Q & A with MC

Q&A About Blogging

May 19, 2011 /

Brown (142 of 182) ps
By far, the most common questions I receive are about blogging – how I got started, how I put up boundaries, what works, what doesn’t, etc. Rather than try to blog on each question, I thought I’d answer them all in one shebang.

Brown (178 of 182) ps

How do you handle the negative comments and feedback you get on your blog?  Does it bother you?  How do you not take it personally?  And how do you let the negative stuff go?

That is one of the hardest parts of blogging. It took me a little over a year before my skin toughened up. I think a lot of letting it go comes with my confidence in my decisions. I could never have handled all the negative feedback I received about choosing not to breastfeed if I hadn’t been 110% comfortable and confident that I was making the right decision for myself. It’s easier to shake those comments off if I’m confident.  Once I learned that part, I changed a little bit about how I blogged. I only blog about things that I’ve already come to peace with in my own mind. I don’t really work through things in my blog posts anymore and that helps me to feel comfortable with my own choices.  When I receive negative feedback, I just tell myself that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and that person’s just happens to be different than mine. I also try to look for the good in the nasty comments. True, some are just out and out mean just to be mean and those people have issues within themselves to work out that has nothing to do with me.  But sometimes people who disagree with me actually have valid information.  They may present it very rudely or harshly or with a tone of judgment, but I try to look past that part and listen to what point they are making – not necessarily how they are making that point.  In the end though, it really comes down to being comfortable with who you are and what you are writing.  The times I write on issues that I’m not sure of my own stance on are the times when I really get bothered by negative comments.  But the times that I write about something I’ve come to terms with on my own, I am able to let the negative comments and feedback slide right off my back.

How do you decide what you’ll blog about and what you’ll keep private?

If it were completely up to me, I’d share everything.  I have no filter.  But I try to remember that this blog is about my family, so there are other people’s lives being represented here, too.  Keeping that in mind, I think the most important rule I have about my blog is that every post I write gets read by Chris before I publish it.  I don’t make anything public before he gets a say.  It wouldn’t be fair.  As for my kids, I have a general rule for myself that I don’t blog too much about their health issues.  I don’t go into detail when they’re sick or how we make them better.  I feel like that’s not my business to share.  Another way I draw a boundary – for my family and for other people – is to try to blog how I speak.  Would I say what I am writing to their face?  Would I care if that person read what I wrote?  If the answer is no, then I don’t post it.

Brown (181 of 182) ps

How long did it take to get an audience and how did you attract readers?

It took about a year before I saw any kind of steady readership (other than my Grandma…she’s my longest running fan!).  And even after that, it’s been a slow, but steady climb in readership.  More than numbers, I pay attention to my percentage of new readers though.  I’d rather grow slow and continuously than have one or two big spikes in readership that never really stay.  Building your readership slow and steady means you’re growing a community of readers and that’s really what bloggers should strive for.  In the first two years, I attracted readers by going out and commenting on other blogs and leaving my URL in my comment post.  But once the balls gets rolling and your readers start to increase steadily, you really don’t have to do much to grow.  It happens organically.  The best way to grow your numbers, in my experience, is to blog routinely and often.  Blog readers are fickle (no offense, Imaginary Friends…).  They come to blogs to be entertained.  If there’s no one there to entertain them, then they’re going to go somewhere else and be entertained.  The more consistent I am with my blog posts, the steadier my readership is.

Which blogging platform do you prefer? WordPress, Blogspot, etc.

I started out using WordPress and I loved it.  It was free and easy to use.  I also really liked that they promoted their own blogs and occasionally my blog would get picked up as one they profiled and it really helped grow my site in the very beginning.  As I got more experienced in blogging, I moved my site over to WordPress.org.  This functions a lot like the standard WordPress.com blogs, but it is for more advanced bloggers and allows you to do things like alter or write your own code.  That way you can customize your site even more.  Once that was going well, we moved over to our own domain (www.marriageconfessions.com).  We still use WordPress.org as my back end platform.  I always recommend WordPress for new bloggers because it makes it easy to start without any prior knowledge about blogging, but it allows you to grow into a much larger site as your numbers increase.

Brown (142 of 182) ps

Do you make money blogging?  How?

I do make money from my blog.  I use BlogHer as my advertising company and I love it.  You apply to be part of the BlogHer advertising family and, if you’re accepted, they make it really easy.  You complete a survey about what kind of ads you’d allow or not allow on your site and then they give you the specification for advertising space on your blog.  I get paid per pageview on my site.  So, every time you guys click around, I make a little more money – so, thanks!  I like using an advertising company like BlogHer as opposed to doing my own advertising because they do all the hard stuff.  They find advertisers, negotiate rates and contracts, and then once a month they send me a check.  For someone like me who has a full time job and a young family, using BlogHer saves me time and makes the process so much easier. 

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