I'm not going to lie, one of the main reasons I got into blogging was because of the free books. I saw
Sophie getting all the latest ARCS and having a successful blog and wanted to be her. Well, I still want to be her really. Yeah, I was naive and I probably started blogging for the wrong reasons.
But! I've grown so much since then. I don't worry about ARCs or followers so much anymore. Yeah, I still want the ARCs, yes I still want more followers and comments and get jealous of the popular blogs (I think most of us do, let's be honest) But even when I feel that no one's listening, I still post. I still try and think of unique stuff to do. Because it gives me a purpose, something to do with my life at a time when I honestly don't have much going on. And I just love doing it, for doing it.
What I learnt at YALC
I honestly learnt a lot at the whole event, just talking to other bloggers about the way we do things was a massive learning experience. But I want to focus on the Blogging Workshop that happened on the Saturday of the event. Because that was such a wonderful experience.
The event was run by Kat McKenna (Marketing Editor of Macmillon), Sanne Vliegenthart (Digital Coordinator for Hot Key/ Book Tuber), Holly Bourne (Author of Soulmates and Journalist for Thesite.org) and Natasha Ngan (Author of the Elites and Fashion Blogger). They said many things, half of which I'm sure I've forgotten but here are a few that stuck with me.
- Keep your posts short and use pictures and bullet points to break up the text because readers on the Internet don't have long attention spans. (Today I'm not doing so good at this.)
- Publicists want to be your friends (This is something I need to remember because I'm often shy to approach publicists, especially on twitter, in case I'm disturbing them.)
- Events like YALC and socialising on websites like Twitter can be great for getting followers and networking with other bloggers.
- If you see something missing, a topic that people aren't posting about for example, write it yourself.
Some of these I knew already, others are things that were interesting to hear. They've given me some good ideas for my blog, including a couple of topics I'd like to write post for. So those might be coming your way... well whenever I get around to actually writing them.
I'm also thinking of creating a new blog. Branching out into another field. It's mostly that last point that is making me think of doing it, though I have been thinking about it for a while. I've been studying Japanese for about 4 years now and I can't find much intermediate resources out there and most of the blogs I've seen about Japanese aren't very well labelled. So I might start doing that in the future, I'll probably post links to twitter if you're interested.
So that about sums up all that's in my head recently. I've definitely started posting more since YALC and I'm really having fun doing so, so I'm hoping to keep that up.
Now is the time to say if you'd like to see anything new on my blog. Comments are always welcome.
