BLOGGER RECOGNITION AWARD

Another one in the space of two days, this makes me soooo overjoyed. It feels so surreal to know that my my blog content is read and enjoyed. I am really grateful to Traveling with kidz for nominating my blog for this award. I definitely did not see any of these coming and I am so honored. It definitely inspires me to keep writing and even want to do better. You should definitely check out her blog, it is A-mazing. Thank you so much again, Lisa Marie, for loving my blog.

How did verskil come about?

I wanted to start this blog in the year 2015 but I kept holding back for God knows what reason, maybe fear of the unknown. I eventually made up my mind to start this blog in the month of August this year and I’m really glad I did. So why did I start this blog? I absolutely love sewing but just because a sewing machine never worked for me did not mean I was going to give up sewing so I chose the harder part that did work for me. This blog became an outlet for me to share my craft and hopefully inspire people that there is always another way. Also I have always had a penchant for motivating the people around me. This platform just became a way to motivate more people and constantly motivate myself as well. So far, I have definitely enjoyed the process.

My advice to new bloggers

I have not been blogging that long so my advice may be a little rusty but I can give you the few tips that have helped me to this point.

For starters, I suggest that if you are going to blog, write from your heart. Choose a niche that you enjoy or one that resonates with you and just have fun with it and enjoy writing. Also I suggest that if you are about to start, use free hosting. I know a lot of people say it is better to self-host from the onset which in some cases may be true but as a new blogger, there are a lot of basic mistakes you would definitely make. I am still trying to get the hang of it myself. Self-hosting means you are going to pay for your own domain so the real question here is would you want to spend all that money when you have not fully grasped the whole concept of blogging or would you rather wait till you have at least gone through those basic mistakes before you actually self-host. Truth is owning a blog is a learning process because there would always be something you would learn everyday and a different approach to what you already know. And this brings me to the next important thing, read a lot. By read a lot I mean go through other people’s blogs especially established ones and see what worked for them. Experiment their approaches, see which one might work for you. Also why free hosting from the onset is better because it gives you optimal opportunity to experiment.

My number two advice is to leverage the opportunity that is social media especially Facebook groups and Pinterest. Facebook groups gave me my first traffic jumpstart, I went from 67 visitors and 192 views in a month to 381 visitors and 649 views the next month. I know this may not seem like a lot but looking at the difference in growth, it is kind of a huge deal for me. I have read in a lot of blogs that Pinterest is their biggest source of traffic. They say it is not a social network, it is a search engine just like google with over 200 million monthly users. I am also still trying to get the hang of this one and I hope it works completely in my favour in the future. I suggest to join bloglovin’ as well but lately, I have read a few bad reviews but if you can make it work for you, that is definitely a great way to keep your readers posted if they are following you every time you put up a new blog post.

 

Blogger Recognition Award Nominees

Madhuri Gururaj from readandreviewbooks

Ken Weiss from the-cookingpot

Toni Elston from toni

Declan Lawrence from life’sdecofcards

Jada Pink from jijjy’s maison

Rafi Nandi from LoneArt1st

Chioma Ochem from chiomabanks

John mulindi from businessandlife

Maimuna Hassan from worldofideas

Rie Allen Linton from n2myhead

 

To participate in the Blogger Recognition Award, here are a few simple rules:

1. Thank the blogger that nominated you and provide a link to their blog.

2. Write a post showing your award.

3. Tell a brief story about how you started your blog.

4. Give two pieces of advice for new bloggers.

5. Choose 10 other bloggers to nominate.

6. Comment on each blog letting them know they’ve been nominated, and provide a link to your award post.