5 Tips for Bloggers

15 January 2012 By 8 Comments

Picture from Cute Little Factory

I’m starting the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge over at the Sits Girls tomorrow (click the coloured bit for the link).  I’ve had a bit of a go at it before, and the book that it’s based on is superb.

But some of our best learning always comes from experience and this blog’s almost a year old so I guess it’s a good time to put a few tips down for people who’ve started recently.

I’ve done a couple of similar things before, but I’m learning all the time.  And, on a similar note, I don’t claim to be perfect at keeping to any of these tips myself.

 

- Create an ‘About Me’ page that tells us something about you.  I love to know who I’m reading about.  I think that a good ‘About Me’ page gives us a bit of background, an introduction to the main characters and a few hints of what we can expect as readers.

- Make it as easy as possible to comment. Both Blogger and wordpress.com allow the blogger to set their commenting options. Assuming that comments are important to you, set it so that anyone can comment. Spam filters reject most of the dodgy stuff, or you can manually approve comments once they’re made if you want to be totally sure that nothing gets through.

- Get involved across different groups sites and communities, including with people outside your normal niche. There are lots of lovely prompt sites and linkups out there, and once you’ve written your post there’s usually a linky to share it on and bring some new readers to your blog. I also love having twitter and pinterest as additional strands for my blogging.

- Never go anywhere without something to write on and something to take photos with. Even if that’s the back of a couple of receipts and the phone on your camera. If your memory’s anything like mine, you’ll need to write things down as they come to you rather than waiting till you’re home.

- Don’t keep a blog if you don’t enjoy doing it, and don’t write any pieces that don’t interest you. One of my greatest surprises this year has been the whole theme of monetising, PR relationships and being given samples for review. I’ve really enjoyed the times that I’ve worked with brands this year, but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.

 

These tips were written for this week’s Listography over at Kate Takes 5; the theme was “Top 5 Tips for Bloggers”. Click on Kate’s link below to find the other contributions.

Filed Under: Blogging and Writing, Prompts

My Posts of the Year

31 December 2011 By 1 Comment

It feels a bit self-indulgent to be picking out lots of my own pieces to mark the year, but doing just that is one of Mama Kat’s prompts for this week so I kind of had to join in.

I bought this domain name on New Years Eve last year, although I didn’ t make any use of it until a few months later. Starting to blog again was one of my big resolutions, and one of the very few that I’ve ever managed to stick with. I’m so grateful for all of the support that I’ve had this year – the online social communities are some of the warmest and most encouraging places I’ve hung around in.

Blogging’s also helped me to see my world differently. I look for humour and fun in things more than I used to, and I encounter so many other people doing the same. I think creativity’s there for all of us if we just open our eyes to it.

 

These are my picks of the posts that I’ve most enjoyed writing, and in some cases putting together pictures for. Some are just moments in my life, and others are reflections on the whole of it.

 

When I first started blogging here, it was kind of a little secret thing that I did on my own. Mike knew about it but didn’t really get involved.  The day that we made Sticky 5-Spice Gammon together was one of the first times that I’d enlisted him to help something for the blog.

We’ve had loads of fabulous days out this year; we’ve been to lots of new places in search of new experiences (and new photographs), and one of our favourite new finds was the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This post was a bit of a whistle-stop tour after our first visit. We’ve learned now that it’s better to take it easy and meander around a small part of the park more slowly. There are still bits that we’ve not seen, and pieces change all the time.  There are some more posts and pictures of our visits here.

I don’t do a lot of sponsored posts, but when I was asked to do one about baking it was a perfect excuse to make some gingerbread men – Mike had been asking me to have a go for ages. They were great fun to make, but we definitely overdid it a bit – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many gingerbread men in one place.

 

I’ve always been a ponderous and nostalgic person, and blogging’s encouraged that side of me lots this year. It seems silly to call “Where I’m From” a meme because it was far more than that, but it had lots of us joining in and seems to be a pretty established writing exercise.  I love it – I loved writing mine, and I loved reading others from across the world and seeing how closely our memories connect to each other, wherever we are.

Nowhere’s encouraged my sentimental side more than in taking part in some of the weekly RememberRed prompts on Write on Edge, a gorgeous community of bloggers and writers.  When they asked us to write about a season of change in the first week of September, I wrote a piece about myself and my school friends turning 40 this year.

I loved writing about the Class of 1988 the most out of everything I’ve written this year, I think.

And it turned out that turning 40 wasn’t so bad after all.

Filed Under: Blogging and Writing, Nostalgia

My Quiet Place

22 November 2011 By 12 Comments

I don’t have one particular quiet place any more. I have a little office at home, but it’s become messy and in need of a good tidy and I’ve lost the ability to concentrate in there any more.

Most of my other places are places that I share with Mike.

 

 

I sometimes crave having somewhere; an attic covered in theatre posters and arty undefinable sculptures, or a study overlooking the sea.

I imagine somewhere where writing would come easily and ideas would present themselves to me neatly, one arriving gently as I finished work on the one before.

 

My real quiet place is something I can create pretty much anywhere, though. With my legs curled in front of me and something I can write on fitting on my lap. That can be sitting on the bed in the middle of a weekend afternoon or finding an empty table on a long train journey. Sometimes, I sit on the sofa way after bedtime, writing under the only light in the house still burning.

In those places, I can let myself ponder slowly through yesterday and start to make plans for tomorrow. I can reflect slowly on things that had moved too quickly the first time I experienced them.

I can go back through my more distant history and use those times to create new words.

But it’s a place that I’ve learned to create inside my own personal space. Writing within the comfort of being curved into a corner, my face mostly looking at the page or the screen but occasionally looking up and around the room at everything that’s there but not really seeing anything.

From the haze of an imagination that’s as excitable now as it was when I was eight years old – so long as I give it the quiet space and the empty time that I need to get there.

 

This post is for this week’s RemembeRED prompt over on Write On Edge, one of my favourite creative writing communities. The brief was to write about our quiet places.

Filed Under: Blogging and Writing, Prompts

Blogging and Anonymity

17 August 2011 By Leave a Comment

Anonymity and the internet used to be perfect partners. Or at least we felt that way. This used to be the place that we’d come to hide, to express things that would previously have been confined to a secret diary.

We used pseudonyms, and every so often there’d be a bit of a rumble through blogland as another name was cracked and a marriage or – more commonly – a career cracked with it.

It was probably Facebook that changed all that and made it perfectly normal to start posting some remarkably personal information fairly publicly.

Somewhere within that revolution that brought everyone online, secret blogging seems to have become less common and blogs – certainly those that I read – have become much more open.

I really struggled with that at first. My ordinary name is very English but also very unusual, and I really didn’t want to be restricted by having to post in a way that would be appropriate to work colleagues or job applicants googling to find out more about me.

I wanted to build a place where I could be honest and open, where I could be myself and not the self that work sometimes needs me to be.

I’m conscious, of course, that I’m certainly a long way from anonymous. If someone who knows me happens to visit here, there are a good few bits that are fairly instantly recognisable. Even more so to friends who know me well.  And there are a couple of photographs dotted about that are undoubtably me.

So apart from using a different surname, everything here is entirely me. More entirely, perhaps, than I am in my ordinary life because here I have my own space and this place that is all about my own goals and journey and ponderings.

For me, there’d be no value in setting up a blog and then having to write fiction or meticulously anonomise everything I wanted to post. And then worry that someone might still guess it’s me.

 

In response to “Do you blog anonymously or as yourself?” over at the Daily Post.

Filed Under: Blogging and Writing, Prompts

Why I Started Blogging

7 August 2011 By 4 Comments

When I was in my preteen years, my grandmother would bring a whole stack of magazines to my mum each month. She read just about every magazine going, I think.

My favourite parts of the magazines were the little columns about peoples’ lives. There’d usually be a woman in each magazine who would write a weekly piece about her husband or kids or whatever. And then there was always the page at the back of the magazine, where someone would write a longer piece with a really light and airy feel – and usually a little paragraph at the end that tied the whole article up in a neat little bow.

It was through those columns that I first came across Sue Townsend and Adrian Mole. The fictional Adrian was a couple of years older than me, but I began to realise that that type of column could host other types of voices.

And I started writing a diary. I was just beyond my thirteenth birthday, and I think that I had something in mind about entertaining people. Something about writing a kind of parody of myself that would have people doubled over with laughter.

I didn’t achieve that, of course. What I actually wrote was a diary about the stuff of teenage angst. Most of it about boys who weren’t at all interested in me. Almost all of it makes my toes curl with embarrassment (I had a quick flick through this afternoon in search of something to include here, and it truly is awful).

I thank my lucky stars that the internet didn’t get properly started until I was well beyond my teenage years. I would have poured all of that angst out on livejournal and would still be regretting it now.

Thankfully, I carried on writing privately, and I kept that up for a good ten years or so, writing in little exercise books from Woolworths rather than restricting myself to a daily slot in an ordinary diary.

The thought of wanting to share and to entertain stayed with me, though, although I’ve never been able to apply myself thoroughly enough to write anything of any substance.

I came across blogging in 2005, I think. I don’t think I went through any great thought-process about why I wanted to blog; it just seemed a perfectly natural thing to join in with.  I had a blog on blogger for about eight months or so and really loved doing it – I stopped because a few things in my life changed and I didn’t make time for it.

When I came back to the blogosphere in the spring of this year, I was so surprised at how much everything had changed.  I’d arrived here expecting that things would be pretty much as I’d left them five years ago, and that I could just sort of puddle through by posting bits and pieces about everything and nothing. I hoped that the occasional comment would come my way, and that I’d feel a little bit affirmed if one or two people wrote something nice.

Which, of course, is a huge underestimate of how it all works now.  Everyone seems so focused and driven, and I’m feeing wonderfully empowered and surprised every day at how this blogging thing isn’t just an oddity any more.  Or at least that, if it is still an oddity, there are people out there who are every bit as strange as me to grow and learn together with.

 

I still have that habit of turning straight to the back page as soon as I open a magazine.

The odd thing now is that it’s kind of strange to read a piece of writing about someone’s life and not be invited to add a comment at the end!

 

I took this prompt from the linkup over at By Word of Mouth. What a great idea for a linkup post!

Filed Under: Blogging and Writing, Prompts
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