of the kimchi market pie. Actually, it’s probably more apt to say that I’m trying to expand the kimchi market and then promptly fill that need, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves, now isn’t it? If you feel like you need more back story as to how we got here in the first place, please see Epitaph, The Prissy Pet Project, and Cuckoo for Kimchi Puffs.
As always, it’s good to at least lightly refresh my Dear Readers as to what this whole kimchi/Tumblr pursuit is about.
If you have already the preceding post, you can skip this next bit, as I’m just repeating myself. If you haven’t read that post, and would like to, click here. To get those details without reading a whole ‘nother post, click below to expand that background info.
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One of the Four Pillars of Pointellism1I’m appropriating this term from the art community for my own purposes. Get over it. is to provide resources for people who are interested in non-traditional money-producing ventures, but don’t necessarily want to risk wasting their time and/or reputation in the process.
That’s where I swoop in, to investigate less-than-sure-bets and then expound upon my misadventures at medium length. Then the readers can decide whether or not such schemes are a good fit for them.
Currently I have been following a random online guide to making money via Tumblr.2Tumblr, a rather popular micro-blogging site
As a reminder here is the basic checklist of such schemes:3All screen shots should be assumed to be from https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/
The short version of this strategy is this:
- Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
- Using some automated tools to post ad infinitum, build up a critical amount of Tumblr followers (50+). Don’t bother with original content–just repost from other like-minded blogs.
- Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
- Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
- Profit.4To be clear, the profit is via a small commission of 2-7% for everything you sell via Amazon–it’s not actually your products in the store.
- Repeat Step 5 without lifting a finger.
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Journal Date: 29 November 2019 (Friday)
For a fuller description of my activity leading up and including this day, this was covered in my preceding post.
The short version, though, is that I had set up several days worth of automatic posts to my Tumblr blog, kimchiandketo, and with that rolling it was time to start making some internet friends, whom in turn I could try to get addicted to kimchi with me as their trusted supplier…
Journal Date: 30 November 2019 (Saturday)
Well, the next phase of my Tumblr/Amazon domination plan is to build a Tumblr following. Like most social media popularity contest games, this involves Liking/Following/Commenting/Reblogging, etc.
My Infallible Guide recommends using another automated online tool called TumblrJazz…but that costs $70 as well. There’s no way I’m going to be out $150 this quickly before I have more solid evidence this will be profitable. It’s not so much that I’m doubting Sifu Franklin’s holy money-making methods, it’s more that I pulled the kimchi idea out of my ass, and therefore my confidence in it’s marketability still needs to be proven.
As it turns out, all that doesn’t matter yet, because I ran into my first important lesson related to this project. You see, I had previously set up a prissypetproject Tumblr blog, and so when I went to try to set up kimchiandketo, they noted that my particular email already had a primary blog associated with it.
“But no problem!” they said. “You can set up all the secondary blogs you like!”
And that’s exactly what I did.
However, when I went to Like somebody else’s post (in hopes of them Following me), it would show up as “prissypetproject liked this post.”
The hell?!? Well, after about an hour of going in circles trying to figure out how to exclusively operate as kimchiandketo when Liking posts and such, I finally uncovered a very unpleasant truth: you can only Like/Follow/Comment and otherwise socially interact on Tumblr under the moniker of your primary blog.
No exceptions. No work-arounds. You’re just screwed if you want to do otherwise.
I’ll let a raw quote from my digital journal convey the je ne sais quoi5Yeah…that’s not what that really means… of that moment:
OH GODDAMMIT, I’ve been liking and following as prissypetproject instead of kimchiandketo. Need to redo all these…
My Evernote “Prissy Pet Project” journal
According to this article, all my hard work thus far is fucked.
I need my [kimchiandketo] blog to be the primary blog, and you can’t convert from secondary to primary–WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT.
Journal Date: 3 January 2020 (Friday)
Welp, it’s a new year, and I figured I might as well get around to taking a fresh crack at building a Tumblr brand (don’t want to leave my Dear Readers–and the Boss Lady–hanging too long).
As you can tell from above, I wasn’t too pleased with Tumblr’s asinine rules regarding secondary blogs being treated as second-class citizens…or more appropriately, non-citizens with very few basic rights.
The gap in activity on this project, however, was more due to the hectic holiday season rather than any feelings of ill-will and/or crushed spirits.
This time around I signed up with a virgin email address and staked my claim to kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com.
See what I did there? I added dashes in between the words, which is actually good for readability, but is a bit more cumbersome to verbally convey the address to a supposedly interested listener:
Yeah, you can check out my butt-health blog at ‘kimchi and keto’ on Tumblr–and that’s with dashes between ‘kimchi’ and ‘and’, and ‘and’ and ‘keto’.
Got it? Good!
That annoying guy who won’t shut the f*ck up about his blog
Also, as a programmer, I abhor dashes, eschewing them for the much more stable underscore (“_”) instead. But that’s another store that I don’t see to have any relation to what is happening here…pardon the digression.
The long and the short of it is that it took about 1 hour, 45 minutes to get back to the point where I was with kimchiandketo, with roughly the same design and posts in my Queue+ queue. Not too bad…
Journal Date: 4-18 January 2020 (Sat-Sat)
These past two weeks has been basically trying to come up with terms to search to find blogs/posts to Follow/Like/Reblog in hopes of steadily building up a following manually–screw TumblrJazz and their $70 ransom!
The game plan is to target an eclectic array of demographics who I think might be possibly converted to the Gospel of Kimchi:
- Foodies
- Hipsters
- People Who Often Diet and Love to Talk About It
- Fitness Buffs
- Wellness Buffs
- People Who Like to Cook
- People Susceptible to Fad Diets, and
- Gut Health Aficionados
For what it’s worth, here is just a sampling of some of the search terms I’ve come up with in my hunt for Tumblr amigos:
- Keto fitness
- Muscle-building recipes
- Fitness geek (erm, not the results I expected…)
- Kimchi
- Asian fitness
- Workout food
- Yoga diet/Yoga for dudes/Yoga fitness/Yoga recipes
- Qi gong
- Tai chi
- Wellness
- Healthy snack
- Nutrition
- Korean food
- Mindful eating
- Clean eating
- Mindfulness
- Gut health
…and more!
Not that I’m convinced that the following is the most efficient method, but my basic strategy has been to just run down rabbit hole after another of a reblogged post. By that I mean I will find a post that I think is somewhat on-brand, and then check out who inevitably reblogged it (an original post is a rare find around here). Then I will move on to the blog that they got the post from, and so on and so forth, potentially finding the original source at some point–though that’s not really important in and of itself here.
With each stop along this chain, I’ll try to scroll through that blog’s posts until I find something worth sharing on mine, then Liking that post, Reblogging that post, and then–now that they’ve been deemed worthy–Following the blog as a whole.
On occasion I will add in my own two cents of commentary when manually6In contrast to the bulk of my posts, which are being handled by Queue+ reblogging a post. Interestingly, I’ve found myself really reblogging only 3 types of posts:
1. Artistic pictures of fruits/veggies. Not sure why, but I have definitely noticed that these types of pictures get an insane amount of responses (“Notes” in Tumblr-speak)…like 10k-100k range. Gotta give the people what they want, I guess…and what the want is food porn,7No relation to sexual pornography. apparently:
2. Pictures of meals that are in desperate need of a side of kimchi:
3. And, for some reason, I think it’s humorous to pretend I have yoga ambitions (as indicated by adding the tag “#mangoals”):
Which, by the way, Assy McAsskins here leads me to another interesting point. People–mainly females–like to show off their booties in the fitness realm, so I actually have to actively work to minimize that type of content on my Tumblr. That’s not so much the image I’m aiming for.
However, once I get my ass in shape like that, I’m sure as shit going to be posting ironic recreations of such posts like you see above. I fancy myself humorous…but really I’m probably just bougie in that regard.
Journal Date: 18 January 2020 (Saturday)
Ass-bombing aside, I do need to figure out the magic formula for gaining users. Recall that 50 followers seems to be my main goal initially. I’m guessing that there’s some internal Tumblr algorithm that uses that as a threshold, and once over that it starts automatically recommending your blog to random passer-byes.
I took a few days to get the first few followers, but as of 13 January 2020 these were my Tumblr stats:
And by the time of this writing I was up to 17:
Also…that‘s my top post? Spinach butternut squash pasta? Whatevs, People of Tumblr, whatevs…
Okay, so back to trying to figure out how to reel in the critical Followers. Here’s what I was thinking (but yet another unproven theorem): who’s most likely to follow me? Probably someone just like me, newer to Tumblr and desperate for any Followers, and more than willing to engage in some good ol’ quid pro quo.8Don’t even act like you don’t know that means. Don’t even.
In other words, I should be preying on those thirstiest9I believe the youths use this as a synonym for someone desperately longing for something, such as dick. of us Tumblr citizens. At this point, I’ll spare you another litany of screenshots, so for those you who are actually reading this to inform their own Tumblr Takeovers, I hope your imaginations suffice.
The strategy: when I search for a particular term, instead of having the most popular posts pop up, I can select the most recent posts to appear. The key here is that it doesn’t do any good to follow an inactive blog–if the owner of the blog doesn’t pay it any attention any more, they won’t see that I’ve followed them and be inclined to follow me back. Plus, they would obviously be past the point of caring about how many Followers they have.
Ideally, I would Follow someone who would see it in relatively short order–within minutes to hours, preferably–and, in the heat of the moment say, “What the heck–you scratched my back, so I’ll go ahead and scratch yours” and Follow me out of the pursuit of our mutual benefit.
The second thing I would be looking for is posts with less than 20 Notes. In other words, not too many people have responded to that particular post yet. If I’m able to be one of the first people to appear to find value in another Tumblr’s post, that’s bound to earn me a lot more good will with them than, say, being the 23,119th person to Like that post. It’ll give me a chance to stand out enough to maybe get Followed by them.
Okay, so again, that’s my logic for going that route. I’ll need to get back to y’all about how effective that this actually turns out to be, or if I “sTumbl”10rim-shot upon a more efficient method.
One last important thing to note is that for the first few days of trying to gain followers, I would do it during what I would call official “work” time. This is time that I’ve been able to carve out and minimize the precious distractions, such as my darling daughters, and get the chance to focus on getting intense work done (this is typically after the girls have been put down for the night, in case you were wondering).
Each night it would eat up 30-45 minutes of valuable time in which I really needed to focus on other things, such as writing blog posts, arranging real estate transactions, or honing my web development skills.
Fortunately, I realized fairly quickly that using this work time for such games was going to make this whole endeavor a losing proposition. I would have to invest waaaay more time than would be worth it to get up to enough Followers to get this show on the road.
But I had a secondary Eureka moment: I can waste time with this Tumblr game that I’m already wasting elsewhere…namely when taking care of, er, bodily wastes. And riding the bus to/from my other day job. Sometime I need to do mindless stuff, and currently that stuff tends to be playing FreeCell on my phone. But of course, that is just time sucked into a black hole of No Return On Investment, so it makes sense to spend it doing something equally mindless, but at least moving my independent career forward, if possible.
So, yeaaaaaah…that’s where I am at right now with this project.
Though in a way, it’s sort of a dream job. Forget working from home–this Kimchi Kingpin is working from his throne.
After all, as our current president has so eloquently demonstrated, sometimes you only need a toilet and a smartphone to really change the world…
Content created on: 15/17/18 January 2020 (Wed/Fri/Sat).
Footnotes & References:
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