Finding Your Blogging Feet

I was reading a couple of posts written by new blogger, Becki (at Pelvis, Interrupted) yesterday.  She wrote about how she wasn't feeling true to herself with her writing and then her "epiphany", for want of a better word.  I think she had been trying too hard as a new blogger to please her audience rather than writing within her comfort zone and letting her audience find her.

Blogging is becoming much more of a social concept.  I wrote an article for the winter edition of Flying Start Magazine (page 36) aimed at new Parent Bloggers, although the advice is the same for everyone.  One observation I made was that blogs used to sit in their little corner of the internet, waiting to be discovered or they were read when you happened to mention to a friend that you wrote a blog.  Very often, blogs were considered a dirty little secret.


social engagement 2010
click to enlarge
image © Nickie O'Hara 2010
Now that more people are using the internet to socialise, blogging has become more acceptable as a way to communicate with the world.  Becki is realising that even though she hasn't got the same status as some of the more established blogs out there, she is creating her own little merry band of followers, all of whom are already looking forward to her posts (including me).   Some of those readers will have stumbled across her blog though searches on Google, some will have seen her self-promotional Tweets and some will be following her brand new "fan" page on Facebook.  We will have some mutual readers as we know each other from a parenting forum but her further community is different to mine.  We have crossovers on Twitter and on Facebook but nowhere else.

In the same respect, my crossover is completely different to yours too.  The parent blogging network is a close-knit one and is a wonderful community for networking and support, but there are other blogs out there too.  To have the same people reading the same blogs becomes incredibly insular, doesn't it?

*whispers* but don't stop reading this one....