I love blogging. Ever since I first discovered the concept, I have thrown myself into blogging both personally and professionally. Admittedly rather sporadically, but blogging fulfils my desire to write and also gives the opportunity to share this with the world – or just those who I select.
My very first blog, I began in 2005 on Blogger, with my first post about my nephew being born. There were a lot of important milestones in our life happening over the next few years – our wedding, my husband achieving his PhD, my 30th birthday, starting university…and I blogged about all of these. I only wrote a few times a year and shared photos with each post, and found this a great way to share these parts of my life with relatives and friends, particularly those far away. This blog continued through until 2009 and was purely personal. I changed this to a private setting a year or two ago when job-hunting and decided it wasn’t really relevant to most of the world, but have kept it for myself. I also started 2 private blogs for my daughters after they were born and just post from time to time.
After I launched a business, I started to realise the potential of blogging to my business. I researched blogs for a while, but at the time focussed instead on a website, using tools such as google sites and weebly to build free basic websites. In late 2010 I started business blogging. This was my first business blog post, which was just a quick experiment at the time, but you might recognise it as something that has grown into this course you’re following now!
https://zestee.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/zestees-top-10-free-digital-marketing-tools/
Back then, I considered my blog and website quite separate, but before long ended up combining them as many businesses have done. I found my blog to be a great tool to do step by step guides for clients and simply to share my experience. One of my most popular posts was this one, helping people set up a Facebook unique URL. This was in Sep 2010 and since then I have referred to it many times both for myself and was great to be able to send to people who would ask me “how to” either in a class I was teaching or via email.
I also created a blog for Professional Parents, a group I started in 2010 to bring together those balancing business and family. For this, I also used www.wordpress.com – one of the most popular (free) blogging platforms. That then grew into the Professional Parents website with blog integrated at:
It’s interesting to watch statistics and to see how people engage with you and your blog. The Professional Parents blog centres around a theme of work family balance…but my most popular post ever was my recipe for Toblerone Cheesecake that I really put online to share with friends! This shows the importance of experimenting and measuring.
Blogging used to be essentially just a way to write and add photos. But it has become a lot more sophisticated, and in the last few years, firstly with the ability to add “pages” to a blog, and then with much more flexibility offered by www.wordpress.org (similar to .com but an option you need hosting for which costs me around $10 a month). I made the change to wordpress.org last year, essentially combining my website and blog – and many others are doing the same. Here are some sites which are blogs/websites combined and using the wordpress.org platform:
- this website/blog www.zestee.com
- www.professionalparentsnetwork.org
- www.dutchaustralian.com
- www.beafunmum.com
- www.brisbanekids.com.au
This is a topic I could write on for ages – and I’m still learning. For me personally, my main theme is that I love to blog – but don’t have nearly as much time as I would like both to blog but also to learn about all the possibilities, so I’m trying to learn to just focus on a few things at a time and build my blog over a long period of time.
You had to read a bit to get to it but here is this week’s lesson:
Now SEO is an entire topic on its own as well, but for the purposes of this course, here is a good start for the basics, just watch the three and a half minute video:
Happy blogging! One of the best parts of blogging is getting comments…so would love your comments below! Renee
Zestee 
I would love to move my wordpress blog to a .org site, but when I set it up I didn’t want to pay the hosting fee to be honest. A couple of months in though and I’m missing the flexibility of a self-hosted site. I’m finding the .wordpress.com to be quite annoying. There are so many wonderful themes and plugins that I’m missing out on. But, I have to be honest and ask myself if the 10 eur per month (or whatever it will be) is worth it. My business is still very small and so far not driving any sales…
Thanks for your comment Nerissa, yes it is an investment, especially if it’s a small business or hobby, but I have found that http://www.hostgator.com is good value, it is about 10 euros per month but with unlimited space so i’ve actually built 5 sites on that hosting package!