Next month marks my first anniversary of starting blogging. I have learned a lot during that time I wish to gain more experience and knowledge as I go ahead and continue blogging now and into the future.
Personal reflections:
Overall, I have enjoyed my experience blogging this past year. I’ve been able to express myself in ways that I never thought would have been possible before and talk about topics on which I previously had little to no knowledge. As a result, I have published around 30 blog posts in around three languages: English, Cantonese, and traditional Chinese.
Although I set out for the blog to be purely a language learning blog, I realized I ran out of steam quite quickly, so I decided to diversify my blog rather than keep it to a niche. This has affected my enjoyment of the blog, enjoying the process a lot more because I can talk about freely a wide range of topics: whatever I find interesting to talk about at the time.
One thing that has affected me during my blogging time is not putting enough time and energy into blogging that is required to make it grow. Putting a maximum of two hours per week into my blog is not enough time to make it grow substantially as such I was not able to monetize my blog. In other words, blogging is hard work, and you cannot expect it to grow without you putting the work in.
However, I’ve always known that there are two sorts of bloggers: hobby bloggers versus full-time / career bloggers. The amount of time I was putting in and why I wanted to start a blog would always put me in the camp of a hobby blogger, which I’m fine with.
What I would do differently if I had to restart my blog:
Provided I didn’t have repetitive strain injury I would go ahead and put more time into creating my blog. This does not just include creating and making blog posts but also doing the marketing and advertising behind as well. This is because a blogging business is not too dissimilar from other businesses, and you must put a lot of time and effort for it to work.
So, this is what I would do. Also, I would time block time to run my blog or to write blog posts every day or so. This is so I will stay consistent being able to justify the yearly fee for a hosting platform as well.
Also, I feel that it’s never too late to change or improve a blog. This comes on to the next topic.
My blog plans:
I believe that I’ve been slacking a bit in my blogging, and I do enjoy this hobby so therefore I want to continue to pay for the hosting and to continue blogging. One day hopefully I will make money from my blog but until that day comes, I will faithfully continue to produce blog posts and content and in the meantime also enjoy it.
I have continued this blog because I genuinely enjoy writing and on top of that I enjoy language learning.
For the past month or two, I have created a free WordPress.com website that has the same content as this blog. However, this will be extremely restrictive in the future as most bloggers recommend a WordPress.org website that is self-hosted which I also agree with as well.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I believe that anyone can start a successful blog in language if you put your mind to it and you put the hard work in. This is important to realise for me going forward.
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