The Creation of Pins & Grins

Blogging has never been out of the question for me. Having seen numerous blogs, the fact that the topic of the content shared is essentially limitless kept my interest. Ultimately I've never been able to find a topic worth writing about, until now. I am clearly still trying to learn the ropes of it but the resource Blogging Tips: Creating Valuable Content (found on page 58) made me evaluate what exactly needs to be applied when forming the overall purpose of a blog. This resource was used in my post last week as well, but I found this content to be even more beneficial for this week's topic. When choosing the focus for my blog I kept in mind the idea of "Write on topics you are passionate about." I also knew that passion would not be the only thing that could produce content, it had to come from an interest that others would find relatable and worthwhile. This lead to my (mild) obession for Pinterest.

When searching through pins, the ones I find that are worthy of a "Pin-it" or "Like" tend to be the ones that I wish I could share more of my thoughts on with those following me. The only way to do so is to alter the description on the pin itself when re-pinning. Most of the time this will eliminate neccessary information such as tips on the DIY project or ingredients for the recipe featured. My solution was to create my blog based on this, sharing the favorites I found and giving a more in-depth idea as to why it sparked my interest. The result, the creation of Pins & Grins.

ProBlogger (found on page 62) is another resource that I referenced, but this time it was to figure out how to promote my blog. The Social Media and Viral Content sections seemed most applicable at this stage. Since I'm just establishing myself, the only thing I've had the chance to experiment with was posting a link to my blog on my Facebook account. While I haven't exactly gotten any results yet, I did get a couple comments/likes on Facebook. I know that people did check it out because the comments were related to my posts but nobody has directly commented through my actual blog yet. The other issue is that many of my Facebook friends (if not all) don't seem to be well versed in social media or blogging themselves. I hope to find a way to better engage others but I think it will be a matter of time as to when/how I can go about doing so.

The actual design of my blog probably doesn't help this issue. I feel very limited working through the provided class blogs. At this point there isn't much visual appeal (possibly because I haven't figured out how to utilize all of the tools available yet). I find that I am personally more attracted to blogs with more visuals, color schemes & fonts. I have done what I can at this point to integrate the "Pinterest red" into my blog but without the option to alter more aspects of it, I find it difficult to do much more. I found the JustCreativeDesign.com resource (found on page 232) to be inspirational, using simple graphics that still keep the focus on the post topics. Again, I'm still trying to learn the ropes as far as applying these ideas to my own blog.

Hopefully I will be able to make progress during the course of this class (and beyond) and I have no doubt that future weeks will assist in the development of my blog, Pins & Grins.