What do you think of the London Bloggers Meetup?

I asked one of the London Bloggers Meetup regulars what he thinks of our events and this is what he said.

Why not join us at our next event and see for yourself why people love the London Bloggers Meetup.

Blogging Challenges Survey 2011

At the start of the year I ran a survey with the London Bloggers Meetup community to find out what’s on our minds for improving our blogs this year. I asked the simple question:

What is the biggest blogging challenge you want to overcome this year?

I had a total of 105 different responses which I’ve summarised into 25 different categories.

I’m fairly confident it won’t be a surprise to hear the biggest challenge we – and probably all bloggers – face is to produce more regular and frequent content. 20% of you voted this as your biggest challenge, receiving more than double the number of votes from the next biggest challenge of increasing traffic / readers (9%).

The percentages in this pie chart represent the share of vote each challange achieved within the top 50% of responses.

It’s interesting to think the second challenge may actually be overcome by performing better on the first i.e. more regular content, particularly high quality content, will almost certainly lead you to achieving more traffic.

Once we move past these two more obvious challenges, the survey started to get more interesting. 6% of respondents are challenged by finding inspiration or the right direction for their content; producing quality content consistently; gaining publicity and reach; and also actually getting started.

One of the more common questions I am asked at London Bloggers Meetups is ‘when should I start blogging?’ My answer is always the same: get started as soon as you can. There is no reason to delay. If you are worried about the quality of your content, don’t be. If you read the first posts of any blog they are generally pretty terrible, but after some practice you’ll get better, find your tone of voice, improve your writing style and there’ll be no looking back.

Once we move beyond the top three quarters of answers, there are a wide range of other challenges faced by our community. Gaining comments is a common challenge and opportunity. How can you encourage more participation on your blog? Answers in the comments below please.

Writers block was voted for a couple of times. Perhaps this could have been grouped with finding inspiration and direction with your content too, but I wonder if inspiration is the way to overcome writers block. I’d welcome any ideas for what can be done to overcome writers block in the comments.

It was only at this stage some of the more technical issues started to crop up, with people needing help integrating their blog with social media platforms and containing spam. On the second issue, I have found with WordPress a good captcha plugin helps along with of course Akismet.

It was also interesting to see which challenges were not so prominent. Making money seems to be something few of you are that interested in which I suspect is a downward trend – perhaps bloggers are starting to realise how tough it is to make money through blogging? Perhaps this goes hand in hand with sorting out your blog’s brand, something more important if you have money in mind I would imagine.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the survey. You can see the full range of answers in the chart below and of course please feel free to add your comments too if you have any thoughts, suggestions, recommendations or ideas for how we can all overcome our blogging challenges this year and beyond.

London Bloggers + Dynamo = A Magical Christmas

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year and what a great year it has been in the world of blogging and the London Bloggers Meetup.  We’ve had some truly brilliant meetups, with interesting guest speakers and generous sponsors – topped off very well by the massively generous Naked Wines in November.

Sadly however we’ve ran out of time to put on a Christmas party for all you bloggers this year!

But fear not, our friends at Onlinefire have just the ticket. They are working with Panasonic to put on an exclusive party at JuJu bar, Kings Road, Chelsea and they’d like to invite you along, so you won’t be missing out after all!

Dynamo, the UK street magician, has teamed up with Panasonic and the TA1 HD camcorder, to create DynamoTV, the eight week series which follows Dynamo as he hangs-out with a variety of his celebrity friends and amazes them with mind-blowing magic and illusion.  Celebrities include, Tinie Tempah, Example, Keith Lemon, Rufus Hound, Sugababes, Sean Paul, to name only a few.

Panasonic and Dynamo are hosting this exclusive party to celebrate the success of the DynamoTV series and we have 50 tickets to giveaway to members of London Bloggers Meetup.

The evening of street magic will take place at JuJu London on Wednesday 15th December from 7pm onwards. Complimentary drinks and canapés will be served throughout the evening. There will be goody bags for every guest, plus we will be giving away 10 TA1 camcorders every hour as ‘spot’ prizes throughout the evening.

Not only that but you’ll have the opportunity to meet with Dynamo in person and mingle with his celebrity friends. To apply for your (free) tickets, click here.

Now that’s surely a fine remedy for all of you who can’t wait until January for your next LBM fix. Happy Christmas everyone!

Cheers, Andy

PS news of our exciting blogger awards coming to a blog near you soon!

Discount for Social Media in B2B Conference

If you work in social media marketing or PR, you might like to know I’ve agreed a 15% discount for LBM’ers wanting to attend the Social Media in B2B Communications conference this week being organised by PRMoment.

If you want to hear from Virgin Media, Computer Associates, Deloitte, Logica, PWC or PeerIndex, then this conference is for you. Come along and learn how these brands have been using social media to:

• build a presence across multiple SoMe platforms
• communicate their brand values
• identify and prioritise influencers
• develop sales channels

You can find out more here.

To achieve the discount, simply use the code LBM when you buy your tickets online.

Enjoy. If you attend, come back and tell us what you learnt.