22 Easy Peasy Blogging: Where Imagination Finds Its Voice

Podcast Description:

Have you ever felt that irresistible urge to share your thoughts and life experiences with the world but had no clue where to start? Well, look no further, because I’m here to unveil the extraordinary universe of blogging in our conversation today. Let’s chat about how blogs serve as the perfect platform for sharing our work, whether it’s writing, videos, or art, offering a powerful means to connect with a global audience.

I want to openly discuss the convenience of setting up a blog on free platforms like WordPress and Blogger, as they eliminate any initial costs and technical complexities. But let’s not stop there; I’ll also shed light on the advantages of owning your own blog, where you have complete control over your content. And, of course, we’ll touch on the exciting topic of monetization in blogging, which can unlock a whole new stream of income for you. To illustrate this, I’ll share the inspiring journey of my cousin, a travel blogger who has transformed her passion into a thrilling adventure across continents.

During our engaging dialogue, we’ll emphasize the importance of having a creative outlet and the empowering feeling that comes from steering your own content. We’ll dive deep into the essentials of making your blog successful, from choosing the right tools and resources to customizing your blog to align with your unique vision. And to make it even more relatable, I’ll share personal anecdotes from my own blogging journey, giving you real-life insights into this dynamic platform for self-expression. So, tune in, and who knows, you might just be inspired to embark on your own blogging journey today!

Podcast Transcription:

Hi everyone, thank you for tuning into my podcast today. I’m pretty excited about today’s post because this topic took me a while to kind of wrap my head around to figure out how I was going to do it again.

I hadn’t blogged in a long time, okay, when I had my son in 2015,. I was pretty much dead in the water when it came to producing any kind of content, whether it was socially or just kind of for my own brand, because before my son was born, I was in marketing. I was in a totally other realm. I was in a different industry. I was working full-time. I, you know, produced blog content for, actually, the company that I worked for, because I recommended that they do it, because they didn’t have enough content coming out in their own social media. There was nothing to really talk about, nothing you could really sink your teeth into or understand that they were an established brand in the industry and I really believe in the power of blogging.

I don’t think that you have to blog as a professional, but I think that if you are a person that wants to kind of establish yourself out there in a certain area, you need to create content over and over that reflects that, not just do the stuff that you do in your own world, in your own side of the world, but you know, especially posting it on social media, it just gets lost because there’s a ton of information out there that people want to share and no one will ever find you. Now, if your goal is not to even be found, but you want to have a creative outlet and maybe you’d like to write, maybe you really need to be creative. You can create without even writing. If you just want to produce video content, if you want to produce artistic content, if you’re a photographer, you can have a blog that totally just shares that information. There are blogs that are video blogs. People don’t even need to write. You can have your videos transcribed and then all of that text and content goes up there on your blog and then it’s shouting it out to the world. Whether you want it to or not, you’ll be heard. You’ll create a community.

Now we’ll say that it does take time and for a beginner it’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many platforms that we communicate on socially. We have Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and stuff, and there are people out there who are really great at creating some interesting content. But if you just need a creative outlet and you’re not sure where to start, you can do a blog very easily for free. I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day who was actually helping me with a transcription that I had of my gratitude journal, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can go to episode 22, 21,. I just that was an unofficial launch of my book that just went live. I published it on Amazon. It’s a gratitude journal, so translating into Spanish wasn’t too difficult for me. But there were certain things in translation that I wanted to make sure were kind of natural and understood by the reader. So I didn’t know if there was a term afirmaciones. Right, we say affirmations in English, but would declaraciones positivas positive declarations be more understood as a natural way to speak?

I had asked chat, gpt. I was using Google Bard. I wanted to be sure and be safe and that my readers were getting a good product. So I had asked my friend Malavette Bloom. She is an amazing singer. I have known her since I was singing my little heart out when I started on the cabaret scene back in. I don’t want to date myself or date her, but I think it was 2000,. It was definitely 2000 when I launched on the cabaret scene. God, that seems like a different lifetime ago. But we both started singing at the same time in the city and we just kind of passed by each other and we never stayed out of touch. She’s an amazing singer, amazing person, and since I’ve kept in touch with her all this time I’ve gotten to know her kind of more, because we didn’t really get to speak when saying hello on the way past each other in D’Otto Mama’s around 46 in Manhattan.

So we were talking, I was asking her, and kind of in Spanish and English, because I was thinking at the same time in Spanish, because my brain was so hooked on to the Spanish that I was translating. So I was chatting with her and at times I would write terms in Spanish because they were still fresh in my head and that was just my mode. So we were talking back and forth and I asked her if my term declaraciones positivas, like positive declarations, was better than affirmaciones, and she did agree. She said yes, it is more understood and just kind of more natural. So we were talking, chatting on Facebook, kind of the same thing, and she asked me if Her blog like she didn’t have a blog. Let me go back for a second. So I asked her if she was blogging and she said that she Does something on Facebook. She’s a writer, she, she does poetry and a lot of great stuff, but she, she shares it on Facebook.

And I know as a creative, a Person, especially a songbird, who has a voice that wants to be heard. You want to really be heard. So if the tree falls in the forest, I said, and no one’s around to hear it, does it really make a sound

? I kind of feel the same way about writing, because I’ve been doing it for a really long time. And if I didn’t share it with anyone, it’s like if I didn’t share it with you here on this podcast, then what’s the point? Because when you’re creating, and you put your whole heart and soul into it, and then you kind of let it go. You’re sending it out to the universe and you just want, you want it to have its own, have its own life. But in order for that to happen, you need to share it. You need to be out there and be heard. So she asked me, you know, do you have any suggestions for me, like how to start a blog? I know that she, she’s a little tech-savvy and she kind of knows how to figure some things out. But she said she was a little overwhelmed. So if you have a computer and you have the internet, it’s really pretty easy to get started.

You can sign up for a WordPress account. If you go to wordpress.com, you can do that and it is free. And the reason I recommend it, and there are many different blogging sites, but the reason I recommend WordPress is because it is very user-friendly, and I’m not saying that because they’re paying me, I’m just, I’m just saying that. I think the biggest difference between that and the others is that you don’t have to be so tech-savvy to figure it out. You know, you’re not going to be figuring out different things all the time. You can figure it out pretty easily. I’ve used a couple of other sites. I started with Blogspot. Now, this is back, you know, when my son was born. I’ve since switched over to WordPress because I like it much better.

So you can start out with a free WordPress account and it will be yourname.wordpress.com. Now I’m going to give you some suggestions about if you want to have your own brand and domain name and if you want to, you know, not just, you know, create a blog, but create a name for yourself out there. So I’ll give you that in a little while. But just to get started, if you just want to write, you want to get some thoughts out there, you know, you’re just you’re creating, you’re doing a recipe, you’re doing a review of a product that you’ve used, whatever it is. WordPress is very easy to set up and you can start a blog, write whatever you want. It’s very easy to add media, add images, you can do whatever you want. It’s, you know, your own platform. So it’s great.

You can even set up pages if you want. You can set up different sections of your blog. Maybe you have a bunch of recipes and you just want to do a separate page for that, or maybe you have a bunch of poetry and you just want to do a separate page for that. So it is very user-friendly. So I told Malavette that it’s free to set up. So there’s really no reason not to just set up an account and start blogging. So she was really excited. She said she was going to check it out and just kind of go from there. And I, you know, I was kind of talking her through some things. So if you are a person who is interested in getting started and you’re not sure where to start, I hope that this episode will help you to get started and maybe I’ll get her on the show at some point. Maybe she’ll come on the podcast and we’ll talk about her process of getting started. She’s a creative and she’s very talented, so I’m sure whatever she does, she’ll do amazing. So that was that. I just wanted to put that out there. I hope you’re all doing well.

Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to this podcast. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and leave a review. To stay updated on my latest articles and videos, follow me on social media. You can find all the links in the show notes. Have a great day!

I hope this helps make the text more manageable for you. If you have any specific questions or need further assistance with anything in the text, feel free to ask.

Link: My cousins Elaine and Paul McVinney’s travel blog: http://mywildfloweradventures.com