It’s been a while since I posted a blogger interview and I’m pleased to say the wait is over. I’m back, but this time with our first ever international language interview. Well that at least was the plan until I realised I couldn’t display Chinense characters here on my blog. If anyone knows how your help will be much appreciated.
Anyway, enough about my technical shortfalls, it’s time to introduce you to the incredibly nice Tracy Wang. Tracy writes the blog Asuan at Home where you will shortly be able to read her interview in Mandarin too.
I’ll spare you the usual rambling intro and hand you straight over to Tracy…
2. What’s your blog all about ( in 20 words or less)?
It’s about life in London, a potpourri of the little experiences that make living in London exciting.
3. When and why did you start blogging?
My mum was the main reason and inspiration behind the start of my blogging in March 2005. Keeping in touch with families in Taiwan, the blog gives them an update about my life in London and at the same time learning something different about the city – from the perspective of a Londoner, rather than a tourist!
4. Which blog platform do you use?
Blogspot
5. Can you give an example of how blogging has enriched your life?
Blogging kind of just happened, and it was only later that I started to notice its impact on me. I read a lot more now, have a different perspective to the conventional day-to-day routines and actively seek interesting topics to write about.
6. Are there any blogs you recommend reading and why?
Unique commentary with all sorts of weird and wonderful topics. The stories are interesting, unique and wacky
7. What three tips would you give to someone just starting out in blogging?
Be yourself – being yourself will make every article you write unique, and resembles you. Once you start writing, the rest will follow.
Add a Picture – photos say a thousand words and make things more entertaining and real.
Do your research – if you’re writing a specific topic, it helps to do some background reading
8. If you could change one thing about your blog what would it be?
I’m generally happy with my blog in its current state… but if I have some time I’d love to play around with its design style and create a forum to make it more interactive and fun
9. What is the key to getting readers to your blog?
Regular entries, intriguing stories, experience sharing, topics that readers are unaware of or curious about. Most of my new readers come from search engines so it helps to include a vast variety of subjects.
10. And finally, what you are hoping to get out of the London Bloggers Meetups.
This is my first meet up – I look forward to meeting like-minded people and hear about what made them start blogging and how the others establish connection with their readers.
Rather than me tell you all about it, why not watch some short clips from the night below. Sorry about the background noise, but it really was a busy night at the London Bloggers Meetup.
If you haven’t been to a London Bloggers Meetup before, click here to read some comments from our community members and to find why you should join us.
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.
It’s been a while since I posted a blogger interview and I’m pleased to say the wait is over. I’m back, but this time with our first ever international language interview. Well that at least was the plan until I realised I couldn’t display Chinense characters here on my blog. If anyone knows how your help will be much appreciated.
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