For the last week and a half I have been participating in a Blogging Mentorship program. I signed up for a couple of reasons – one being that I knew I needed to do something to bring order to my blog again, which has become a messy resemblance of my son’s room with dirty laundry, lego, books and everything else casually and chaotically strewn across the floor. The other reason is to see if monetizing my blog is a realistic opportunity. Secondary to this, I also want to drive people to my Photography and Design services. I decided to give it all I have for the duration of the course and see where it gets me. In the past ten days, I have learned a lot and some of the things I knew about social media but was afraid to embrace were affirmed. It has also been a very humbling experience in that within the group of participating bloggers you have everything from totally fresh bloggers with not a follower to start to social media experts with tens of thousands of followers. Part of a business (which is what I consider my blog in part) is tracking success and failures.
Here is where I am at after ten days:
- I was affirmed that gaining followers (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook -these are linked so you can go ahead and follow me) is not narcissistic but a way of building my business. If I want to be attractive to companies as an influencer, I need to have influence, which means followers. This past week, my twitter followers are up by 52, FB by 7 and Instagram by about 10. Not bad, not great either.
- I need to learn to leverage SEO to direct people to my site. I know how to optimize SEO for a static site. I build sites often for outside organizations but I had never given it much thought for each and every post. So a huge task at hand is going through my 8 years of posts, filtering out the ones I am not so proud of and re-categorizing and implementing SEO for the ones I want to keep. The switch from Blogger to WordPress has made this agonizing.
- Social Media posting is an important component. I need to. I need to engage my readers more and post more often. This will take some practice.
- I need to pay attention to analytics. I don’t post as often as I like which means that I don’t have a lot of traffic. Right now I am at about 5K views a month with only 1K of those being unique visitors. At the height of my blogging, I was at 20K a month. I would like to get back to that.
- Finally, I am still convicted that this is a special place and while I would like to earn some money from blogging, I need to keep it authentic because that is what brought my readers here in the first place and what will keep them coming back.
How about you? Are you a blogger? What are your goals and how is your progress measuring up? I would love to hear how others are doing.
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5 Comments
Great post Krista! Thrilled that you joined us in the class!
This is fantastic if you are using it as also a business. I hope it works for you!
I am the opposite…If my stats get too high on google analytics I stop blogging for awhile. I also have moved blogs 4 times due to privacy concerns and issues…which begs the question- why do I blog? I mostly blog for myself…to get out thoughts into the proverbial outer world and sometimes to hash out issues or simply be authentically me…I however, I remain public instead of private because I do value the comments that add a voice or differing perspective at times…it helps balance I feel in general…and also because in the initial blogging days when I was blogging more to blog I met six friends that are still part of my core group today. That was invaluable…and still I have added two more that I occasionally email. It’s my only social media to connect that way so at times I still use it that way…but on and off I DO still debate taking it down or moving it and maybe I will again. I share a lot but am also paradoxically one of the most private people. I share things that I feel are not part of my inner private person as I have a lot of layers…so in a weird way I am very transparent but also super private…so that is my blogging history and my only hopes for myself is that I continue to find myself and perhaps one or two more life changing people that are like me…as that is rare and the blog is the only place I have found my like minded friends…
I hope you can meet your goals for your family! I will try to hit up this space more to give you more hits…:)
Oh I also forgot the most important factor for me probably has to do with my INFJ counsellor persona. I feel most of my experiences are different from most that I know. If I blog about them, my hope is that one person who may feel otherwise isolated or those that are different will feel validation, feel confidence in who they are or begin to understand themselves through my personal understanding, or just feel less odd. I want people to find that balance of self confidence and self questioning…but mostly I just feel if there is one person who had less of a support than I did, that they may need to know its going to be ok and choosing counter cultural states or making decisions that seem of the minority can also mean a beautiful life too. I guess that is why I love blogging more than any other social media…it feels that a difference can be made in just one post to myself or people I love or a stranger who may need those words but can not find them in their circles.:) You probably know what I mean in a sense as you participate in a lot of advocacy which used to be my focus but is not as much now but I still love the aspect of helping people including self…And the people who are not helped or annoyed can simply click off my pages:) it’s a win win:)
This is it: “If I blog about them, my hope is that one person who may feel otherwise isolated or those that are different will feel validation, feel confidence in who they are or begin to understand themselves through my personal understanding, or just feel less odd.” This is totally why I blog. This space has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, it was for me – a place to process. Sometimes, it was for others. I hope to find a balance in this. Know that I appreciate that you comment 🙂
Thank you:) yea…it does ebb and flow for me too…part of the beauty 🙂