A Day since I Promoted My Blog - Reactions & Feedback
I had started working on my blog at the beginning of November when I bought the domain and hosting. Yesterday was the day when I officially shared my blog for the first time with a wide audience. In this post, I'll share my experience of going live with a blog.
Preparation
Now, this wasn't my first time of attempting to start a blog. I had already registered the same domain and installed the same software back in 2014. My first post also had the same title… Hello World! However, this time was different. I was determined to make this work.
After writing a couple of blog posts, I started working on getting the site production ready. I researched privacy policies, disclaimers and general ideas on how to set up a successful blog. I also started looking at SEO and how to make my blog social media friendly.
One day at the office I was chatting with a co-worker and decided to share the news that I was starting a blog. I shared one of the posts and got positive feedback. Later on, I had a chat with my boss on what I was planning. He encouraged me to take the plunge.
Sometime later I tweeted links to the Cubetto review and the "Hello World" post. Now, my twitter account had been pretty much dormant since I had created it. I got some traffic from the shares, but nothing major. At this point, I felt ready to share my creation with the rest of the world.
Going Public
I had started working on a FaceBook page for the blog for some time. Yesterday I decided to publish it publicly. I flipped the switch and sent a link to the page to my wife. The FaceBook notifications started coming in. 1 like, 2, 4, 10… All this without me even asking anyone to like the page.
At this point, I started worrying, "what if no one likes the content?". I started getting some encouraging comments to my post on how I became a programmer.
Feedback
I got a message from my mother on WhatsApp, "I read one of your posts. Well done. I found 3 mistakes which I feel you should fix. I'll send you an e-mail tomorrow morning".
I'm a person who craves feedback, especially if it helps me to improve myself. So, I was looking forward to receiving my mother's feedback. Now, my mother is a teacher by profession, so I ended up receiving much more than just 3 mistakes.
She asked me whether I had checked the grammar in Word. I'm ashamed to say that I was relying on the spell checker in Chrome and the Yoast WordPress plugin for reviews of the text. I didn't realise that none of them checks for grammatical mistakes. I fixed the mistakes she had found and asked her to review my other posts. Needless to say, I got more feedback from her.
At this point, I decided to look into the Grammarly Chrome plugin, as I wanted to avoid having stupid grammar mistakes. I compared my mother's feedback with Grammarly. I have to say my mother's feedback is better than the free version of Grammarly. Having said so, it does a good enough job that it's worth using.
I'm really grateful for the way my mother has provided me with feedback that helps me be better at whatever I'm doing.
Analytics
I'm really happy with the resulting traffic generated on the blog. The below are charts from CloudFlare and Google Analytics showing the traffic on the site for the past month.
Users in November 2018
These graphs tell me that people actually read something from the blog and followed the links on the FaceBook page.
Conclusion
It has been an emotional 24 hours for me. I'm grateful for all the feedback, comments and encouragement I have received. (I'm sure my mother will send me some suggestions, and I'm already grateful for them)
Have you ever been interested in setting up your own blog but been afraid? I strongly suggest you put in the effort and take the plunge. The experience you get out of it is worth it!