The Journey to being a blogger and Social Media Influencer

 Hello, my blog followers and friends, this is a personal post about my journey to being a blogger and social media influencer.

Do you know, what's beautiful about being a blogger? Pouring your heart out and emotions flowing freely into words. I am not an introvert for sure, but I enjoy writing more than speaking. Writing comes naturally to me without much effort. I am not talking about professional writing, but just like a journal jotting down my experiences.

The Begining:

I started my blog around 13 years ago to document my book reviews, but then, my love for travel dominated my blog. This is my first blog post which seems too silly now. 

During this journey of 13 years, I learned a lot from other bloggers, read many beautiful blogs, watched videos, and read articles on how to manage a blog, what plugins to use, how to format it blah blah..My page views were too low as expected(500 views per month) as I didn't write anything to impress others but used my blog as a journal.

The Progress:

The next phase started when I was researching how to promote blogs on social media or whatever channels available. I started traveling more and there is a lot of content that I am publishing regularly. 

I got extra time to write posts in simple, clear sentences, proofread, and edit them in small paragraphs. I also got a knack for creating graphics with Canva which made my blog posts look better and readable. 

Of course, sharing my blog posts on social media really helped me. Also, it made me understand what it means to be a social media influencer. 

Social Media Impact :

The first platform that helped me to grow my blog is Twitter. I least expected it, but I use Twitter also to get the latest information on some trending topics and follow the topics that I am interested in. I got my first 500 followers with this platform. 

Facebook is for my close friends and family, so I get more page views from Facebook naturally. But, I don't over-promote there and restrict promoting personal content. 

My most favorite platform is Instagram. I love sharing the photos from my blog posts, adding a call to action to let the followers click the link in my bio, and increase the reach of my post by using relevant hashtags.

Doesn't seem complicated right?

- beautiful phots

- Call to action and

- Relevant hashtags

My followers gradually increased to around 700 within a few months and my traffic to my blog too saw some hits from this platform.

Pinterest Magic!

The last and most effective platform which helped my blog grew in terms of page views is Pinterest. I would have learned about its power in my earlier days of blogging.

Due to many mentors and blogging friends like Shailaja, I could quickly understand the basics of Pinterest to make it work. Here is Shailaja's page if you want to get her guidance on Pinterest. 

My Pinterest brings me the most traffic nowadays even when I don't blog regularly. My Pinterest profile gets around 50k profile views every month and my blog also reached 15 k monthly views with around 500 views every day.

PC: www.pixabay.com

SEO:

I am still a newbie on SEO, but this really helps me in bringing some of my pages to the top place in Google search. Since I am busy these days, I couldn't focus more on it, but I follow a few tips to get some results at least.

- To use relevant keywords in my blog post title, the first paragraph, and in the search description for each post

- To research topics that are trending to write blog posts

- To rename the images with keywords and use alt text to insert keywords

- Use lengthier posts with simple, easy to understand sentences and small paragraphs

- Use high-resolution images and graphics

I think, if I spend more time on SEO, I can increase my website traffic for sure.

So, that is the journey so far to 15k page views per month. If you are a blogger, did you experience and explore the topics that I mentioned?

I would love to know your experiences and journey to being a blogger and social media influencer. 

Until next time,

I am happy to be collaborating with Intellifluence for this opportunity to talk about social media influencing.