Happy 1st Birthday My Days NI!!
I feel like I should get you a present! A new computer, camera or graphic designer perhaps? (Don’t worry Mr C, I’m only kidding!)
It feels like much more than a year ago that I set up my blog. A blog about how I spend My Days here in Northern Ireland. The things my wee family get up to, and, as it turned out, quite a bit of rambling.
This linky is for bloggers who have been blogging for a year or less. It’s your chance to link up your favourite post of the week. It’s a great way to find new blogs to read and to raise your blogs profile.
If you’ve been following me you are probably aware that this blog is relatively new and I’m still finding out what works best, for me and the blog. I have been lucky to find so much support from other bloggers on my journey so far. One of whom is Lucy who writes at Baked Potato Mummy. Lucy has also tagged me in Blog Your Heart Out -five questions to help you learn a little more about the person behind the blog. So here goes…
I published my first blog post nearly two weeks ago, and I have to admit, I’ve become a little obsessed with the whole blogging thing since then. I admit, like most people starting out, I thought I would put up some posts and the viewers would come flocking to read whatever I had written. Apparently, it doesn’t quite work like that!
By chance one of the bloggers I was following started up a group to help new bloggers. Twinmumanddad has been a great source of information and advice on all things bloggy. What I did learn pretty fast was that I had to put myself ‘out there’ more and get networking. And so I spent most of last week setting up twitter, facebook pages, bloglovin, google+ and there are many more I just haven’t got around to yet. I was glued to my phone, tablet or computer at every opportunity. I decided that this was really going a bit too far and so I had the weekend (mostly) off.
Then disaster struck. When I checked my stats, (apparently you should not make a habit of this!), on Sunday I had only 2 views. Two days off had resulted in a total collapse of my viewers. What should I do? Get straight back on and start posting?
Will it always be like this? In order to have a viewing public will I have to give up my life to social media so that other people will read about it? I hope not. I think maybe I am trying to run before I can crawl!
I have several posts in draft which I hope to post soon, and if anything, blogging is encouraging me to make my life more interesting so that other people will want to read about it. How am I going to make my life more interesting you might ask. Well, since I’ve started writing blogs, I’ve started reading them too. There is a wealth of ideas, events and inspiration which will ensure that I am never stuck for something to do with my children.
So will blogging stop me from living? If living is doing housework then yes. Blogging is definitely going to take precedence. Anything takes precedence over that! Will blogging get in the way of me doing things with my family? No. I pledge to keep taking weekends (mostly) off. I may post things I already have in draft form, and check in to my networks when the kids are sleeping, but I will not spend time with my head buried in a computer when I should be living. If that ever changes, I guess I’ll have to stop blogging, though I’ll always be a blog follower from now on.