Blog Blog Blogging Along – Learning As I Go

The things I do for my blog; I have a smart phone, why is this news?

I swore I would never own one, that’s why.

Apparently if you run a blog, they are essential.

  Most of the time I don’t know where my cheap and cheerful mobile phone is.

I forget to take it out with me, I never check it and when I do, there are usually a thousand and one missed calls.

 My only emergency where a mobile phone could have been useful was while I was freezing in our garden, wearing my night attire, mid-winter, having locked myself out and no one else was home.

 I could see my phone, through the window, sitting on the kitchen table.

 (You may be wondering how I managed to get back in, I broke into my own house, MGG, My Greek God, was not too pleased!).

 

 

Why would I need a Smart Phone?

 

Greeker (i.e me) is now the not-so-proud owner of a smart phone?

 Blogging made me do it.

 

 

Naïve of me, I know but when I started writing my blog, I thought that was it, you wrote it, gave it a quick once over, clicked all the right buttons and it was out there, on The Internet, for the world and his wife to read.

 Now I know better.

You need to learn complicated things, things with names you don’t understand, not even proper words, only initials; SEO, HTML; oh, that was a bad one, it took me a full day of hell to learn how to insert code into HTML.

 

 

It’s all Greek to me!

 

This learning curve doesn’t stop once you’ve published your post.

  There’s all sorts of stuff out there, to show you how your blog is doing, are people reading it, how old are they, where do they live, are they male or female?

 More learning, more complications, I’m still not sure how to fathom out Webmaster, Google Analytics and Adwords.

 

 

Then there are meta tags, keywords, page views, unique views, organic views, snippets, templates, gadgets, widgets and goodness knows what else.

It’s all about words, good ones, bad ones, adding them and then, on second thoughts, discarding them.

 Figuring it all out takes time and patience.

 

 

A flash of inspiration and I have a subject to write about, it needs research, lots of research, at least that can be done by surfing the web, no need for visits to libraries, it needs pictures, so, search for suitable images, all the above is time consuming.

I have other things to do.

  I have to feed MGG, see to my darling pug dogs, weed the garden and clean the loo (as one does).

 There’s a new book out, just begging to be read, it’s a glorious day, I must take my granddaughter to the beach; my whole schedule is turned upside down.

 

 

Finally, after hours with my laptop, my blog post is ready, much time has been lost here, through my inability to type; everything is done with one finger, even after five years of blogging!

One more thing I need to do; learn to type!

 

 

Next comes edit, edit and edit again, throw out, add, and throw out again.

And thank goodness for “Spell-check”.

 

 

The great moment has arrived; time to press the “Publish” button and launch my work into cyberspace and hope that somewhere out there someone will not only read it but enjoy it and find it interesting.

 

 

The point of all these hours spent alone with my laptop, sometimes in the middle of the night, feeling that I am the only person awake in the whole wide world, is to entice people to read my blog and here is where we come back to my smart phone.

 

 

A blog needs help once it’s out there alone, it needs to be pushed and promoted and it needs to show up in a Google search in order for it to be discovered; so that it may be “followed”.

 

 

Networking; this is the bit I don’t really like so much.

I would be happy to just write a post and publish it, that’s not how it works though.

 If you want readers, if you want followers and I do, it has to be done.

 

 

Social Media

 

 I’m registered with Face book, with Pinterest, with Twitter, with Bloglovin and a whole lot of others, more studying was needed here to actually link these social media sites to my blog.

 

 

I thought this list of social media was enough, until my daughter told me it would be a good idea to register with Instagram, it would help my blog rake in more followers; help accumulate traffic. (Blog language for readers).

 

 

One snag, to register with Instagram, I needed a smart phone, so, now I have a smart phone, you see? I told the truth; my blog made me do it!

 

The end of my life as I knew it

 

This makes one more thing I have to learn to use properly, I’m now registered with Instagram, as yet, I don’t have a single picture on there; I still have to sort out how it works.

Three of my personal rules have now gone out the window:

Get to bed before midnight.

Do not turn on computer until after 5 PM.

Get up, get dressed, get out.

 Dear blog, the things I do for you!