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.
If so you might want to enter our competition for a free ticket to the London Funding Conference.
Taking place on the 9th March at the British Library, the conference is for businesses seeking investment and in particular those who would like to:
- Understand the different types of growth capital and how to secure the best one for them
- Meet funding experts and businesses that have recently raised investment
- Talk to potential investors
- Meet other exciting growth businesses
Confirmed speakers include Luke Johnson (celebrated entrepreneur and founder of Risk Capital Partners), Michael Blakey (canny angel investor and founder of Avonmore Developments) and Mark Prisk MP (Minister for Business Innovation and Skills).
The conference will feature hands-on funding support during the day and separately, high level funding strategy presentations during the evening. See the agenda.
How do you win a free ticket then?
Simples. Just tell us in the comments below why you deserve the free ticket. The most entertaining entry wins.
We’ll pick an answer and announce the winner on Friday 4th March.
What if I don’t win?
Don’t worry, we have a cheeky £25 discount code for LBM members too. Just drop a note in the comments and we’ll email it across for you.
Terms and conditions
- All entries must be submitted in the blog comments on this post
- Closing date is Friday 4th March at 5.00pm GMT.
- The winner will be announced on Friday 4th March via email.
- The competition prize is one free pass to the London Funding conference on 9th March 2011, London.
- The promoter’s decision is final and binding in all matters.
- Prize is non transferable and there is no cash alternative.
- One entry per person.
Last year I started a series of interviews with some of the more regular visitors to the London Bloggers Meetup and I’m picking this up again now so we can all learn from each others experiences. I’m going to kick this off by posting up an interview with Ann Fenech, someone who’s been coming along to LBMs for I would guess a little over a year and a half. Ann, feel free to correct me.
I first recall meeting Ann when she won a competition at a meetup in Feb’09 which was sponsored by Bacardi Breezer. Ann won one of the competition prizes that month and you can see her entry here. She stands out as I called out her name wrong and she abruptly corrected me. It felt like I was having my wrist slapped. Sorry Ann.
Anyway, since then I’ve got to know Ann a little better and you can normally guarantee she’ll be at an LBM somewhere with a smile on her face, invariably winning a competition prize – did you ever take up Muzu’s offer of two free tickets to a gig of your choosing?
Anyway, enough of the rambling introduction, I’ll hand this post over to Ann so you can learn from her blogging expertise…
1. What’s your blog called and what’s the URL?
Blog Name: Rantings from Afar and the URL is http://annuca.wordpress.com/
(also write about research-related aspects on my other blog: www.researchpath.wordpress.com)
2. What’s your blog all about ( in 20 words or less)?
My blog is about my life: My experiences, travels and observations.
3. When and why did you start blogging?
I had been quite sceptical about blogging as I thought it was quite intrusive. However, when I was moving away from Malta to the UK to study I realised that it is a good way of documenting my time (I was always horribly bad at keeping a personal diary) while keeping in touch with friends and family back home. I haven’t looked back – and cannot see why I thought it was intrusive! After all you only blog about what you wnat.
4. Which blog platform do you use?
WordPress.com: It’s easy to use for a not particularly technically minded person!
5. Can you give an example of how blogging has enriched your life?
Besides allowing me to have a concrete record of my time, I think the most enriching is the people I have met through my blog and theirs, some of which I have gone on to meet.
It has also helped me improve my writing by making it a frequent activity and by putting my audience at the forefront of my thoughts when doing so.
6. Are there any blogs you recommend reading and why?
Ianvisits: Great place to learn about quirky things to do in London, and the calendar of events is definitely helpful!
Cary Cooper: Learn all you need about stress!
La Delirante: It is nice to see the other side of the coin – an expat in my home country! It is useful to see your culture from the eyes of someone sitting outside it! (Ooops Ann, this is a private invite only blog)
7. What three tips would you give to someone just starting out in blogging?
- Decide on a purpose for your blog: is it just for your friends, for commercial purpose, will you use it to write about your interests? Having a clear cut purpose means that people know what they will get when they read it.
- Write regularly, but not forcibly. Better to skip writing a post than to write one as you feel you have to.
- Add pictures or other materials. I only learned this with time, but it does help make your blog more interesting and lively.
8. If you could change one thing about your blog what would it be?
If I could I would have made sure that I had a clear-cut purpose for my blog from the start, rather than having one blog trying to do everything.
9. What is the key to getting readers to your blog?
I try to include relevant tags to each blog post, but otherwise I Wish I knew – this is still a mystery to me! My readers decrease drastically every few months, and then start picking up again, before falling drastically again in a continuous cycle. I have also made the
Alltop expats list and have no idea how, so must be doing something right!
10. And finally, why do you come to the London Bloggers Meetups?
London Bloggers Meetup was one of the most welcoming groups I found when I moved to London. This is why I keep going back! Besides the great people there, the sponsors and prizes are not too shabby either 
Posted in Meetup on 15. Jan, 2011
As usual I’m a few days late blogging about LBM and as usual I’m struggling to start without gushing too much about how good a night it was, particularly challenging this time around given I was one of the speakers. Oh what the hell, I’m just going to say it, I thought this was a great LBM.
Nice to get the year started with such a bang and probably the busiest LBM to date – we had somewhere in the region of 120 bloggers turning up.
Obviously it was good to have our friends at Dell onboard. Nice to hear from Kerry (@kerryatdell) about the Trade Secrets campaign which you can check out on facebook soon. Of course the very generous bar tab helped us ease back into the year, but possibly the biggest crowd puller was the Dell Vostro laptop competition. We had over 40 entries to the competition and in the end two winners, with Andreas Kambanis from London Cyclist picking up the Vostro laptop and Tom Phillips a snazzy looking new mouse. You can read their entries here.
There were plenty of other great entries and we had a shortlist to choose from, including those where there was a genuinely good trade secret, or those that simply made us laugh…
Andy Roberts I wanted to make a good first impression so I tried painting my Dell laptop white, using a jumbo pot of tipex. It didn’t work and now I realise this was unnecessary. MACs aren’t the only cool computers any more.
IanVisits ..the more useful tip is to take a notepad with an interesting cover as it can be a good way to break the ice and build relations with people about shared interests.
Alex Guest speak clearly, “Beardy dear, yo Delhi pepper” = “Get it here! Your daily paper!”
Paul Wilkinson How NOT to make a good impression
Trust me, I speak from experience…. Sometimes everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. This all happened to me in one pitch to a new client last year:
1. Do not break your leg. Crutches are never a great look for a PR consultant, and you can get hot and sticky very quickly….
Stuart Waterman Whenever I meet a new person, I hand them a crisp ten pound note. It *must* be crisp – once I made the mistake of giving a new contact a crumpled note, and, while he still accepted the cash, I could tell he hated me for it. It was in the flare of his nostrils.
To those on the shortlist, we doff our caps and say well done, maybe next time you’ll be picking up the silverware (or in this case hardware).
I hope you all enjoyed my talk too. It was the first time I’ve done much more than introduce our speakers and welcome you all along to an LBM. You can see my prezi presentation below which has my 10 lessons and tips from the past four years of blogging. Just in case you’re curious and haven’t asked me yet, I blog about marketing and the London Bloggers Meetup events, but in the past I’ve also blogged about great places to eat in London for under a fiver, being a tourist in London and I have been the editor of the blog for lastminute.com.
There were too many people to name check this time around I’m afraid, but you can see a handful of snapshots from Peter Marshall here if you want to get an idea of who was there. Usual apologies to peeps I wasn’t able to speak to on the night, I seem to remember getting interrupted in mid conversation with many of you, most notably with Mex!
See you all again in around a month’s time.
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