Welcome to the second week of building my DIY blog. An attempt to become a part-time blogger.
Having done something, I haven’t managed to do for my whole working life last week, I put aside every afternoon for a new venture successfully, I can happily report I managed to dedicate every afternoon again this week to building my blog. I have to say I’ve been considerably more chuffed with developments this week than I was last week.
A couple of weeks ago I had randomly contacted a WordPress blog builder to redesign my blog. To cut a long story short he messed me about and having spent a few hours researching the things he’d asked me to research, he got back to me and said he was too busy. I have to say in my experience of previously having two e-commerce stores and dealing with SEO and digital marketing companies, being messed about by amateurs who can talk the talk but not walk the walk is part and parcel of the experience!
As I said in last week’s blog, I intended to put the Bank Holiday Monday aside to watch videos on building blogs. Everything is trial and error when you don’t really know what you’re doing. I’ve gone through phases before when I’ve tried to improve my blog and sat down and watched videos and pretty much just given up on them. I’m not going to say that they’re hopeless, although, overall they do seem to be, but they are certainly worth persevering with as you will always pick up a few useful tips as you decipher the waffle!
I sourced what looked like three good long videos. They were chosen because they were basically about building a blog and they were all two to three hours long. Videos of building a blog in 15 minutes are obviously ridiculous. I was not particularly excited at the prospect of sitting through eight hours of videos, but think what I will learn.
Needless to say, all three videos were fairly hopeless. Although I have an existing blog I thought I’d sit through the beginnings of each one just to see if I had missed things. One I managed ten minutes of because the presenter had a really irritating high pitched voice and spoke really quickly and that irritating manner where he was trying to be wacky and cool. Rather than just educate he used lots of gimmicks flashing on the screen. It just became frustrating to watch as his raison d’etre seemed to be just talking about himself of how great he was and denigrating the watcher like they are an imbecile.
The second video was more encouraging, but having got through the seven minute introduction he posted a WordPress link on his index dashboard which I simply didn’t have. So I gave that one up. I will return to it because I quite liked the guy and although he may be using features I don’t have I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up lots of other useful tips from him.
The third video was totally disorganised and preachy and I lasted about 3 minutes.
It was only a half hour wasted really. I had put the whole day aside, but I just had a bit of a hunch, why don’t I just go to the index dropdowns and just start playing around with them. Hey presto within an hour and a half three of the four tasks I was going to pay someone to do I’d accomplished myself. To you the reader these may be very simple things but to me as a lay amateur they certainly were baffling. I managed to redesign some of the appearance, a long way to go but I’ve worked out the basic principles of working the blocks and widgets. I’ve managed to navigate how to do the images better, I adjusted the appearance so the first paragraph only, shows on mobiles and laptops, therefore making my blogs more accessible and I managed to move the widget which has the titles of the previous five blogs to the top right rather than hidden at the bottom.
Within a couple of hours I had improved the navigation and the look of the blog without watching a video. This should be a lesson to anyone, don’t waste your time watching videos if you’re trying to build the blog yourself, just put some time aside and play around with all the tools available to you on your WordPress blog. As I said previously, videos are always worth watching but I think just working it out for yourself does seem to be the best method and also through teaching yourself this sets you up for being able to upgrade and update your blog.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not suddenly fantastic at blog design and have a long way to go, but I have sussed out some off the basic building tools.
I invested the princely sum of £84 in upgrading my package to Explorer. May or may not be why I found the navigation a lot easier. One thing is for certain is I have received more views through the WordPress system since upgrading.
I’ve actually posted a new eight or nine blogs this week and a bit of a breakthrough came on Friday when for the first time in seven years amateur and very occasional blogging, looking at the stats under the list of viewed blogs. a new ‘read more’ sign came up which I clicked on and OK it was only one more, but for the first time I’ve had over 10 individual blogs read in one day. Yes, a lot of them were of course read only once but a breakthrough is a breakthrough!
My views for the last month remained at approximately 1200 which I’m quite pleased with and I feel that over the last two weeks I’m ready beginning to get into this blogging thing.
What I’ve really notice is I go on two walks a day and this week I’m finding myself thinking as much about blogging as I am my business during my wanders, which I’m so pleased about. I must never forget my main focus and reason for taking up blogging is to start winding my business down into a part time business and spending the time freed up being creative and doing something that I enjoy. As I said in my last blog, I’m really beginning to appreciate just how mammoth it will be to create a successful and functioning blog.
I am beginning to consider the mammoth social media aspects and how some of the blogs can be both really interesting but also commercial. For instance I have four vintage online Etsy shops, something I’m really good at, and I know I can write lots of interesting blogs about that and how to run them and stick them on the numerous Etsy Facebook groups and my 2000 listings which should be something that I really enjoy doing and I think will bring in lots of views.
I’ve been pleased with the eight or nine blogs that I’ve written and published this week. They are all non football related so represent my first move away from being a Lewes FC blogger to a more varied and let’s face it, interesting matters. I’m aware that probably is the best tool for building a successful blog is lots of original, varied and consistent content for Google to pick up on.
Progress this week. Slow progress!
The Rights of Fans. 