OUR TASK FOR TODAY - The world of book blogging has grown enormously and sometimes it can be hard to find a place. Share your tips for finding and keeping community in book blogging despite the hectic demands made on your time and the overwhelming number of blogs out there. If you’re struggling with finding a community, share your concerns and explain what you’re looking for–this is the week to connect.
Actually, I didn't expect my blogging acivity to spread and widen so much as to become terribly engaging, really rewarding, and so ... time consuming!I started with LEARN ON LINE to provide my students with audiovisual materials as well as notes, useful links, power point presentations and so on. But, soon after, I felt like I wanted something more personal and I started writing FLY HIGH , with my book reviews, favorite period dramas, films and series, art, trips and journeys, theatrical shows, school and ... my one weakness, British actor Richard Armitage.
Among my favorite authors, Jane Austen. Writing about "everything Austen" was rather frequent on FLY HIGH, so when the responsible for the public library in my town asked me to moderate a "Jane Austen Book Club" and read all her novels, one a month for six months, I made up my mind to also set up a blog where to post all the materials for and about that experience. The real club ended but the virtual one around the blog has grown and grown and now "My Jane Austen Book Club" has more followers than FLY HIGH! I have featured lots of Austen writers and had the honor to interview them, review their books and receive their friendly acknowledgements. It hasn't finished yet. I started wondering how I could spread the word about the great deal of work I did on my blogs. No doubt. I had to try with Twitter and Facebook. They are so simple to use and so popular! This is when I started a Twitter account as SMaryG, a Facebook account as FLY HIGH and a Facebook page for My Jane Austen Book Club. My most recent online "creature" is The Everything Austen Daily , a daily paper I publish collecting automatically the links twitted with the tags #janeausten or #austenesque. I was almost forgetting my Utube Channel and my Vimeo Channel! I don't take much care of them, but they are out there too.Now, how should I measure how successful my efforts have been in your opinion? Counting how many comments a day I get? How many new followers I get? Because , despite all those efforts, the stats haven't changed so much, my followers haven't become more numerous and comments are actually rare, not that many. I should presume they were totally unsuccessful, then :-/
Instead, I'm really happy about my little community, I love writing about the things I'm fond of, only ... I started thinking I should reduce somehow the amount of work I usually dedicate to my blogs daily. Nothing changes, actually. Either I post everyday or from time to time, I don't notice any great difference in the traffic. If I post the links to my blogposts on Twitter or Facebook, I don't get more visits or more comments. Is it worth going on working so regularly and intensively? I'm quite disappointed with facebook or twitter. What happens most of the time is that someone retweets your link without reading your piece , or they "like" the link on fb without even having a look at what you wrote. Sometimes people comment directly the link on fb without following it, clocking on it. They just look at the picture, ignore if you wrote something positive or negative about that book, film, topic, person and ... leave their comment!
Worst thing? There are days when I feel "invisible" - especially on fb. Do you think it is worth going on posting my links there? FLY HIGH facebook friends are 1329, and My Jane Austen Book Club fb page has been liked by 803. My followers on both blogs are dramatically fewer.
Conlcusion: Blogging is such fun I'm not planning to stop. Seriously thinking of dumping social networks down, instead!
I'd like to understand why that happen. What should I change according to you, expert or enthusiastic bloggers? What do you suggest me to do to improve my blogging activity? Any tip will be really welcome!
