Why I Started Using Images And How It Helped!

I think everyone has heard the saying "a picture paints 1000 words" at some point. I get it - it makes sense. But (there's always a but isn't there?) I'm also a firm believer that carefully chosen words can paint not just a picture, but a movie.

I like looking at pictures as much as the next person, but sometimes, I like to paint my own picture, decide for myself what the person is describing and how it would look.

When I first started my blog, I made the decision on day one that I wouldn't be using images. I figured a lot of the posts I write (all of them really at that point) were my opinions on various things, so they didn't require images.

I read all the posts telling me why I should use images, but I still wasn't convinced. In hindsight, I should have listened sooner - these posts were written by people much more established than me. It's not that I somehow thought I knew better, I just figured images weren't my thing.

Because I'm quite wordy, I'm happy to read a long post, even if it's just text. The mistake I made was thinking everyone else feels the same. I learned that they don't. People think visually and are more attracted to a post with images than a body of text.

With all that in mind, I then wrote this post and it didn't look right without images. I realised I had a choice to make - scrap the post or use images. It seemed pointlessly stubborn to scrap the post, so I caved and used some images, still not convinced it would make a difference.

That post received almost 4 times the views my posts were averaging at that time! I knew that couldn't be a coincidence, so I started doing a few more posts with images - and all of them did consistently better than those posts without images, regardless of the topic being discussed.

And that's when I had my epiphany moment!

- I realised the images don't detract from the words, even if the topic is a serious one, they add to it.
- I realised I could use images to show people my interpretation of the topic, but they would still read the words and would still be able to form their own vision of it!
- I realised that I preferred the look of my posts when they had images in them.
- I realised that I had opened a door to people who liked the post sharing the image on their Pinterest boards, something that had previously been impossible.

I would never have thought I would say this, but I am converted. If someone had told me at the beginning I would one day write this post, I would have laughed at them, but here I am writing it.

I now make sure I have at least one image per post, but I often have more.

That's not to say that I think a blog without images can't be successful - I don't believe that at all. I also don't like to tell people what they should or shouldn't do on their blogs, I just think if you don't use images, and you want an easy way to bring in more traffic, it's a definite option.

Tomorrow's post will talk in more detail about how to use images to boost your traffic.

Do you use images? Do you find they increase your traffic? Let me know in the comments :)

You can find me here: Twitter Bloglovin Pinterest and Instagram Please do stop by and say hi!

Five Reasons I Love Blogging!

Often people ask why bloggers blog. Well why do we? I can't speak for everyone, but here are five of the reasons I blog:



1. Blogging is like free therapy - you can get anything and everything off your chest, you can write about something that has left you broken, sad and you might find the writing process helps some.

2. Blogging is a fantastic way to share your ideas and opinions with the world! - I love having this little space to talk about my thoughts and opinions on anything and everything, and to share the things that make me happy, the things that make angry and the things I love!

3. I just love it - I originally started my blog to help me find my voice as a writer. Perhaps this is the wrong reason for starting a blog (are there any wrong reasons?), but I fell in love with blogging and I now see it as so much more than a stepping stone. Blogging itself has become the end goal. I still very much want to write a novel, but I still want to blog too. I also learned the two are very different in terms of voice. On here, what you see is what you get - I write in my own voice and I stay honest and true to myself. When writing fiction, I write in a character's voice, and that character may well have very different thoughts than I would have!

4. I love hitting milestones and goals - I guess you could say I'm a little competitive that way. I don't try to compete with other bloggers, not only is that pointless, but I believe as bloggers, we should be helping each other, not trying to outdo each other.
I love the element of competing with myself for want of a better term. I like setting goals for myself and achieving them, and my blog allows me to do that. I'm also a bit of a stats geek (I didn't know that about myself until I started blogging), and although I don't let myself get too hung up on stats, I still enjoy looking at them and comparing them month on month.

5. I love the community feel - Prior to starting my blog, I imagined bloggers to be very competitive with one another, and I thought there would be a lot of back stabbing. I couldn't have been more wrong! The blogging community is amazing - everyone is so friendly and welcomes new comers with open arms, often giving help and advice where needed. I have made a lot of new friends through blogging, and stupid as it sounds, I feel like they get me on levels my IRL friends don't.

Are you a blogger? What do you love about it? Let me know inn the comments :)

You can find me here: Twitter Bloglovin Pinterest and Instagram Please do stop by and say hi!

When Blogging Goes Bad!

On Wednesday night/Thursday morning, around 3am, I almost deleted my blog! The picture above represents perfectly how I felt at that moment.

Around 10pm Wednesday night, I was happily scrolling through my Twitter feed, not a care in the world, when one of my pre-scheduled tweets for the day's new post happened to pop up. Bear in mind this tweet, or a variation of it, had been going out once an hour since 10am. Something looked weird about it, and as I looked I realised to my horror the link to the post was wrong!

Through the day I had noticed the views the post was getting were a lot less than a new post normally gets, but I put it down to the fact the post was a reflection piece on the A to Z challenge I had just completed - maybe it was only of interest to other people who had completed the challenge? My other posts were getting viewed so I hadn't been overly worried. It didn't even occur to me to check the link I was posting - talk about a rookie mistake!

After the initial shouting, swearing and generally morphing into a crazy person, I took a deep breath sent out a couple of frantic tweets explaining what had happened and told myself it couldn't get any worse. I didn't know the universe was going to take that as a challenge!

I've hearing a lot recently about Google Analytics and been meaning to give it a try. I figured now was a good a time as any - maybe I would get some useful insights as to how badly the link issue had affected the day!

I went off and looked into it. I wasn't prepared for how much of a mammoth task it was going to be. Seriously, if you're blog is still relatively new, and you think there's even the tiniest chance you might want to use this feature in the future, I would highly recommend you start now.

The site generates a bit of code which, unless you are a confident enough web designer to embed this in the mainframe of the website, (which I am not so much can go wrong fiddling about with this if you are not 100% sure of what you are doing) you then need to go paste the bit of code into every single blog post and every single page.

As it's now getting on for 1am, I had nothing better to do so off I went, on my pasting journey. Now for most of my posts and all of my pages, this was uneventful - edit, HTML, paste, update, move on. A little boring, but simple enough.

However, for around 10 posts (I still don't know why these were different, or what happened) pasting in the code somehow made my blog decide these were new posts, which had to be displayed right at the top of my blog with a time code that said they had just been published! And of course, they had to be the oldest posts, some of them about topical things that are by now three months out of date!

Luckily, of all the posts this happened to, only one had comments on (if someone has taken the time to write a comment, deleting that post seems awfully rude) and they were so old, they probably bore no relevance to my blog today. So I deleted them. It wasn't something I wanted to do and I was unhappy about it to say the least, but needs must I suppose.

So code added, old posts deleted I eagerly went off to check my analysis - and it hadn't worked. The last two hours of pasting in code had all been in vain, I had deleted posts for nothing! It just wasn't worth it! It was the final straw in a day of blogging mishaps, and I went back to my blog with the full intention of deleting it altogether and putting the whole blogging thing down to experience - I figured if that many things went wrong all at once, I clearly wasn't cut out for this. I was over it and I was done with it!

Something stopped me - I don't know what, maybe the thought of all the hours of work that went into it, maybe the fact that analysing my stats wasn't that big a deal, I'm not sure, but I decided to close down, and if I still felt the same way the next morning I would delete it then and not look back.

 

 

Thursday morning came around, and I had had a change of heart. I put on my big girl pants, and gave myself a right good talking to. I'm not one for spitting my dummy out, and in that moment I didn't like how easily I was willing to quit (I'm detoxing this week, so maybe it was lack of carbs and sugar making me a bit irritable?).

I decided to pop back to Google Analytics, and see if I had missed any steps, if not, I would delete the code from all the posts and live without the stats!

I opened the site, and lo and behold, there it was - my first report. Somehow I had managed to miss the part where it says the first report can take up to 24 hours to generate! I'm glad I added the analytics and I would recommend it if you just want an in depth look at the demographic of your readers. But I urge you to read it all properly first!

I really can't believe how close I came to throwing in the towel because of a few set backs. I'm glad the rational part of mind eventually put in an appearance and stopped me deleting it - I how would have been gutted Thursday morning if I'd have gone through with it.

 

So what have I learned from this?

 

1. Sometimes, you are going to have days like this one. When it gets to the point where you are this angry, nothing is going to go right, and the smallest thing will feel like the end of the world. Walk away. Switch the computer off and don't go back until you are in a better frame of mind.

2. Never give up! In the moment, you will want to - that feeling won't last forever, just wait it out!

3. Never make decisions in anger! I already knew this one, but that night sure brought it home to me!

 

 

Sometimes, you just have to remember my favourite saying - worse things happen at sea!

 



 

Have you had a day like this? How did you overcome it?

 

Follow me on Twitter @randommusings29 and feel free to comment :)

W Is For Writing For Yourself

Day 23 of my A to Z Challenge. W is for Writing For Yourself.

If you don't know how this works, I've posted the link back to the rules of the challenge at the end of this, along with a link to yesterday's post. If you want to read my full alphabet, just keep following the links. Each day has a link back to yesterday's post.

I took part in Monday nights #bdibNA Twitter chat on Monday 11th May (if you've never taken part in one of these, do it. They are brilliant! They are held Monday and Friday night at 1am UK time). We discussed, amongst other things, what out greatest fears are with regards to our blogs, which inspired me to write this post.
I've always had a fear that no one reads my posts, or if they do, they hate them! It seems many of us have the same worry. It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks like this sometimes!
As the conversation progressed, a few comments were made that primarily, our blogs are just that - ours. And that we should be writing for ourselves.
I realised that I do write for myself. Obviously, having readers is important. Blogging takes up a lot of time and to think it's all in vain would be soul destroying, but if you're not writing for yourself, I think that would be soul destroying too. You have to find a balance between giving the reader what they want and it still feeling like your own blog.
To clarify what I mean, if the general consensus within my readers was that they like a certain type of post more than others, I would be happy to include more of that type. Equally if there was a type of post that got a lot less readers, I would do less of that type.
Where I write for myself is by staying true to my opinions. If I had an opinion that I believed would be unpopular, I would still write that that was my opinion - if not, then it's fake, and ultimately I value honesty. Firstly, because bowing to popular opinion is a cop out, and secondly because readers aren't stupid - they can spot a fake opinion a mile off, especially regular readers that know your writing style.
Hopefully, I've got the balance right!
As a blogger do you feel you have the balance right? As a reader do you think it's important to read something that reads as true, even if you disagree with the points made?

Follow me on Twitter @randommusings29 and feel free to comment :)


Link to rules:

http://myrandommusings.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/a-z-challenge-whos-with-me.html

Link to V Is For Victim Blaming: http://www.myrandommusings.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/v-is-for-victim-blaming.html

Why I Started Blogging

Not many of my friends know I blog. I know a lot of experienced bloggers will say I should promote my blog on my personal Facebook etc, and I understand where they are coming from - its a lot of potential readers! I choose not to do this for 3 reasons:
1. I don't want to be that person always self promoting in a place which is primarily for keeping in touch with friends.
2. I don't want my friends to feel obliged to read my posts.
3. If I get feedback on my writing, I want it to be honest, and I think friends tend to be nice, even if they didn't really like it.
Anyway, I got a little side tracked there! One of the few people who does know I blog asked me why I started. I thought it was a good question, and here's my answer:
Blogging isn't something I've always wanted to do. I've thrown the idea around before, but never in a serious, let's do this, kind of way.
At New Year, I wrote my resolutions, and one of them was to start writing a book. This is something I have always wanted to do, but keep putting off.
I knew what I wanted the book to be about. Its going to be fiction, but based loosely on a bad relationship I had which you can read about here; http://myrandommusings.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-relationship-that-made-me-grow-up.html
I've wrote short stories in the past but always total fiction, and always in 3rd person, and I want to write this in 1st person, so I started a blog to see how that would work. To use a cliché, to find my voice.
Originally, I was going to write a few posts and then delete the blog. I tried just writing on Word, but it didn't work. There was no motivation as it felt pointless. Its funny, because I never expected anyone to read the blog posts, but knowing that there was a chance, no matter how remote, meant there was a point to the writing.
To my surprise, people started reading my posts - not many but a few - and I continued to post.
I enjoy writing, and I'm pretty opinionated so it made sense I enjoy writing this blog.
That's when I realised that blogging wasn't just the means to an end for me, its something I want to continue doing, and I started to promote my posts on Twitter etc and got a few more readers.
I really do enjoy writing, and I now couldn't imagine not blogging.
I would be interested to know what made other people start their blogs.


Follow me on Twitter @randommusings29 and feel free to comment :)