We all felt for Andy Murray’s anguish when he came runner up at Wimbledon 2012 yesterday. Such a blow to hit a young man with incredible passion to win this amazing tennis championship. So near and yet not far enough: his quote “I’m getting closer!” says it all.
Let’s hope his passion will not diminish to allow him to try again next year. Andy has to combine his passion with persistence, focus and constant practise, continuously toning his body and mind to compete with the incredible pressures to win such a tournament. And of course he has the Olympics in just over two weeks, another chance to do his country proud, so needs to concentrate on an appropriate mindset for that.
Passion is an incredible driving force. It is the focus that keeps us going, provides food for thought, content and planning the next stage, fuelling the desire to create what we set out to do, to help, educate, entertain and inform our readers through our posts.
Blogging thrives on passion. It is the base ingredient of a successful post. Your readers will sense, understand and appreciate your passion, especially if you are skilled in revealing it within your words and language. It provides positivity, a centrepoint for your raison d’être, and if you can share with your readers your passion, goals and aspirations, they will ride the journey with you, and if you let them, encourage and boost you along the way.
This blog is a vehicle for my passion and what it represents. The Fairy Blog Mother aims to improve her educational status in teaching bloggers about how to blog, create a blog, improve their blog and write better posts. My journey has gone up several notches after creating a proper marketing plan, and there will be many exciting and valuable times ahead. Meanwhile I will gird my lions, fasten my seat-belt and don protective clothing as I venture forth to catch up with my passion and to meet its needs.







Results of my blogging experiment so far
The most amount of views in one day has been 12 so far, and since the third day I have always had traffic (I’m up to 70 views so far). I’m not sure about the reliability of WordPress’s statistics, as when I have received email notifications about ‘likes’ from readers, these have not been picked up. Therefore I suggest you treat these results with a pinch of salt, and don’t take them as ‘gospel’.
One of the main indicators of a successful blog is the amount of interaction you receive, whether it’s in the form of comments or ‘likes’. Even though the latter is gratifying, the former is the most desired (so far I’ve got two), as it shows you have moved the reader enough to express themselves in words rather than just pressing a button.
I have set up the sharing buttons to allow readers to share my posts, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it is early days… However, the RSS system is set up to syndicate or feed my posts onto Twitter and Facebook, and the stats do show if anybody does click through from these to view my posts.
Frequency is certainly a good indicator to get regular traffic, but so is good content. Visitors need to know that whenever they visit they will get something worthwhile to read, as well as something new each time. Pictures make blog posts more interesting, and can say a lot more than words, so you can create a satisfactory post quite quickly and easily. I will be investigating how to make this process more efficient using various technological advances that are becoming available – watch this space.
Another thing to mention is that I take as much care with my categories and tags as with the quality of content and pictures. Adequate keyword usage stimulates the search engines and helps new visitors to find you. And it’s important to include the alt tags behind your images too, not only for the spiders to read, but to help any partially sighted visitors to understand your blog better.
If you want to take a look at the blog in question, feel free: http://aspiringcountrywoman.wordpress.com