If you take some time out, and really look at some of the blogs around, I’m mainly looking at parent bloggers here, there are a vast array of amazing. When you skip back to your own page, you will be a little deflated at the lack of zazz your own page has.
This is when it happens, you start to really play around with your blog, new backgrounds, different templates, posting more photos, diversifying your posts. Buttons, Binkies, Affiliations, Blogrolls, galleries… The list of extras is very, very exhaustive. But what makes the other blogs around us so interesting is the writer behind it all, the key-pusher.
Those who sit devoted to their audience, because they know who their audience is, who share personal stories, inspiring stories, heartfelt stories, heart breaking tales and most of all honest ones. Sharing very personal parts of the life they lead. It’s interesting, it’s almost bordering on voyeurism in its most updated terms, it might not be sexual but it is certainly things of a private nature.
We sit down, with our tea/coffee/choice of beverage, ready to devour every word they have written, from there many people comment, this goes to and fro for a while, and eventually they become friends. It’s so easy because you already feel like you know each other due to reading almost daily updates about each other, the people around us and our interests. As a parent blogger, as well as outside circles it’s nice to have a online support network of people who are in the same position as you. This takes the blogging into a whole new stratosphere of importance in our lives. Sitting at home, with your glorious spawn trying to carve out time in the day to blog, to connect with the online world, the ones we forged for ourselves. In some cases, even our alter-egos.
There are many parent and baby groups around, but the times might not suit everyone, then what? The easy answer is trying to connect yourself with online groups. Connecting with millions has never been as easy as it is now. Are those relationships lasting? Quite often they are, because there is a connection with people like us, it is easier to nurture a relationship via online media platforms than it is to manage to meet up with real people when you have a busy daily life.
What starts out as a hobby, something to have a go at, can become our main source of interaction, along with your blog; it makes sense to create a twitter account & possibly a facebook, where you can throw your words out into the world and hope they bounce back somewhere along the way.
Create your own personal network, a collection, a support group of the like minded.
There is a lot more to blogging than it being a hobby. It’s connecting, it’s a catalogue of your life, it’s a platform for controversy and it’s free therapy.
The power of the blogger is also now pretty obvious to companies. They give bloggers the opportunity to test out products, to voice their opinion that will serve as a guide to perspective buyers. We get to keep the products in exchange for taking a time out during our days to write about them. Top bloggers, with a vast amount of readers are in a position to decline a review if they don’t think it will fit with their personal style.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the keyboard is mightier than the overpriced advertising agency.
The blog is now an insight into our lives in a way that perhaps is even more personal than meeting for coffee. Pictures, writing styles, personal traumas, due dates, scan pictures, what you are reading, birth videos, what you are wearing, where you political views lie, what you spend, what you save and how you feel is now encapsulated in a virtual world for all to see. We choose as bloggers to allow people into our worlds, who we deem suitable to connect with outside of blog comments and follows, we choose our own hours, our content and our backgrounds.
We choose to let you in, you choose to stay.
