My thoughts and experiences with personal blogging 3 months later.
Three months ago, I began my resolution to give blogging a try for at least 6 months. I thought I’d share my thoughts on blogging as a hobby.
Please keep in mind that my expressed thoughts may not be shared by other new or experienced bloggers.
This post is my longest by far, so below is a bulleted list of the subtopics/sections included in this post.
Before I Published My Blog Site (confidence issues)
Publishing the Site and Going Live (SEO and Google Search Console)
Creating Social Media Accounts (learning to be more social online)
The Blogging Experience (time, post views, and site visits)
My Final Thoughts
Next Steps
NOTE: Unfortunately, the blog tool I'm using doesn't allow for anchors or hyperlinks that allow you to 'jump' to different sections on this page. If anchors were available, I'd use them for all my blog posts. My sincere apologies for the inconvenience as you scroll through this post.
Before I Published My Blog Site
If you haven't already done so, check out My 1st Blog Post. In that post, I discussed my reasons and thought process for starting a personal blog in 2020. In short, I'm fulfilling a resolution to start a blog and give it a chance for at least 6 months.
In January, I acquired my domain name and web hosting. I already used Wix.com for my professional resume/portfolio website, so I decided to continue using the service for my personal blog. Wix.com has a free hosting option, but I decided to take advantage of a special offer for paid web hosting and a domain name. I wanted to start a blog tied to my domain and brand name of choice.
Another reason I opted to pay was to fulfill another resolution of selling something crafty. The thought was to use this website as a central hub for other sites I may sell through like Amazon or Etsy. Unfortunately, I’m far from fulfilling that resolution because of the fear of not being good enough to make quality products. We'll see if I face that fear before the year ends.
Anyway, before I could get a domain name, I needed to decide what brand name I wanted to use. I was determined to go by my nicknames “Jelly Jam.” I’ve been called these 2 names for 30+ years of my life. In my youth I was called “Jelly,” while many colleagues simply called me “Jam.” Yet “Jelly Jam,” or some combination of the words, are commonly used and not available.
I played around with different adverbs to make my name a little different. Eventually I chose “Simply” because I thought it described me very well. I’m a simple person, often perceived as boring, but I don’t get bored because so many simple things in life keep me entertained. Then I acquired the domain name and Google username "Simply Jelly Jam."
Creating my logo was challenging. My graphic design skills are minimal at best. I knew I wanted to draw my own logo, but I ambitiously decided to try digital drawing for the first time. I tried to recreate a mason jar sitting on my desk. This simple subject took long to recreate digitally since I was just learning to using the stylus on my touchscreen in a similar manner as using a pencil on paper. Considering how it’s my first digital drawing, I’m proud of the logo I created. Yet there’s room for improvement.
Because I've already created a professional resume/portfolio website, designing this website was easy for me. I drafted several posts and created the blog’s HOME, ABOUT, and TERMS OF USE webpages in advance. There were other pages I created and left hidden in case I aimed to fulfill other ambitious resolutions the website could be useful for.
I conducted a full QA on my pages, ensured imagery included alt text, viewed how text formatting displayed on multiple screens, verified online forms and hyperlinks worked properly, created automated email marketing, and checked other technical aspects of my website to troubleshoot any performance, display, or accessibility issues that arose. I verified that the site was mobile friendly, because personally I like reading blog posts on my cellphone and thought others might prefer that too.
Yet, I lacked the courage to publish my site when I felt it was ready to go live. You see, I have confidence issues and tend to think about worst case scenarios. Nothing but negative thoughts ran through my head before I hit the “Publish” button. I specifically had many questions I struggled answering positively in my own mind:
Is this a waste of my time and money?
Would I want to quit this so-called hobby before going a full 6 months?
Will anyone visit my website?
What will people think and say?
Will people like my posts?
Then I remembered I was doing this for myself, to fulfill a personal resolution, and not for anyone else. It’s only a waste of time and money if I didn’t want to do this, or if I expected to earn a living on blogging full-time within a ridiculously short amount of time.
While I’d like others to see my content, nobody online knows who I am because my "brand name" is "brand new," so I shouldn’t expect visitors to my site within a short 6-month period. Some people may like my posts. Some people may hate my posts. I can’t please everyone, so I should at least please myself by doing what I like and writing about what interests me at the time.
Publishing the Site and Going Live
I finally went live on March 5th. It felt good to publish my site and release my first post. I thought setup was complete, until I checked out the dashboard for my website.
Through Wix.com, I accessed an SEO wizard that guided me through steps for “completing” the website. I admit I didn’t know anything about SEO before I published my site, and I failed to learn about it when I researched how to start a blog last year. Fortunately, the wizard easily guided me in setting up my SEO. An SEO, or search engine optimization, would allow my site to be searchable through Google’s Search Engine.
Through the wizard, I verified the following in Step 1:
Homepage’s title (meta title) and keywords were set
Homepage had an SEO description
Homepage text was optimized
Homepage was set to be visible in search results
Site was mobile friendly
Site was connected to a domain
Site was connected to Google Search Console
Deciding on keywords proved challenging to me. I didn’t know how specific or generic my keywords should be. The wizard allowed for a max total of 5 keywords. Initially I used simply, jelly, jam, hobbies, and blog because I didn’t know what else to use. I modified the keywords a month into blogging, but I’m not certain I’m using the most optimal words for my site. This is certainly a con of not blogging about a specific niche. A personal blog where I post about random topics makes it difficult for me to determine the right keywords for my site and SEO setup.
Like SEO, I wasn’t familiar with the Google Search Console. The search console is an online tool that helps improve a site’s “search presence.” I found this part of the SEO setup process easier to manage directly through the Google Search Console site then through the SEO wizard. I needed to verify my URL by copying the meta tag and pasting it into the <head> section of my homepage.
Once I pasted the meta to my homepage and published my site, I returned to the Google Search Console and clicked the “Verify” button. I received a confirmation email about 10 minutes later. After receiving the email, I was finally able to submit my sitemap to complete this stage of the SEO setup. I’m still learning how to use the Google Search Console to its full potential. So far, it's a great way to let me know if there's an issue with any of my pages.
Creating Social Media Accounts
The SEO wizard suggested I verified my site had alt text for images, my contact information, and social media links for a better chance of appearing in search results. I didn’t have a social media account for this brand name, and I didn’t originally plan on creating any. Before starting this blog, I didn't use social media much.
Yet, because I wanted all boxes checked off in my SEO wizard, I went ahead and created an Instagram and YouTube account to start with. I also knew doing so would help market my website and my online store if I ever gained the courage to give that a try. I’ve never been much of a social media user, so initially I struggled to remember to post or upload anything to my 2 new accounts.
Uploading to YouTube is becoming easier for me because I'm creating a habit of recording all my craft projects and gameplay. Once I've uploaded a crafty video, I'd link it to my blog post as a bonus visual element for site visitors to check out. I haven't uploaded many gameplay videos to YouTube, but I have several ready for upload if/when a craft video doesn't turn out well, or I don't post about something crafty. That's happened on 2 occasions already.
The Blogging Experience
I initially planned to release a weekly post. Yet on the week I published my site, I decided to post bi-weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I figured I might as well try this schedule for a while since I’m unemployed with time on my hands. For the first few weeks, I edited and released the blog posts I drafted prior to publishing my site.
For the first few weeks, I drafted my posts days in advance of its release date was the smart thing to do. I started recording my crafts projects for uploading to YouTube (assuming I didn’t have camera issues) and link to it within a blog post. It was easy for me to edit my videos first, take screenshots from the final video rendering, and then write a post that aligned with the contents of the video.
Editing and rendering a video would take me about 4 hours to complete. I try to record my craft projects from different angles, so much of the editing time is spent on reviewing the footage to determine which clips I want to use in my final render. The complexity of the craft projects also determined how much time I spent on editing. Time lapse videos of me drawing on something usually takes an hour to edit and render because there's not much to edit.
Writing a blog post and editing images for the post also takes me about 4 hours to complete. I'm usually distracting myself with watching TV or doing something else (I like to multi-task), so the actual time spent on videos and blog posts may be shorter if I didn't allow for distractions.
The time spent on craft projects vary depending on the project. Most of the time I walk away for hours while I’m waiting for something to dry. I also use old cellphones to record videos. They tend to overheat, so time away from the projects are necessary to keep the phones from starting an impromptu firework show in my house.
I rarely just focus on one thing at a time. Each professional job I had required me to be a multi-tasker. It's habit now. I’ll start a project until I get to a temporary stopping point, then I move on to something else for a while. If you’ve ever wondered why I don’t give a project time estimate, it’s because I have no clue. I could maintain a time tracker, as I've done for my profession, but for now I like doing things at my own pace whenever I want to devote the time to do it.
In the last week of March, I struggled with happiness and became ill (unrelated to the current pandemic). I didn’t have any craft projects completed. On the morning of March 31st, I had no content to work with. I knew I didn't want to write about how sad or ill I felt days prior to this post date.
I told myself it’d be alright if I didn’t post anything since my friends were the only visitors to my site at the time. I was watching Animal Crossing: New Horizons gameplay and news update videos on YouTube that morning. I began thinking about how I wanted to buy the game as soon as I received my tax refund. After all, my Dad bought me one of the last Nintendo Switch Lite at a local Target store the day before.
Then I decided to write my thoughts on the Nintendo Switch shortage, the Animal Crossing: New Horizons popularity, and if I thought buying a $200 Switch Lite was worth it for a single $60 game I didn't know much about.
Writing A Switch for One Game was therapeutic. It was nice to write about what was on my mind at that moment in time. In fact, I found that the posts I write on a whim, including My 1st Blog Post, were the easiest and fastest for me to write. I think it's easier for me to write posts about what's on my mind and interests me most at that time.
My 1st Blog Post has a total of 19 views. It's a small count, but it's a lot more than what I thought I'd ever receive. Most other posts range between 10-15 views. Only 2 posts have fewer than 6 views. When I started blogging 3 months ago, I never thought I'd receive more than 3 views on any post.
Two of the 19 views are likely from my close friends who never fail to show their support for anything I do. One view is from my account when I checked to ensure there weren't any text formatting or other display issues immediately after posting. That only means the other views came from external sources.
The SEO setup I did in March helped drive some traffic to my site, but I think social media was the driving force behind my site visits and post views. According to my analytics last checked on 18 May 2020:
60% of my site traffic entered the site’s URL directly into the browser
25% came from somewhere else that linked to my site (like YouTube and Instagram)
15% came from search engines
I doubt my friends are revisiting my site and viewing my posts repeatedly each week, I believe most visitors who entered the site's URL directly into the browser copied and pasted a URL I included in my YouTube video descriptions. If I remember correctly, the descriptions are text-based and don't automatically convert URLs into clickable hyperlinks. Unfortunately, the analytics doesn't specify what sites visitors come from, or perhaps I haven't figured out how to find more specific data.
My Final Thoughts
I worried sticking with a bi-weekly schedule would feel like work after some time. I thought if I weren't well prepared with ideas and content prior to a post date, I'd become overwhelmed with either struggling to come up with decent content or skipping a post for that day.
Yet, the flexibility of blogging about what I want, when I want for my own entertainment makes keeping up with a personal blog worthwhile. Through my posts, I'm creating a personal archive of my thoughts and interests at the time. My blog is essentially my public journal that I and others, including friends and family, can look back at in the future.
My posts reflect of me. Because I've been treating this as a hobby, my blog allowed me to write freely about my thoughts and beliefs. It's been therapeutic to write what's on my mind, especially on the days where I struggled with happiness. Slowly, I'm beginning to feel comfortable sharing some of my feelings publicly as stress relief, and hopefully I won't upset or offend anyone as I continue to do so.
My writing skills improved over the past 3 months. I still have much to learn but running my drafts through Microsoft Word identifies fewer errors each week. Apparently, I've recognized my most common mistakes and addressing it during my first drafts.
What's Next?
I have another 3 months to give blogging a try. If I continue to enjoy blogging as much as I do today, I'll probably stick with this for a while longer.
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Thanks, and have a great day!
Simply Jelly Jam
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