Let me start out my saying that I am not a professional blogger. I am an interior designer by learning, practice, passion and profession. Yet here I am today, writing a post on blogging tips. Actually, that sentence should read – ‘Yet here I am today, writing a blog post.’

Looks like this is going to be a long story… so make yourself a cup of coffee, get into your favourite reading chair, and let’s get started.

Source

How Did I Start Blogging?

I stopped working in 2005 when my son was born. Almost a decade later, I was talking to a cousin about getting back to work. I didn’t want a 9 to 5 since I was yet not comfortable about leaving the kids home alone all day, especially since they were used to having me around.

But how would I get work if I wanted to start out on my own? Who would trust me with their home when I hadn’t worked professionally for this long?

My cousin suggested I start blogging. It was a great work from home idea. I could keep an eye on the kids and yet do my own thing.

Then came the next question.. what do I blog about?

And from that comes the first of my first blogging tips…

Blogging Tips From My Own Experience

1 – Write What You Love, Love What You Write

There were so many options and suggestions that came up, a mommy blog being the most popular. But whichever way I looked at it and whatever option I considered, I kept coming back to interior design.

I started out by looking for other blogs to read. Yup, I hadn’t even read another blog till then. The only blogs that could hold my attention for more than a post were decor blogs. And when I came across Emily Henderson’s blog my heart sang a little song. THIS was what I would want my blog to be like.

Decor was the only thing that got me excited about writing. (Until then I hated writing, but I’ll get to that later.) And so I decided to write about design and decor and I am so glad I did.

I spend a huge amount of time reading and researching every post. And then there is the writing. I know I wouldn’t have been able to keep up if I didn’t truly love my subject.

2 – Be Yourself

Now that I had decided to write a decor blog, my next question was, what kind of decor? Should my style be modern and minimal, colourful and bohemian, or eclectic and somewhere in the middle?

Until, somewhere along the way, I realised that there are almost 8 billion people on this planet. Whatever in the world I might write, there will be so many people who simply love it, and then so many more who just don’t. Instead of trying to please all of them, why not just write from my heart and reach out to my own tribe of people who genuinely appreciate what I do.

The writing itself was another problem. I never really considered myself a writer. I remember leaving out the English composition in my class 12 board exams because I was sure I would pass the paper without it. (Crossing my fingers my kids never read this!)

But once I had decided to write this blog, nothing was going to stop me. One of the first blog posts I wrote is this one. Click on it to read only if you promise not to laugh or judge me… Unless you want to judge me for being brave and going ahead even though I had no idea what I was doing. With less than 200 words, no research, nothing substantial said and some very oddly edited pictures, it’s not something I’m really proud of now.

Except when it reminds me of how far I’ve come… and how far I still have to go!

3 – Be Consistent

In the beginning, I would write whenever I could think of something to write about. If I couldn’t come up with an idea, I wouldn’t write.

This obviously didn’t work too well. Some weeks I had a few hundred visitors on the blog, others I barely had any. I gradually realised I had to be consistent to get regular traffic on the blog. I started by making sure I wrote a post at least once a week. This meant that I might write on a Monday this week and on a Friday the next. So there might be a ten day gap between two posts or only two or three. Still not too consistent, if you ask me.

And so one fine day, I made a decision – ‘To write and to publish, from this Tuesday forward, for better, for worse, through work or vacation, in sickness and in health… This is my solemn vow.’

As you can see from the chart below, I now write a post every Monday which is published every Tuesday morning. And I have managed to do that consistently for at least the last two years.

 

I have made myself a blog calendar which is basically an Excel sheet with ‘Months’ along the x-axis and ‘Weeks’ along the y-axis. I fill in each spot with ideas as I think of them, requests as they come up and reveals and round ups at regular intervals. This way I know what I’m writing for the next few weeks to come.

When I go on vacation, I write before and pre-schedule the posts. And everyone, from family to friends now know that Monday is ‘blog post day’. Even my clients will postpone all non-urgent communication till Tuesday to give me the space and time I need to write.

4 – Don’t Ignore Social Media

If I had to choose just one of these blogging tips to been given to me before I started out, it would be this one. By far the BIGGEST mistake I made when I started blogging, was not being on any social media channel. I thought I’d write this amazing blog, and share it with family and friends. Then they would share it with theirs and in no time it would be in everyone’s favourites and one of the most read blogs ever.

Haha!

Reality: I wrote a very ordinary blog to start off with. (I know I’ve gotten much better at it… but I also know I still have a long way to go) I shared it with family and friends. They, being the sweethearts that they are, signed up, book marked it and shared it with all their family and friends. And though this got me a few hundred views every month it was still less than 500 views a month for the first seven months.

Remember the 8 billion people I wrote about above? How would they ever get to my blog if they didn’t know I was writing it.

The good part, I never gave up. And I never stopped learning or trying. (I’ll talk about both these in more detail later.)

After reading a zillion times over that I MUST be on social media, I finally got on to Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.

This chart below is the top referrers to this blog during this year so far. One look at it and you can see that all the readers are coming mostly from social media sites.

5 – Improve Your Photography Skills

And if they are coming from social media channels, guess what’s making them click and hop over to the blog?

You got it. It’s the pictures.

Whether it’s Pinterest, which is all about pictures, or Instagram where what you say to your tribe is just as important, you can’t do it without a good photograph. Even on Instagram, what gets you to stop scrolling and start reading a post is first the pretty picture.

So next on my blogging tips, make sure to keep improving your photography skills. I have always taken and edited all my own photographs. Except for one project so far, I have even taken all my project pictures myself. When I started out, with no income from the blog or my design business yet, I didn’t want to put in more money into the blog than I absolutely had to.

Which meant no professional photographer and no fancy equipment. I’ve only ever used my phone to take photographs. I wrote a post some time back on how to click and edit photos on your phone. You will definitely find it useful if you use your phone to take photos, so remember to check it out.

These two photos below of the same part of my living room will show you how I have improved my photography skills in small ways. The first was taken about 3 years back when I revealed my living room on this blog. The second a few months ago.

Notice the angular walls in the first versus the straight wall lines in the second, how the second photo is taken at eye level and how I’ve made sure to add more plants to the scene to give it more warmth and a feeling of completeness.

6 – Watermark Your Pictures

The next of my blogging tips is related to your pictures. If you are going to put your pics out on social media, you must make sure that the pics lead back to your own website.

I started watermarking my pictures only recently and for two reasons.

First, because my pictures were being used often on social media, and twice even in the newspapers, without giving any acknowledgement of credit to me as the owner of the pics.

Second, because I myself, very often, use other people’s pictures as examples on my own blog. Though I try as much as I can to link each picture back to it’s original source, many blogs don’t. Which means I might find a picture on Pinterest. When I click on it, it takes me to a website which has used the picture in their article without linking to the source where they found it. I have to then search similar pics on Pinterest and via Google image search to find where that picture originated. Even though I spend hours doing this for every post, I often still can’t find the original source of every picture.

But when a picture is watermarked, it becomes so much easier to do that. I directly go the website and it’s easy to find the picture on it and link to it.

Now I automatically add a watermark to every picture as I edit it in Photoshop Express.

7 – Write On Topics That People Will Search For

I showed you above how most of my blog readers come from various social media channels and search engines. Here’s how that probably happens.

Let’s suppose someone gets on to Pinterest and wants ideas on how to make a gallery wall. She puts ‘gallery wall’ in the search bar and pics from the posts on gallery walls on this blog show up on her Pinterest page. She clicks one of them to reach my blog.

Now suppose I wrote a post on my pet called, ‘All About Sprite’. How likely is it that anyone would search for it or be able to find that post?

So unless you are writing your blog as a hobby, make sure your posts are going to be useful to your readers in some way. That they would want to look them up, save them and share them further.

8 – Don’t Give Up

And after you’ve done all of that and everything right, you still have to have a ton of patience and wait for the results to show.

This chart below is the monthly views on my blog from the time I started right up to now. I started off completely unprepared and knowing nothing and so took the longest time to get even 500 views on the blog every month.

Jan 2017 is when I got my first 100 followers on Instagram, and you can see how that started to make a difference to the blog views.

Mid 2018 is when I started posting regularly, and you can see a consistent increase in viewers there.

From something as basic as how to add links to the blog, to how to change the social media buttons in the side bar, to what I’m doing wrong and where I’m getting stuck, I’ve Googled my way through everything and still continue to do so.

Don’t worry about failures, don’t worry about not getting instant results and don’t give up!

My final, and most important of all blogging tips to you, is to keep at it, keep learning and you will keep growing.

.

From 500 views when I started to a little less than 96,000 last month, it’s been a 4 year long journey. I was so excited about the first time I got a thousand views in a single month, and I am looking forward to hundred thousand with the same enthusiasm and excitement.

And still, I am not primarily a blogger. I spend just one day a week on the blog while I spend the rest of the week on my design projects.

But the blog serves its purpose, because guess where I’ve got most of my work from? And along the way I think it’s become the most popular decor blog by an interior designer in India.

Is it a lot of hard work and commitment? Yes.

Is the effort all worth it? Yes.

Do I still enjoy working this hard at it? Yes.

It’s the only reason I have been able to keep the commitment. Is because I still love what I do.

Which brings us back to the first of the blogging tips. Do what you love, and love what you do.

To all the new bloggers out there, wishing you all the very best. I hope these blogging tips have helped. Feel free to write in if you have any questions in the comments below and I’ll try to help the best I can.

Until next time,