Let's talk blogging

I receive e-mails from you guys on a daily basis and feel proud to say that there hasn't been a single sane e-mail that I haven't responded to. However, over time, I've been forced to categorize these emails into folders in order to create a safe little home for all the mushiness that I never want to lose. Once upon a time, the only category in use was "Fan Mail". Soon, I had to create "Fan Mail/Weird". That's where all the "Naalson will you marry me reply please" and "send your photo with name to 94139936" and "who are you?" and "I'm calling. You weting?" go.

But over the past few months, I've had to create a new category called "Fan Mail/Blog setup". This is where I store all the e-mails that come in, requesting my assistance in setting up your blogs. A lot of you have wanted to start your own blogs and I really appreciate the fact that you felt open enough to ask for help. Unfortunately, help usually comes a little late because I'm kind of technologically retarded and The Husband is the one who handles the back-end side of things. So I either forward these emails to him in the hope that he will respond to them or I try to get him to type out a response in my presence.

Either way, we realized that there's too much information to share and too little time to craft individual responses. We decided that it would be better to document our response and point further queries in the future to this document. So we sat down and went through all these emails in an attempt to narrow down your most commonly asked questions and concerns, some of which are for me to respond to while the others are totally his area of expertise. We found that the most common questions were:

  1. I want to start a blog but I don't know what I should write about. How do you stay motivated to keep writing?

  2. I have no technical background and lack the skills to manually set up a blog. Could you explain if there's an easy way to set up my own personal blog?

  3. I have been blogging for a few months and haven't gained many followers. How do I grow my blog traffic?

  4. How can I set up Google Adsense for my blog and monetize my content?

If there are more of you out there who are wondering the same things but haven't sent in a query yet, worry not. We have decided to answer all four of these questions in individual blog posts this week. We hope that we will be able to help as many of you as possible in setting up your own little blogs with as little complication as possible. I will be tackling 1 and 3 while The Husband goes into a lot of depth with 2 and 4. I have taken special care to ensure that he doesn't throw around too many technical terms to confuse you. I told him that his posts should be simple enough for me to understand completely, and to feel comfortable enough to set up my own blog. For this purpose, he has included screenshots and step by step instructions. I can confidently say that I was able to follow his instructions so I'm guessing that those of you out there who are like me will also have no difficulty in understanding the wee technicalities of setting up a blog.

Once again, this week we'll be sharing:

  1. How to select a genre for your blog.

  2. How to set up a blog (the way we did).

  3. How to grow your blog traffic.

  4. How to monetize your blog content online.

We're going to be sharing solely based on our personal experiences which is what I hope you were looking for in the first place. There's a lot of blogging literature and advice available online and honestly, we haven't read up much ourselves. We taught ourselves everything from scratch and followed our gut when it came to mapping our own path in this big, BIG world of blogging. So if you've been doing this for a longer time than we have, and if you have some pearls of wisdom to share with us and our audience, please do leave a comment under the respective posts and help both us and our fellow bloggers get better at what we do.

If anything, I hope that this week we'll at least motivate those of you who never even thought of starting a blog to start one, just for the heck of it :)

Happy blogging week, you guys!

#motivationmonday