Lifestyle Blogging is not just about self promotion and selfies – WordPress Singapore

It’s not just about self-promotion and selfies that I catch it. I’ve seen a website so uh, yes to you, okay, uh, hi, everyone. I actually don’t usually present about all this, so I don’t think I am the expert or anything. I just write a lot. I’ve been writing for a long time, so jon was just asking me if I could come in and share so the same thing.

I expect that lie 15 people and I thought you’d just be informal sessions bites, and so it’s quite a lot of people today yeah. So the topic was supposed to be quite funny right because everybody expects lifestyle vloggers to just post office all day and yeah. Nothing much else, but I really enjoy blogging. So I’m going to just share a couple of things. I’ve learnt along the way, and hopefully you find something of value to you today.

So I’m just going to I’m just going to tell you that I’m not going to do a writing workshop today. I’r also not going to do a click bait. You know crash course, because I obviously am not expert in all those things, but what i’m going to tell you is really my story, how they, I managed to start blogging and what I learned eventually creating better content each time and how he also helped me in Terms of my SEO, because uh, no I’m I’m listening to what was being shared, and I realized a lot of things that good writing helps you with its link to SEO as well so yeah.

So this is the timeline of what I did in blogging. So I created my first vlog using microsoft. Frontpage anybody remembers that so you know I was in Computer Club and I was like okay, I’m going to create a vault, so I individually created pages on microsoft, frontpage and I uploaded it on a free sub domain. Somebody gave it gave me so that was all the way in two thousand, so I’ve been logging for about 16 years yeah then in 2002.

I started blogging on blogger because that was you know the reach at the point of time and then 2007. I moved over to wordpress because you know this time, I’m a teenager, so I wanted to try new stuff and I thought so wordpress was something that I stuck to in the end. So eventually in 2010 I co-founded the Campbells, which was actually a really frivolous lifestyle. Blog we blogged about going to parties, he posted lots of selfies, so we did everything that a regular her lifestyle blogger would do before reaching 2014.

So what actually happened is I went from selfie selfies email posts and then some recommendations somewhere into anything. But then what happened was this surrounded by this point in between 2010 2014 can remember when I asked myself, because I was kind of sick of writing the same things over and over. What would my readers want to read right? Because it’s boring to write just for myself, so I started writing about what we just want it.

And then the next point was just over here and then I got sick of blogging because I wrote what everybody else wanted to read and I really don’t write anything that I wanted to write. So it was really tiring and I just ended up writing every single day, but nothing of it was of importance to me and then right over about here, which is probably the best part oops yeah. So I asked as myself you know what can I write? That is of value to my readers and still a value to me.

Something that would impact me make me feel happy to write at the same time what people would enjoy reading. So this is a fantastic quote. It says to hell with the facts: we need stories and I think that’s the nature about sharing online. You really want to read a story about somebody else. You really want connect with somebody else. I confess I’ve, never read anything by ken K, sec, okay, bye. I know if the novelist – but I thought this was very apt, so I’m just I’m just going to share what I discovered during that point when I could create the content that I am proud of today and that if this is my recipe, it’s actually quite common Sense, I think it’s very basic, but it balances what I want and what the readers want.

So for me, why it’s important to me. I want to express myself when I write my content. I want to feel satisfied when I write it and I also want to feel fulfillment and I want to be creative at the same time, so it means being able to experiment and to you know, play around in things. At the same time, I needed to realize that I need a balance, what my readers wanted, and that will give me the likes to share the attention that you inspire me to write more.

But most importantly, I needed to know how to deliver value to the people that I am writing for. So what’s most important is a connection. So when you balance what you want and what people want to read as well, you will find you be able to take more pride in doing it in connection is really about being able to talk to people that you care about. Your readers become people you care about, at least for me, and I wanted to know what was interesting for them.

I started doing a lot of analytics and all that so I’ll go on a little bit detail later on. But at this point I’m just I mean there’s nothing much that I can share that you don’t already know it’s really just about inspiring new ways of thinking whether you can look at things from a different perspective and to find that sweet spot between what you want And what other people want to read so yeah? What do I want to create? So this is a simple question: what do I love is a lifestyle blog about the I love about my life that I wanted to share because it would add value to other people, so this can take the form of personal stories.

It can be new, unfamiliar topics for me I really enjoy. I was actually more of like. I write a lot about food. I write a lot about beauty, but I didn’t really do a lot of fashion because I thought that I wasn’t really a model. You know. I shouldn’t be posing and taking photos of myself, but I thought it was interesting will be challenging. I want to try it see whether I could do anything with it, so that to me was an unfamiliar thing and I tried it and actually it worked for me.

So I started taking more photos and I became more confident also experimented a lot so different ways of writing. I think when you initially when I block there was a lot about what I did so it was. I went here I enjoyed this. I enjoyed that eventually reach a state rep. I was kind of boring, so I started doing different stories. How I share a lot more about my experience and how it might connect with somebody else.

For example, if I talked about a place to eat, I would think about what my experience was like when I was I was there, how other people would enjoy the experience as well and try and bring that to life. So I use I use very simple words. I don’t really use some, you know big phrases and so on. I will just use short sentences. You know easy-to-understand sentences and just explain how that felt to me and I think that that really worked, because people would be more willing to connect.

I also noticed that when I did this, a lot of people would not comment on the blog. I mean who else here and all has nobody commenting on your blog if you like your writing so yeah, but I got a lot of comments on facebook when I share the links and then I realized people are reading it, but maybe they weren’t really comfortable with Commenting on my blog, but they were still interested in what I was writing, so that sort of gave me a little bit more idea of what I wanted to write again next time around.

So obviously, I would still want to write about topics that I’m passionate about. So, for me, these this includes still beauty. I still enjoy beauty by started. Writing about lessons that I’ve learned and surprisingly, you know things. I learned from my relationships that one’s good ones, my bosses, things like that and people actually enjoy reading it. I mean you never know what kind of topics would be great right.

You just experiment, and you see if that works for you, and if that makes you happy, and then I had to think about what my readers like anyway, I mean it’s not very fun to write things and then have realized that there’s only like one one, one. One viewer who view the page or there’s no Facebook Likes on it or you know it’s just pointless, because why would you write if it’s not to be read so then I started doing research.

I use google analytics. I went on to find out about keywords things that people were interested in through my blog notice, that okay, for example, my sharing on my relationship, was one of the I mean better hit sites, and now I was thinking. Why is it that people were interested in that? Is it because people like to read about relationships, and I realized it’s not? It was actually more of that personal connection that they had with me when they read about my experiences.

So that’s when I realized that I could write about things with me. I point of view, but it had to be something that people could also understand and identify with in their own lives. So that’s how I started crafting all my stories when I could see what I love doing and then why people love meeting I started to get a better picture of them. How I should write. It was a tone of voice I would use, while is the kind of experienced people looking for and so on.

So I know this is like the you know, top thing to do now doing listicles. I five things to do 1000 things to do in singapore. When you know clearly, there’s no one thousand things, but obviously people enjoy reading this and for some reason it works. You know for most sites, so okay listicles are great, but I think they’ll be pretty boring if idea listicles, because I don’t think I could spit. I don’t take a spin like three hours, just putting pictures and like two sentences underneath each activity or you know each restaurant.

It’s just boring for me. So what I did was I realized I could do listicles also. You know why don’t I do something different with it. I could do it what I enjoy doing so I start thinking about angles, so we just saw like good photos. I think this is a given. A lot of people actually go into a block site. Just to look at photographs and that’s very demoralizing to people who write but uh still continue.

Writing because eventually somebody will enjoy reading it after looking at the photos by the first thing is just should still could get good photos, so invest in a good camera or at least learn how to use your iphones properly. Okay and then, of course, how could I right exciting titles? To be honest, I have a big problem with this because when you want to SEO optimized Johnson site and when you want to write exciting titles, you end up with the same few things over and over again, so I had to do a balance so some days, I would write something that I liked you know and other days all right something SEO optimized, so I don’t do the same thing over and over just because it’s better for SEO, I mean it’s.

My blog is my website. I think I should have a bit more control over what I do without you know, compromising on the SEO. As though and of course, I always looked out for top search topics, I have a friend Kenneth, who is actually he writes my blog as well. Ok, so Kenneth actually writes for five me Anders calm and he writes about controversial topics. So John, maybe you can ask him to talk about that big stir, so he writes about current affairs and those are very top search topics.

I think if you ask kind of later on, if you want to speak to him, you realize that a lot of times the things your eyes ball gets a lot of hits and Link truth, so yeah, but top such topics are important too, because for your own Blog site, I think it’s important that you write what you want, but you also need to know. You know within that group of people who are reading what you read reading what you write.

Is there any particular topic days of interest interest to them, and is there any way you could create content in the same topic? Area might not be the same thing. It could be a different segments of the same topic like, for example, beauty could be zoomed into treatments. It could be skin care for relationships, it could be like we’re friends or with boyfriends and so on. So it’s just finding different angles to approach writing and just creating things that you know you could share about in your own personal life and share that with others so um.

I also realized that it’s very a bit more interesting that mix things up. So I don’t do the same things over and over again, for example, maybe I do listicles and personal stories mixed into one. So, instead of doing like five places to eat, I could do five places. I had good memories or something like that, so something that could connect with other people when they go go somewhere. If you realize that a lot of people are very nostalgic, they really enjoy reading about something that they can remember.

So if they have been to a place, you know if you’ve been, if you’ve personally been to a place where you form very incredible, the memories things that you can’t forget about. Maybe it could be a place where you had your first, your first group outing or something like that. Maybe people would have that same kind of experience, but they would like to you know find out about yours. I also talked. I also do a mixer of my favorite topics and storylines, so what I do is maybe I would write about anything of anything.

Anybody have a topic: okay, chicken rice, I mean, if I were good, I was going to write about just the chicken rice was great. The chili sauce was awesome and I mean what else is it? The restaurant was very beautiful. I think nobody would really want to care about that article, because there’s a thousand and one other article says exactly like that. But what makes people want to read about it? It’s because of my own experience there is this something that happened it’s caught my eye.

Was it a you know, an observation of the person, the people who eat there or is it something like I don’t know what you can rise means to me. I mean it. Doesn’t really matter it’s about finding out what yours, your particular story lies and sharing that, together with your favorite topic, yeah so, like I mentioned earlier, try something new and then have great photos with it. So maybe you’ve tried something you’re, not really sure about what you can do, that’s different, but maybe you’ve never written by SEO.

So maybe today, after you know, Tommy’s top you’re studying like oh I’m, so inspired I’m going to share about SEO. Then, okay, maybe a very challenging thing to do that with making fury you know more challenge would be to maybe have great photos with that. So how would you write an article that would be lifestyle? You know invited comments. It’s actually to tell the story to the great photos, so it could be yourself.

Looking true, I don’t know website and then it is a photo. I mean the possibilities are endless. Of course, there’s always the reviews, and these are always things that get you a lot of SEO such hits and stuff, because people are always looking about the same things. What it’s interesting to you, it’s most likely interesting to somebody else. So if, for example, you have a review of a food place, I think food is the easiest for us to identify with there’s.

Definitely somebody else who wants to know about that place before they visit so writing a review. But can you add in an intriguing title? Why is something that you don’t know about? People would not know about the place that you could include in the title. I mean it’s about brainstorming, different angles as well. So then another one is like you know it could be your favorite topic in another popular topic and you blend it together.

So it could be relationships this one popular topic, but your favorite topic is where to eat. Then you would say: wait to eat with your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your mom, or something like that. So I mean I’m just going to end quite quickly because I think that’s only so much I can say about creating content. A lot of it is actually sitting down running true and analyzing. What you already have written – or you know looking in fact the best way to learn, is to look at other people, so other successful bloggers or other successful websites with great content.

Why is it that they’re good at a lot of the times you realize it’s the same few things, it’s a good title, it’s a good good quality of written work. You know it’s not just a basic description. There’s definitely something more emotional to it and they’re always let see a few things, but how do they do it creatively? That’s one thing that always observed in other people’s blogs as far as what people are interested in when they read my blog, for example, if a particular blog posts about my recent visit to a particular restaurant was more welcome, you know people enjoy sharing it.

Then I will look into it and I think about why people are sharing it. Is it because of the personal story I shared with it, or is it because of the photos, or is it just because people are from a particular area and they wanted to find out about it? So I go in and analyze my content, but at the end of the day it’s important not to lose the plot. I think if you are going to just write just to get red – and you don’t really care about yourself and what you’d like to do, then it kind of gets boring and you will definitely start blogging.

I mean I’ve been blogging for 16 years, so I guess in some way I was still able to enjoy what I do and I guess it comes a lot of the time from the creative the way I’m givin, because I ran my own thing. I can do whatever I want with it. Also. This is something that I really have to share is that we just don’t know what they want until they see it. So you know everybody will tell you a you, should write about this or that or you shouldn’t write this way, because you know I don’t like it.

Of course you can take in the feedback, but I don’t think people know what exactly they want it and I’m sure you have like clients, you have clients right if you’re in agency anything, and they will tell you that they want something like this. But nanny. Don’t know what it is until they see something good, so I always believed that you know at the end the day you should still stay connected with your vision.

So if you have something that you visualize of that blog of that website that you have, you should stick to it and not stray from it too much just because you want to pander to what people want to read yeah. So that’s it! These are my blog sites. Twitter is the grand facebook linkedin yeah. You can connect to me here. Obviously I look a lot better in my profile picture s. Is everybody yeah? So if you have any questions, you can feel free to ask me, but I don’t think there’s a lot of questions left.

It’s quite a straightforward topic. Oh yes, abdallah gospel. That’s a good trick, my what a form of my whooping cough facebook. So I I can see that when I thought or fiction, I get about five Frankie to me: yeah, I’m fine, there’s 50 plus mmhmm yeah, and I will need that. No there’s, no one of these. What you like yeah! That’s it at least they’re secretly clicking at least they’re reading the post.

I think that when you, there are certain topics that you are very passionate about, which actually people were not automatically want to read about it. Books, unfortunately, is one of those things I think you’ve got about history as well, I think maybe depends i’m not sure. If that’s going to be popular for more people, how do you find the balance cool? I noise. Do you enjoy eating? Because if you don’t have good yeah, so if you don’t enjoy reading, I don’t think you should.

If you enjoy reading, you don’t enjoy eating, you shouldn’t la anything yeah. But if you like books – and you realize that people are still reading that relationship stories, what about books? Can you talk about relationships? Are there books that you’ve read that teach you lessons about relationships? You know things like that. So it’s about finding something interesting. There. People want to read about putting that in the title angling, your story, in a way that you know they will feel more compelled to read it, but at the same time you still get to introduce the books that you like, or you can still review the books That you, like yeah and my shins, you guys got ta speak to her nor later so I encourage you go to look at a website, not just because I view the website, but really some great articles, one of the two that way that I, the one should