Can't see that anyone's started this thread yet. I don't fit neatly into any particular category as I blog about my life and interests, including parenting, photography and blogging/social networking as the core topics with others occasionally thrown in. Anyone else?
Blogging at Semantically driven
Oh me too Jaycee! I am at a loss for where to go Forum wise for today's task - are there such things for Personal Blogs? What exactly is our niche? Our blog covers a variety of things we are interested in such as movies, music, books, photos and sports in a way that hopefully people find entertaining and humorous. We do several memes but also write original posts to mix it up. We are just starting out and trying to meet some great new people and learn from them. But we are also trying to gain some experience to use on other sites/forums in the future for freelance writing, etc. and hope that any base of followers that we build will follow us along in those ventures too.
Hi, I started one called Kitchen Sink blogs but maybe the term was too confusing! Or maybe kitchen sinks are a real niche?
My name is Tracy and my blog is I Hate My Message Board. I also have the IHMMB forums.
As for today's assigment, I wrote on another thread that I'm starting up a new project on one of my forums that I'm hoping will evolve into a place for bloggers like us, that don't have a specific niche, to gather, get ideas and spark each other's creativity.
I don't want to promote my own idea too heavily, but if anyone is interested in hearing more, I'm glad to answer questions.
And if you are not, I say find a forum that YOU would be interested in posting in. Chances are, if it attracts you, your interests will mesh very well with the posters and you'll find that many will be interested in your blog, too.
Tracy, please share your project. I'm also announcing a little project tomorrow (16 April) for my five year blogging anniversary.
Hey same to me too, I blog about what's going on everyday in my life, sometimes I use some photos to illustrate daily life.
My blog is mostly a personal/life blog. As I just recently turned thirty, it's geared towards the thirty something crowd and chronicles my life in my 30's.
www.thirtysomethingblog.com - Stories, advice, and random thoughts from a thirty-something female.
http://twitter.com/erin_ts
www.cmfads.com
I'm also a personal blogger. Doing this challenge I was able to define what it is I'm blogging about. As of today, about the transition from a bride to a wife. We'll see what happens next :)
What a fun thread. My blog, Catered Crop, is mostly about paper crafting, and specifically about Stampin' Up! craft supplies. I do incorporate a few personal things - it keeps the blog fun for me and helps my readers feel like they know me personally. I've had people join my business and come to my craft classes through my blog - they feel like they're doing business with a friend.
My tagline pretty much sums it up for me:
Unpaid Entertainer: The Unfiltered Observations, Stories, Musings and Humor of a Heedless, Misanthropic Extrovert.
So I guess it is a personal blog of sorts. It's as close to that niche as any other.
Hi Jaycee! Since you twisted my arm...btw, I sub'd to your blog so I could see what the surprise is!
Right now, I have a forum that is fairly busy, 840 members, 600K posts in a little over a year. The group is great and tight knit, but that's proving a hurdle to getting new posters and fresh perspectives. It's hard to break into an established group.I just wanted to be transparent that part of my project is a hope to increase traffic and participation in my forum.
I also have a passion for blogs and bloggers and would like to help great bloggers find wider audiences, particularly in our niche, personal blogging. I think that if we worked together, we could help each other in so many ways - expanding our reader base, sparking new ideas, encouragement.
What I've started this week, is taking a subforum I haven't done much with, OFFS (I guess you could say that stands for Oh for fudge's sake, heh) and dub it a Flog. I'm starting slowly - this week I've started a daily Funny Blog Post of the Day where I find a blog post I think is funny and then riff on it a bit. Here's an example.
My hope is to attract other bloggers to this forum and take turns promoting each other's best posts. And for those bloggers to help me promote the forums - perhaps linking to a particularly good thread every now and then or using social networking, that sort of thing. And hopefully as the forum grows, we'll each get more readers, great company and lots of ideas to take home to our own blogs.
Now, we would not be strictly talking about blogs and blog posts, there would be other sorts of general conversational threads. And I also don't think there will be an instant boom! huge traffic effect, but I'm confident if we stick with it for a few months this could work.
My aim is to start slowly, perhaps "recruit" a few bloggers this week to start posting in the forums, then perhaps the next week they could invite a few more and build from there. I was planning on asking my blog readers next week to help out with this project, but Darren's post today encouraged me to reach out to the bloggers on this forum and ask if any are interested in participating.
If you'd like to be a part of this "Flog", you can register at the IHMMB Forums. The forums I'd like to concentrate new posts on are OFFS and our Writer's Forum. You can also email me at tracy.oconnor@gmail.com and I'll put together a weekly brief email to keep you up to date on our progress and ways to participate.
The key to this project's sucess is that each of us will be giving as well as getting. I'm kind of looking at the timing of Darren's post as an omen that we can make this happen!
Thanks so much for reading! And please if you have suggestions for my Funny Post of the Day, email them to me - I'm always looking for great blogs to read.
Tracy, I've posted about my surprise! I haven't had a chance to visit your forum yet. I couldn't even get into this forum last night at home to see what it was. I'm at work now viewing this but obviously sneaking this time in to post. I'll check back in tomorrow.
My blog falls into the personal/mama/lifestyle blogging category as well -- it's nice to see more of you out there as opposed to all of the more business minded folk!
My life. My inspirations. My loves.
http://sofawned.com
My blog was a way to capture my thoughts and the many things that make my life great! And there are lots. I try to keep the ranting down to zero and it is a downward slope to blog solitude. Anyways I am really happy to have found fellow Personal/Life Bloggers here so I can smile, learn and just interact with.
This is going to be exciting!!
I also have a personal / social blog: Solo-Dad.com It chronicles smy life as a single dad and the issues confronting other single parents. It's a part-time effort, mainly for fun.
BlogAsReligion.com - Blogging sucess without a gazillion readers
I've had a difficult time finding my niche, too. I kind fit into the SAHM blogs; however, I don't write very much about my kids or my family. It's more of a personal blog.
My work -in-progress elevator pitch is: Graceful Creative serves two purposes. First, it is a journal of my personal journey to redefine myself. Secondly, it serves as an inspiration for other women to reclaim their inner beauty, and become more than watered-down versions of themselves.
I am also a personal blogger, blogging about my life and interests which vary (a lot!). I think that in itself is a niche, clearly you can see with the comments that there are people doing it and it is ok. I believe there is something for everyone out there.
@kirwin - my blog's elevator pitch is also a work in progress. I plan on revisiting it when the 31 days are over. How about others here? Have you done an elevator pitch. If so, did you struggle with it because your blog's topic is so broad?
@jaycee @kirwin I haven't been able to come up with an elevator pitch besides my blog's current tagline:
Humor, crankiness, a museum of snack foods and the odd motivational piece"
Frankly, I'm surprised nobody has offered me a movie deal yet. ;-)
@jaycee Congratulations again on five years, love the project you cooked up!
It was the assignment of my elevator pitch that had me commit to what I wanted to blog about:
"Hi, I’m Alison and I write New Life as New Wife to help women make the transition from the single world to the married world while maintaining a little rock n' roll. I started New Life as New Wife in 2008 as a spin off to my A Day in the life of a Rockstar Bride Blog, to help women deal with the transition of past excitement associated with planning a wedding to the sometimes let down of “reality” AKA post-wedding. Prior to being a Rockstar Wife, I spent the last 6 to 9 years as an IT professional, dance instructor and an awesome Rockstar girlfriend. To contact me, please email newlifenewwife@gmail.com"
I also have a personal blog called www.gregellison.net. The blog is about my interests, my job, and my life.
Greg Ellison
I'm a mom - but working outside so I don't fit into SAHM blogs, I write a lot about Dubai but I don't travel, but instead live here and write about how it is to live here, throw in some touristy stuff. It's hard to know what kind of niche I belong to so I guess I'll be here...hi everyone! I just signed up to the forums today. Should've done this earlier!
Hey all, loved hearing about your blogs and projects. I'm Dina, a mom of tweenagers (over 17, under 21) and baby boomer who blogs about marriage, midlfe and making big transitions like from mom to emptynester, from child to caregiver, from this life to my newly designed life as a writer. As Allison says, sometimes in married life you get juicy cherries, other times, it's the pits. We talk about the weird, silly and annoying parts, too, but always with humor and a positive attitude. My blog's tagline: Master marriage and midlife one boondoggle at a time.
Really, I'm trying to incite a revolution to make marriage, especially longer marriages, more fun. To do that I'm starting a collaborative writing project that brings readers, bloggers and me together to create the ultimate gift guide written by women for men. My tagline for the guide: no time, no ideas, no problem- romance in just one click. My goal is to have my fan page, which explains it all, up by the end of the week, if I can swing it with the homework. My plan is to create a resource that readers love while promoting bloggers, products and services via the book and later a website. Got gift expertise on any topic? Drop me a note.
Delighted to meet you all, and I look forward to reading your blogs and learning more. If you have a minute, I invite you to browse, This Marriage Thing Here's hoping we all get what we want,
I run into this constantly -- how to define the personal blog niche.
Further, how does one apply the same principles that one applies to an SEO blog or a marketing blog, for example.
Who am I targeting? Um, the world. Yes, I want the world to read my blog.
What service am I providing? A few chuckles. Doesn't everyone want and/or need a few chuckles?
So how do I find that demographic and serve it? No clue.
While I am a mother and I do stay at home with my kids, I write more about the inane things I observe, with a strong focus on trying to outlast a 70-year-old woman on the elliptical machine at the YMCA. That chick is adamant. Regardless, I don't consider myself a Mommy Blogger (ugh I hate that moniker) but I do wonder if I would get more traffic if I focused on that demographic.
Anyway, my pitch goes thusly:
Sometimes I wish I had a stable of multiple personalities to deal with life’s trials. Gigi would take care of the house, Beverly would nanny the kids and Ghostface Killah would deal with my extended family.
But in reality it’s just me, Cardiogirl, trying to raise three small girls with my husband of 15 years. I’m a low maintenance chick — have Converse low tops, will travel.
I'm really looking forward to meeting my own peeps here in the Personal/Life blogs.
Cheers!
Cardiogirl http://www.cardiogirl.net
@CuriousDina - love your blog/site idea! A fun new read!
Sandier Pastures - we've met before through Thursday 13! Nice to see you here too. It is a small world - so the collaboration message that I keep coming across is certainly important. Cardiogirl - I feel exactly the same way. I am having a hard time with some of the more marketing tasks during the 31 Days event. But it is making me observe and focus more. We seem to have a similar style - maybe we should collaborate!
Molly @ The Bumbles
Let the Bumbles/Cardiogirl collaboration begin!
Since our Day 15 task is to find a blogging buddy I thought I'd stop by here. Anyone wanna buddy up? :) My blog is about me, my life, and anything else I have going on or want to talk about. I'm 29 years old and a self professed computer geek if that helps tie yourself to me :)
-Harold Martin
The Daily Harold
Cardiogirl - I got your post and sent you an e-mail. Maybe we'll actually figure this collaboration thing out! One thing I saw after I went back and re-read Darren't "blog buddy" task looking for magical instructions specific to us was that part of the benefit is to get input/encouragement from each other. I look forward to having someone to bounce ideas off of - in addition to working together somehow.
hmmm, don't know how to find a buddy in my area, but there are so many interesting blogs and people. If anyone wants to link up or just see life from a different perspecive, check me out here: www.newworldstoconquer.blogspot.com
This 31 day challenge has been really fun so far although I am struggling to stay afloat.
Great blogs everyone, keep 'em going!
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