I LOVE blogging! I love blogging more and more every day! When I read things on other people’s blog that make me feel less alone, when I see pictures of their travels and can feel like I also went there with them. I love it when I see people commenting on my blog and actually enjoying what I have written or my photographs. I like to get a dialogue started and love to get inspiration from people all over the world.
But blogging is HARD!
There are just so many things I didn’t expect when I started blogging. When I had my previous blog, My Scottish Adventure, I wrote, added pictures and that’s about it. I never really did anything more. I’m pretty sure only my parents and a few of the family friends read the blog and so it was enough.
Then, earlier this year, I started this blog and a few weeks in, I got serious about it. I wanted people to read it. I wanted it to look like all the blogs I loved so much, and at the same time I wanted it to look like me. I wanted it to be like a piece of me I put out there, in a corner of the Interweb.
There is lots to think about when you blog:
– Getting involved. It is all about creating a conversation with other bloggers! Getting involved in the link ups and blog hops and spreading the love! I didn’t realise that at the beginning, but it’s so obvious! If you don’t get involve or if you don’t put yourself out there, how will people know about your little corner of the web?
– Being social media savvy. Oh gosh, that one I’m still having issues with! Not only do you have to blog, but social media seems to be absolutely necessary! It really is a great way to reach more and more people, but sometimes it gets tedious to have to manage like a 100 things at once. It’s instagramming the crap out of all your pictures (thanks to whoever told me to send myself pictures from my computer to my mobile!). I connected my site to my Twitter so it posts automatically, but I do try to go on it every day or so to check out what’s new and see if there is anyways to start a dialogue with anyone (a girl can hope!). It’s pinning all kinds of inspirational pictures about crazy and unrealistic hairstyle, DIY’s and projects, on Pinterest! It’s managing a Facebook page, which I thought would be easy because I’m on FB everyday, but it’s a bit more than that!
– Stats. One word, and yet the most stressful thing. I’ve become obsessed! I have to admit, I have become a statistic monster. I refresh my stats page every hour or so. I just love to know what reached my readers, what interested them, where they came from. It just kills me that I can’t add google analytics for it to help me figure out how to better reach and talk to my readers!
– Trying to figure out the WordPress maze. Arrrg the nightmares I got from switching to WordPress, after my last blog was on Blogger. I didn’t do much research, except that I thought the whole look was a lot more professional on WordPress. However, there are lots of things you can’t do on WordPress but that you can do on Blogger and that kills me! I can’t add Disqus? I can’t add Google Analytics? Whaaat? Why can’t I change the damn font?? Anyhow, it is needless to say that I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out the layout, the widgets, the different ways to customise and all that without spending the money WordPress seems adamant I spend! Also I got so confused with the whole buying a domain name VS being self-hosted! My bad! I’ll probably take the leap later in the year, but for now I’m happy to just make the most of what I have!
– Creating buttons. That one was a problematic one for me. I went on SITS and saw their tutorial which totally didn’t work for me, even after I copy-pasted from the site! It took lots of research to finally find a site that explained very clearly and that also gave a link to a code generator website. It finally worked!
– Photography. Photography is absolutely necessary! I mean people are visual, right? When I look at other people’s blogs, I know that sometimes I’ll be charmed in an instant just by their pictures (and let’s be honest, I can’t be the only one who scrolls, right?). The one problem about blogging about travels and moments that have already passed is that my photography sometimes doesn’t show exactly what I wished to share on my blog. I write a piece about a certain day during my trip to South Africa or France, and I’m like ‘Damn you past-Camila! Why didn’t you take a picture of this one particular thing! It would have been brilliant!’
– Time management. Trying to find the time to blog when you work 60 hours a week is definitely a hard task. Now that I’m off of work it’s less so. I take time every day to improve my blog and write a lot. I love scheduling post so I don’t have too much stress, but it means some days I blog a lot!! I blog an average of 15-25 hours a week right now and think about it almost constantly. I mean every thing I have just mentioned before takes a lot of time!
– Consistency & Content: This one is simple. Content is the key to a good blog. At first, I found it difficult to find new post ideas, because I was trying to be like everyone else. It didn’t work for me. When I finally started to follow my heart, it became easy! And it’s good to be consistent! If you don’t post, there won’t be traffic.
Did this turn into a rant? …oops, sorry!
Do you find certain blog-related things hard? Did it take you a while to learn about all those things? xx
