My Blogging Transformation Experience

In Week 4 of the SMS module reading the content covered is on blogging. In this post I want to share a personal and anecdotal experience of my blogging experience to show what it takes to create an effective blog.

I never understood the concept of Blogging for most of years since it first arrived in the social media scene around 2002. It took almost 10 years since the formal introduction of the concept of "Blogging" to the time I took my first dabble at writing a Blog.

It began as a Lark.

I had done some travels, and I was reading the occasional travel blog sites and realised that some of the writers were getting paid to write and travel. It sounded like an interesting task to explore so I just started posting some photos and writing about the travel experience. The first post receives several views and even had a couple of comments. That was the hook. It was almost addictive. It was like a power trip. Something I wrote that had an impact on random folks around the world and suddenly it felt that I had a voice and it mattered.

Soon I was posting and writing original content regularly. I realised that I had a latent writing bug (Something I had as a child but ignored it over the growing years). Incidentally, writing actually solved another problem related to trauma that I was facing around this time. To me, writing was very therapeutic but I also enjoyed the recognition that came with letting my inner creative out.

My original blog was focused on five different subject areas: Travel, Money Savings, Arts & Design, Career Tips, Social Commentary. I set up these specific categories because I discovered through prior Twitter usage (see following blog post on this aspect) that these were the areas of great interest to me.  The image below is a snapshot of the original blog format.

However, in some time I was starting to see a plateau in new unique visitors to my site. This confounded me because I knew I was writing great content (which writer does not?) so maybe it had something to do with Search Engine Optimisation. I spent the next several months researching, updating and hiring professional help to optimise my site for Google rankings. I soon started to receive comments from the professionals that my blog site lacked focus since it was dealing with multiple subject areas. I countered that arguments by referencing many popular blog sites that deal with multiple subject issues (eg. Huffington Post) and the fact that I was not exactly a blogging expert on any one subject. It just was that I loved to blog about those specific subjects so I cared more about what I wrote and what I "pushed" out there in to the blogosphere and hope everyone reading it really liked it and shared it or commented on it.

This kept on for a while but I continued to see a steady decline in readership and views. Coincidentally, it was around the time I enrolled in the Durham SMS module that I started to re-evaluate my blog design and format. After picking up some of the social media strategy tips in the course module and working with a social media professional I set specific goals (see this earlier post on this) for a major revamp.

The new layout and design narrowed the focus down to primarily my travel and money savings topics so it appeared to be a travel focused blog site, something that appeals to tourism officials who prefer travel focused bloggers to work with. Since I still blog on my other subjects, I provided a link to readers to those posts should they end up exploring my site beyond the travel stories. The new site started to see a steady increase in traffic and it helped in securing new clients for my blogging services. A sample shot of the new layout is below.

Lessons learnt from this experience on blogging success are:

1. Develop the theme and content focus from the get go. Getting this task out of the way will ensure that once up and running, the blog will have dedicated readership and no confusion of what exactly it is all about.
2. If you can't decide, well then go ahead and write whatever it is you feel like. This will of course allow you to get your writing experience going and eventually allow you to find your focus on one or two areas of writing. But keep in mind that it may be prudent to launch a new blog site once you have found your focus as a sudden revamp may also disengage some existing readers.
3. Focus does not mean only one subject. You can write on two or three other subjects, as long as they are related or linked to the core content. 
4. Do SEO and learn about SEO writing from the beginning to help write content that will get found faster and ranked higher.

-Abi