Bored Blog 4: Always Ask Questions!

Aw maaaaan, day 4! ^_^

7/13/2021

Psssss...guess what? Yes, I now know how to make my photos smaller, but that's not it!

I got my first subscriber yesterday! ＼(^▽^)ノ＼(^▽^)ノ (this is us all happy and whatnot).

Welcome to Bored Blogs! A website I'm still working on to make it look like a legit blog. Wix has all these things to add and do that it might take me a while to figure it all out.

Yesterday I was curious how other blogs look. What is the general format? Do they use lots of photos? Do they sometimes add videos? What in the world do they write about? Google wasn't much help because it kept showing sites to build a blog, but not anyone who writes them. Luckily I just so happen to have a Twitter focusing on the writing community.

Usually when I write a question and send it out to the Twitter universe I get no responses or likes (even with tags). I tried it anyway by writing "Do you have a blog? I would like to follow you." Then I added #writingrcommunity #writer #writerslift. I honestly thought people would ignore me like usual. Then I opened up twitter and saw 20+ notifications. I thought "So they [ in notifications] have it go up to 20...Wow...this must be what popular twitter accounts look like!"

I received likes, comments and what's this? Retweets?! It was overwhelming. I had a lot of blogs to look through (I still do). I looked at the first few and noticed the format of their blogs. They definitely looked legit. You should see their "continue reading" button for each blog! I thought, "I need that! How do I make that??" It's something I found some answers on but I need to figure out the steps and if I need to re-work my website from scratch.

Another thing on Twitter is that I got followers. In the beginning I had 23 or so followers? You know, most people do the follow for follows thing and I told my self, "No. I'm only going to follow people I actually want to follow." If that means not having many followers then so be it. It makes me feel less cluttered in a way.

The first time I checked I had 85 followers in total! Then it got to 100! and now it's 106! It's really cool, but I know soon enough they're all going to unfollow me either because I'm not following them or they like to follow people and then unfollow them. I'm not going to sweat this part of Twitter. I'm curious if by a few days I'll get back to 23 people. We'll see (*^▽^*)

Ah, so back to my new subscriber! After seeing that, I was trying to see if they received those "Thank you for subscribing" emails. I tested it out with another email I have and I got nothing! I was freaking out. "Nooooooooooooo. The unprofessionalism!" I kept looking on how to fix this, but the only thing I found so far is if I send them a message, they get an email saying "Thank you..." and they can click on the photo of an envelope but they can't see the message I sent them. So I'm going to have to keep working on this (-_-)ゞ゛

Oh! I just checked Twitter. I lost a follower already. Here we go!

It's already starting to drop!

Yesterday I also talked to one of my two followers on Wattpad. She seems like a nice person and somehow has a lot of views on two of her books. I read her first book and I could tell she's a teenager by the way she wrote (I used to write like that (ᗒᗨᗕ)). She said she's writing as a hobby. Since she's a beginner she has a long way to go (if she wants to make it her profession). With practice she'll get there. Same to you if you want to be a successful writer.

I messaged her asking how she received all these views? To my surprise she was happy to tell me. She said she's in a Wattpad group chat on Discord. She did a read for read type of thing and did not know how she got that many views of her book either lol. She kindly sent me a link and I joined the Discord. I asked the guy running it how many people are in the group. He said over 1,000! I have no idea how people run these chat groups with that many people.

We'll see how this works out. I also posted on this writers Reddit page how to get more readers. It was also a surprise people were responding to my question. I told them about the book I'm writing on Wattpad. Some people said "Social media!" -_-

This one guy said his girl friend used to write stuff on there. She dealt with the same thing. Not many people were reading her stuff. It's a place a lot of teens go to read romance stories and *cough* lots of inappropriate stuff between guys and gals. He suggested I find some other place to post my work. Though the platforms he's seen aren't that great if you want people to review your work.

On my way home from working with the producer, the guy's message was going through my mind. I felt down and fed up. I thought, "Then I'll turn it into an ebook! I need to keep putting my work out there! It can be free on Wattpad, but I'll put it on Amazon or something anyway." So, that's another thing I need to do.

On Wattpad my book only has 4 chapters anyway. If anyone wants to read the whole thing they can buy it. It's not going to be that expensive anyway. Maybe a dollar or so.

I guess the moral of all this is to keep asking questions even if you might not get answers. Go for it!

Best,

Emel