Any bloggers here willing to share some info and lessons learned?

[Desperado]

Hi everyone,

Following some introspection linked to my professional and personal paths a few months ago, I decided to start a blog to help me write on a regular basis, do something different than what I'm doing in my regular day job and use latent skills to, basically, avoid losing my soul and will to live due to the daily grind.

I'm not looking to sell anything or promote my competences or skills, just to post some thoughts on specific personal subjects, books that I've read, perhaps adding some short interviews down the line. I'm looking to add content every week or every other week.

I've already gotten some great advice from @overedge who gave me the idea for a copyright disclaimer and enlightened me about some WordPress.com aspects[big thanks again!] and I found some great basic information on this site: How To Make My Blog, but I thought it would be nice to have a forum to exchange ideas and experiences on the subject.

I'm particularly curious about the following:

• Which platform are you using? What have been its positive aspects and drawbacks for you? What have you chosen to pay for as an extra (ex. editing the code, premium themes, no ads options)?

• What was your main goal in starting a blog? Has it changed over time?

• Are you posting anonymously? How much personal information are you providing?

• How much interactions are you allowing on your pages?

• Have you had issues with online harassment and/or constant negative comments (trolling, etc.)? An acquaintance has modified the configuration of her site to only allow comments from people with a name and an email address and I hear spam is also an issue.

• If you had to do it all over again, is there anything you would do differently?

Any information would be appreciated - thanks in advance!

 

[kina]

Get used to zero for a while as in zero audience. It takes time to build an audience much less get the ire of some. Mostly you'll probably start with a tight knit community of like minded ppl once you get an audience. Spam comments are a real concern but WordPress and blogger can block them

I would also suggest that you find similar sites and post comments in a way that links back to your blog. Email them to see if you can collaboration or be featured once you build up you site and have content. Use their audience to help build yours and provide value to their audience too

More ideas to come. ...

 

[maatTheViking]

I have a baking blog I have not updated in a year and a half (since I went back to work).

I use wordpress - easy, professional looking layouts for free, possibly to move to own domain if I wanted as many hosting companies support wordpress. It is also highly programmable and customizable, and I considered expanding my skills (as a software developer) to include some wordpress programming, but I never got started and it wasn't necessary (from a career perspective).

My main goals for writing a blog was the following: Give me something to do while not working, and recording my favorite recipes and modifications. A secondary goal was to practice a bit of photography.

I don't provide my last name. I think my bio provides some basic information such as background and area. If you really tried you could probably find me, as the blog has a facebook page, and I think it is linked to my personal facebook.

For interactions, I allow comments and reposts and everything. I think I use wordpress default, which means I have to approve people once? Or maybe it just flags what it thinks is spam?

I have not have ANY issues with harassment or trolling - not on the blog or on the facebook page. I think I had a spam comment or 2. FWIW, the top commentator was my mom .

My main goal was never to attract readers, since that is VERY hard. That is why I didn't put that as a goal. However, if I were to do it again, I would probably try and be more active on social media. I would have a twitter and IG account in addition to the facebook page connected, and I would try to update with links to other blogs and food comments multiple times a day. I might even try to up my post schedule on the blog from twice a week to 3 times.
I did have the blog as a sig in my email and here on FSU when I was actively blogging.
I would also probably try and invest in a lightbox, to make my recipe picture pinterest worthy. Oh, and you need good props too for food photography.

I do wish I had time to write posts again. I really enjoyed it. My format limited me, I wanted to take a picture for every step in my baking - I think that made my blog unique, and helped with potential copyright issues for recipes (you can't copyright a recipe, but you can copyright how you write it out afaik). It also meant a lot of time consuming photoediting, even if all I usually did was correct white balance and crop.

If you want to take a look, the blog is here: https://morethandough.wordpress.com/

 

[kina]

okay.

(proud that i typed all that up on my cell)

okay ...

you may not want to sell things on your blog, but you might want to take the perspective of ppl who sell things via their sites.
take http://byregina.com

if you want to learn how to start your own side business and become informational entrepreneurs you turn to her site to learn the ins and the outs. she sells workshops, ebooks, and various things, but that's on the side. the main gist of her blog is to give you real, good, free info and when you want more, you turn to her products.

she also works hard to promote her blog on social media, making it picture friendly, making it pin friendly so people can pin things to pinterest and have it grow that way. it's a hustle and she does it well. i'm serious with the audience of zero. you'll have to work hard to build an audience even if you don't want to sell something. there's no fun writing to no one. (another idea is to join twitter and engage in twitter chats for your area, topic ... i always get lots of connections, more people to follow on twitter, more people to connect with and if i had a blog i cared about, more people to know about it)

now ... even if you don't want to sell via your site, create info that would be valuable to someone. i've heard it said that this isn't the age of sharing your inner most thoughts on social media or online. just like it's no longer the era were you made youtube video in your room, in the dark, with bad lighting. no youtube videos are professionally produced even if it's just yourself doing it. and when it comes to the blog, or website, you're not treating it like a diary. you're teaching and helping someone. where you were five years ago, you can talk about it and walk others through that phase. if i'm new to the topic of, let's say 19th century poetry and i was a former english major, how can i walk someone through it. how can i explain the poems so they could get it? how can i make the background vibrant? how can i connect it to the art we see today? you have to think about your reader and what they want. what is valuable to them.

have great pictures also. but respect copyright.

you can also set a calendar of posts ... plan out your posts for the next week or month. write stuff ahead of time and schedule posts. so, you can schedule a post for january 30 at 9 am. and when that exact time comes along, only then is it published.

and keep your blog organized (topics, themes, etc.)

hope that helps

 

[Spun Silver]

I'm not a blogger, yet, but I found myself being the audience of one recently simply because she wrote a post on an author I am interested in (that hardly anyone reads) and tagged it in such a way that it comes up in Google searches for that author. I have no idea how many readers she gets that way. To my disappointment, she doesn't seem ever to have posted on that author since, but for now at least I am still reading because I like the way she writes. I am learning a bit about Canada too. I'm linking her blog in case you want to see how she has set it up.

http://jamandidleness.com/2013/07/25/they-almost-understood-each-other-margaret-oliphants-hester/

 

[Simone411]

@maatTheViking I hope you don't mind, but I added a link to your blog, More Than Dough, to my "Chefs & Recipes" section on my Useful Sites page of my website. I added it around the beginning of last year, and I totally love it.

@Desperado I would love to add your blog when and if you decide to start one.

 

[kina]

nevermind

 

[KatieC]

@Desperado, to answer your question about a main goal in starting a blog, I was going back to Africa and instead of just writing emails, I wanted to show pictures too, so started a blog. It was the first time I took anything electronic with me, but I managed to download the blogspot app to my iPad and use it without too many issues. http://9845twentyseven.blogspot.ca/
It was definitely done for my friends and relatives, but apparently a lot of people from the Ukraine look at it, don't know why.
It changed the last time in 2014 because I decided to put in more photos, and less writing. Partly the old "a picture is worth a thousand words". Pictures of Victoria Falls in Zambia just didn't need a lot of words.
Please post a link to your blog when you get it going. I'd like to read it.

 

[TheGirlCanSkate]

I have several blogs, my most successful had 10000 hits a day. I thought it became less personal as I started to write what I thought people wanted to read. I became online buddies with several bloggers, 2 got books! But after 2 years I lost interest. It is in wordpress. I have others in bloggers but they were goal oriented and boring to anyone reading.

I never had ads, the more popular one was 8 years ago. I was anon aside from a couple friends but I had a photo.

Have fun and enjoy, it was good free Therapy for me at the time and made me very brave at trying new adventures.

 

[Desperado]

Thank you very much everyone!

 

[Desperado]

Hello again, here is my very modest attempt: https://experiencesbyjay.wordpress.com/ I plan to populate content every week or every other week in the future.

Have a great weekend everyone.

 

[Kasey]

Just dropped a follow on ya! I had a blog at "blog.com" for a while, but here were serious issues with their site being down, like most of the time! So I moved it to wordpress. It again, nothing for profit, nothing to advertise skills or anything like that; just musings and personal journalling about things in my life I guess. I have a few followers (those who are masochists for life-snark I think!), but readers are mostly friends and family. I don't know; I live alone and talking to cats, they don't always get your sense of humor!

 

[Desperado]

Thanks @Kasey! May I get your blog link? I've been investigating how to create a blogroll but I'm not there yet.

 

[Kasey]

lol, I'm so unsavvy, I have no idea what a "blogroll" is....sounds like a bakery item!