Wow! Who would have thought that I am already on my 100th post?  I mean, I ❤ blogging, but 100 posts, here, already? If I wanna be scholastic about my numbers, I am actually on my 264th blog post (cause I have two blogs), but it is 100 here. So, what does that mean? What have I learnt? Any tips?

Realisations & Reflections

Difference between edu-blogging and ‘lifestyle’ blogging.

Blog number 1 is an educational blog. That one is an oldie. It (now) only has to do with topics connected to teaching or ‘kinda’ teaching. My readers are teachers of English. I have a niche blog (you gotta have a niche blog).

Blog number 2, this one, is still learning. My ‘lifestyle’ blog doesn’t have a voice yet. I am still trying to figure out what I like to write about and I don’t even know if this blog is a lifestyle blog! I’d love it if there was a niche/blog category called “personality blogging”. That’s what I’d fall in. My blog is me (I seriously have a problem with calling this blog a ‘lifestyle blog!). My readers? I dunno who you are. I see numbers, but who are you?

Tips, Wins & Flops

Choosing what to write/Inspiration

So far, I have been inspired/ got ideas from:

❤ My life (my me, me, me fest)

❤ YouTube (youtubers who talk about makeup, beauty and planning)

❤ Other blogs

Helpful tools/tips & some random blogging realisations

I have learnt a lot about blogging and taking photos and while I still have a lot to learn, these websites have proven to be my blogging saviors.

Picmonkey: I edit all my pics there. I watched a few Youtube tutorials and learnt how to add banners and pins. I am still a learner. Life saver: I also use hex codes to determine my colour choice (I am colourblind).

Samsung Photo Editor: I edit my pics on my phone first and then edit on picmonkey as well.

Stumbleupon: I have had a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon. I have also read lots of interesting blog posts there.

Giveaways: I organised 2 giveaways cause it was my birthday. I did get quite a bit of exposure/followings. I also got to interact with a lot of you. My lucky winners should be getting their pressies soon. Is a giveaway a way to get more readers? Yes, but only temporarily, me thinks.Was it easy to organise? Well, kinda. I used rafflecopter to pick a winner, but it was not as easy as I had wanted it to because lots of readers did not end up qualifying for the gifts. Were my rules not clear? Dunno. Have to think about that one.

Buffer: I now schedule my posts. Yayay!!

My hashtags: I do internet searches for popular hashtags when I tweet a blog post. I have also followed accounts that often retweet my posts cause they have to do with a particular interest. My faves?

For planner-related posts: #planneraddict #plannercommunity #scrapbooking #cblobloggers (also for DIY).

For my beauty/lifestyle: #fblchat #lbloggers #bbloggers #beautytalk #beautychat

Back to Realisations

Daily blogging

I tried to do daily blogging in December. It was very interesting to read other people’s #blogmas posts (blogmas means blogging every day till Christmas/ New year’s), but very challenging for me as a blogger. I wasn’t good at it. I did miss a few days. I did like the kinda daily blogging though.

Addicted to stats/ page views:

I do check my page views but I am not sure why. I started on the 10th of September 2015 with 950 page views and today 25th of January my January views are 3600. In total, I have had about 12.000 views (4,5 months). For me, that’s fine. As I said,

• I don’t have a voice yet.
• I dunno what I want to gain out of all this blogging.
• I am enjoying myself so numbers are interesting, but not why I am blogging.

Numbers?

Numbers are just numbers. They can change. Rome was not built in a day. Slow and steady wins the race, and yes, I do know my sayings. Yes, I want people to read my posts. If I didn’t, I would have been writing in a diary, to myself, but that’s weird ( or is it….? :P). And anyhow, I am not losing sleep over them. When I start losing sleep, then I will worry (about me, not my numbers!).

Info you didn’t need, but I am gonna share anyway

Most of my readers/ visitors are from the US. 2nd place the UK, then Greece, Canada, Australia and Germany. Why is that interesting? Well, out of my top 6 countries 4 use English as their mother tongue. I am Greek, but I blog in English, so 700 Greek people have read my English blog posts, same goes for my German readers. I have also had page views from a country called “European Union”. Seriously? Where is that????? Search terms that have led to my blog? Free stickers, planners, functional stickers and yeah… a lot about stickers.

Tips, Wins and Flops part 2

Social Media

What have I been using and doing in my life?

Facebook groups: I joined lots of groups in order to interact with other bloggers. I am in the groups: show your blog love/ blogging boost/ blog passion project and a few more. For new (and old) bloggers, these groups can be extremely helpful. Join them!

Twitter chats: I have taken part in lots of twitter chats that have allowed me to connect with other bloggers and actually talk about blogging quite a bit cause my friends/family here (on my little island) just don’t get the whole blogging thing!!

Faves: #lbloggers (lifestyle blogger chat/ #fblchat (Fab chat)/#bdib (for bloggers).

Pinterest has proved to be a good way to get ideas and get blog traffic. I post a lot of posts about planning and DIY, so most of my traffic is from Pinterest. I still need to learn how to make good pins!

The good part: Wins

I have interacted with you guys (<3 my readers)and have ‘met’ lovely bloggers.

I became part of a planner team ❤ (Just Jaimee: the Lily pad) and I have had the opportunity to chat with lovely Etsy store owners from the planning community (seriously if you are not a planner, you must be baffled with all this planner/planning talk :D). I also got to share a lot of planner-related printables/ coupon codes and giveaways with my readers.

Monetizing? 1 person ordered something from Amazon (I am rich!!! I made $0,27 :))

I will be writing a collab post about planning (exciting :))

I got to do a book review where someone actually sent me the book to review. You can view that post here.

Me, Me, Me

My most popular posts (toot tooting my own horn): Plan with me November 23rd. Gabis Planner prints gave me an interview and shared a printable.

The one closest to my <3: Feeling like a Unicorn: a day in the life of a colourblind gal.

Post that almost no one has read (I thought these were funny, but no-one else did :P): Greek gal in the UK: itsy bitsy spider.

You done yet?

What about the future?

Well, I don’t know what to expect. I mean, I see people hitting 10k or 200k views per day and I wonder, “How?”

I am a teacher. I ❤ teaching. When asked, “would you give up your full-time job to become a full-time blogger?” My answer is” No” ,but I still enjoy blogging. It is my creative outlet, my childhood dream of being a writer. This is as close as I can get to that aspiration.

So, that’s what I’ve learnt. You have my  wins, my flops and a lot of me, me, me talk.  I hope you found at last one thing interesting. Again, this is the part where I beg for some sort of …. connection ❤ <3.Do subscribe to my blog if you like what I have to say (it does help me out and thanks if you do). Connect with me on Pinterest / Twitter/ Instagram.Maybe even give my Facebook page some TLC? Don’t forget to ‘pin’ this post 🙂 Remember the comments section is all yours. OK!! Enough with the promo!

Thanks for stopping by

xox

Jo

P.S. I hope I don’t have too many typos. I really wanna press  ‘publish’ now, cause, yes, I am that kind of blogger……

P.S. 2 This is blog post 101. Thank God I became an English teacher cause I’d suck as a maths one!

❤ ❤

Since I am a teacher and I teach vocabulary, I thought I’d share with you a post I wrote for my edu blog a while back. It has to do with words. First, let’s start with one of my favourite extracts.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well-better, because it’s an exact opposite which the other is not.Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doublegood” if you want something stronger stills……….You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.”        Syme talking to Winston (George Orwell in his book 1984).

This got me thinking about words and how they give colour to our life. Imagine not having any words? Imagine if we only had the words “good” and “ungood”:!! What if everything we described, had to be confined in those two words? I love words, so much that I’m actually a very wordy person, and while I think that my ‘word bank’ is kind of broke, there are a few English words I really appreciate, and that’s what this ‘ramble’ is about. So, here goes. the words I like.

Mesmerise: It makes me think of passion and love and all those nice feelings. It has a nice sound to it as well. Just love it.

Mouthwatering: Just makes me think of food and chocolate and Pavlov’s dog.

Quintessence: I don’t know why, but this word just makes me think of things that are important. Unique, significant. It gives meaning to meaning.

Mushroomed: OK, so this word makes me think of pizza, but it is also a nice word. Things popping up everywhere. Hmm, nah, maybe I like it cause I like mushrooms. Anyhoo, it’s one of my favourite words.

Cathartic: Greek word comes from catharsis. Just beautiful, as is the feeling.

Serendipity: I like the meaning. Something beneficial that happens by chance, by luck.

Word I wish existed?

Badest of course (one -d). I think the word worst does not do bad justice. I have said this in an older post. You have something bad, you add -est and it gives a whole new dimension to how bad something is.

So, yeah, that’s about it. I have no idea why I am writing this post (then again, I have no idea why I write many of the things I share on my blog), but I think about it.

Words make our lives………….. (you can add whatever you want here).

After writing this post and as I was going through my Reader, I saw that Helen has written a post about her favourite German words (she beat me to it   :D). You can read her post here.

Till next time….

I am an educational blogger and I also teach academic English at various universities in the UK. I am now blogging, here, about more general topics like planning, beauty and fun girlie stuff. I have become a member of many blogging/bloggers’ groups and have been connecting with people who blog (but are not educational bloggers). An interesting question popped up by a blogger called Victoria in a Blogging Boost group Facebook group. She shared an article about plagiarism and asked what other bloggers consider plagiarism and how they avoid it. I realised, after browsing through various blogs, that some bloggers do not acknowledge sources or give picture credits, but why?

This may be happening for two reasons:

1. They are using only their own material and pictures.
2. They are just not acknowledging other people’s work and using it in their blog posts (plagiarism happening intentionally or unintentionally).

But, if you are getting ideas/pictures/videos from other people and not acknowledging them, and now I am going to go into teacher mode, it is an offence, and you could in small or bigger trouble for it!! Oh! Let’s not get into using someone else’s work and making money from it or let’s do, remember this song?

(www.youtube.com)

They have lost all the rights to this song, cause it is a plagiarised rolling stones song (www.rollingstones.com).

Things to think about

What is plagiarism?

The verb plagiarise means:

To use to use another person’s ​ideas or ​work and ​pretend that it is ​your own

(www.dictionarycambridge. org)

In simple words, anything you find someone else and publish on your website (texts, pictures and videos) and you do not acknowledge where you found it.

What is not plagiarism?

Common knowledge:  E.g.  People use computers, Brad left Jennifer and married Angelina.

So, am I plagiarising if I…

• Use Google pics and say I found this on google pics?

Yes! ( you need to find who took the picture!)

• Read something, somewhere, and then write my own stuff based on it?

Yes (say who inspired you/why you are writing this, based on what?).

• Paraphrase or summarise something so technically not using someone else’s words? I am using my  own so now they are my words…..

Yeap!! (You still have to acknowledge if you have read something somewhere).

• Find a cool quote somewhere, use the exact same words, but no source/author?

Yes

• Read  something on Wikipediaand I remember it?

Yes (Keep in mind though that the information you find on Wikipedia is not reviewed, so you cannot really know if it is true. People who write on Wikipedia are just like me and you).

• Copy a whole text with the same or similar words/structures, but do mention the author?

Yes (unless you use quotation marks,if you are, then no).

How can I see if I am plagiarism something?

There are loads of plagiarism detecting software available, but the easiest thing to do is to put your text into Google, if it pops up, then you are plagiarising!

How do I acknowledge people/ pictures?

These are my suggestions and how I try to avoid plagiarism.

People/websites

If I find something on a blog/website, I put the website in brackets and add the link in the brackets (example the Cambridge dictionary which I linked earlier).  If I am using information from a book, I add a reference list ( teacher mode: reference list goes in alphabetical order).

Pictures

If I use a picture, I add the name of the person who took it under the picture. If I do not know the name, and it is just a website I say picture is taken from http://www.xyz……….com. (BUT I do not use other people’s pictures if I cannot give them credit: teacher mode)

* By the way, try to write down everything correctly, try not to change people’s names!!Also, if you are going to use a picture maybe you should check the host’s website and see if there are copyright restrictions or a license on their website that prohibits it. You need to email and ask for permission to use the pictures!

So, I know how I am going to avoid plagiarism, but how do I stop others from stealing my ideas/pictures?

Well, there is not much you can do in today’s day and age. Everything is public, people have access to what you share online.  I have added a creative commons license to my sidebar just to show that I do want my stuff to be acknowledged. You can find the link to creative commons  here.

Final thoughts

You do not have to go crazy and start worrying about referencing systems and all that (you are blogging, not submitting your paper to Harvard) but do make sure that you mention people when you are using their stuff. It is the best way to go and it shows respect.

Hope you like this blogging tip. If you want more information read this article shared by Victoria on the Blogging boost Facebook page. I have posted another post about blogging etiquette and bits and bobs you might also want to check out. You can find it here

So that’s all folks. Feel free to leave a comment below. Sorry for the teacher mode!! I hope you found some of my suggestions thoughts helpful. Don’t forget to ‘follow’ this blog if you like what you read.

Talk soon

xxx

So, new blog, first post.Let’s talk about blogging.

When I started blogging, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I started off as part of my training for a teaching diploma. So, my first blog posts were about the things I tried out in class and ideas for tasks. During my first year of blogging I didn’t really blog much (compared to now I mean) and I wasn’t really that active in social media either. Now, two and a half years later, I know a few more things and that’s what I am going to share today. You see, while this is my first post here, I have been an educational blogger for some time now. I know a thing or two you may find helpful.

Firstly …… share

If you are going to blog and want people to read your blog posts, you also need to promote your work. I mean, yeah sure, your blog may be you talking about the things you love, but you are also blogging because you want people to read you (aren’t you?). You want to share your ideas and learn from others through their comments. If you wanted your blog to be private, then why have it at all? Why not just write in  notebook, like back in the good old days when we only had notebooks?

So, once you have written something and pressed the publish button, what next? Well, you share/promote.

Where?

Facebook for starters. I share all my rambles on Facebook (luckily, Facebook doesn’t disown you if you are a prolific blogger like me  :p). Apart from your personal page, you can also share your posts on Facebook group pages.

You can also add hash tags on your Facebook entries because they do show up if someone searches for something you have has tagged (and anyway, urban legend says hash tags are good, so just add’em , will ya?).

Google+

I also share my post by pressing Google+. If I am a member of a Google group and my post will probably interest the people in that group, then I share in that particular group. You share with your cirles and then with extended circles.

Twitter

I must admit this is my go to place to share my posts. First of all, I tweet my posts for a few days. Not just once. The life span of a tweet is not that long. I mean your followers will only see it for a few minutes and then it’s lost in the abyss. There are also twtter chats that you can take part in. The more people you ‘meet’ online, the more chances there are that someone will find your post interesting and then share it with other people.

Extra tip: Try to use the same names on your social media. My blog is called mypinkrambles and that’s what my twitter name for this account is as well @mypinkrambles (follow me btw if you want to ofcourse 🙂  ).

A few more thoughts about blogging

Saying thanks: I think it’s necessary to always thank people who share or retweet your posts. It’s nice of them to be sharing, and you should be saying thanks. I also think that if you read something and think it’s good, you, too, should be retweeting and sharing their posts as well.

Comments: I reply to comments.  I ❤ comments. I enjoy reading them. If someone is going to write something in response to a post they read on my blog, I find the time to reply. I may not do it the same day, but I really try to reply to everyone. Also, comments give me a sense of who reads my posts and what the people reading my posts are interested in.

Blogger vs. WordPress

I started off on Blogger but after almost two years of blogging on Blogger, I moved to WordPress. The move is easy. The bad thing is that you lose all the nice comments and documents and PPTs you shared on Blogger do not get transferred and there is a bit of a formatting issue. I like the widgets on WordPress and how easy it is to embed things. I do miss the font options Blogger had.

Inspiration

I like blogging about the things I am interested in. So far I have been blogging about teaching, but it’s time for a change (hence the new blog). I have also found that I often tend to be borderline personal (two years blogging about teaching? Nah… I have rambled about loads of random stuff about my life). So, I guess my life is my muse as well! I like approaching blogging as if it is diary or journal writing. Articles or other blog posts also inspire me. This is why I also enjoy taking part in blog challenges and chains. It makes me feel like I am part of a community. YouTubers and magazines are also places where I get ideas.

Photos

I now take my own. As a teacher, I think it is really improtant to acknowledge other people’s work. If I cannot give picture credits, then I avoid using the picture.

Making money off your blog

Hmm wouldn’t it be cool if you could make a ton of money from blog posts? My other blog has had about 135.000 page views in total. I have received two free books and I also made 10 euros which were then taken back. What am I talking about? AdSense. Adsense is Google’s advertising platform(?) / company(?). Anyway, if you want to add ads to your blog, you add Adsense. I did. I got some clicks and then was chcuked off cause of invalid clicks. Have no idea what that (invalid clicks) means exactly. I tried to appeal but it my account is still disabled, so, yeah. Don’t mess with Google…. or….no money from my blogging. I have made loads of online friends and learnt a lot though, so it’s fine. I   ❤  blogging anyhoo!

Final thoughts….

Blogging is a commitment. It takes time. I also think it walks hand in hand with social media. Oh! Yes, one last thing. Once you have ‘blogitis’ (it’s what all prolific bloggers have), you might wake up in the middle of the night with a good blogging idea. That’s why you should always have a note pad next to your bed. Don’t worry, it’s normal (ummmm, I think).

This post originally appeared on myeltrambles.com, but I have adapted it here.

If you have any blogging tips or just wanna say, “Hi!” Go for it. The comments section is all yours!!

Talk soon

xx

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