Tag Archives: bloggingfundamentals

Blogging Fundamentals 2018 – Assignments One Through Five

First things first – time for an update on my progress toward achieving any of my New Year’s resolutions. I published my resolutions on 6 January 2018 in this post: 2018 – Time For Some New Year’s Resolutions. It was a pretty good list, ambitious yet achievable, so I thought, and while it is still too early in the year to say I failed entirely, I can say I am not doing well to achieve a single one. But, this post marks a little more progress toward achieving some of them.

The entire focus of completing the Blogging University Blogging Fundamentals course at this time is to completely revamp this blog to have it align more with what I foresee as my writing focus for the foreseeable future – using this blog to support my need to earn more money, which is one of my published resolutions. As a retired person, all my income is fixed now, so earning more money can only result from getting another job or developing income from home-based business. I am not looking for a new job and I’m not going to look for one, so this blog is going to be one tool to help me start earning from business. Thus, the focus of my writing is going to be business related, primarily home-based business related.

Other than shifting the focus of my writing, revamping the blog also means I am completely changing how it will look. Again, this works well with completing the Blogging Fundamentals course, since the fifth assignment is to “Love Your Theme,” in other words to try several themes until I find one I like and start using it. This turned out to be pretty easy as I identified a theme several weeks ago I wanted to use, so the next several weeks will not only see a change to my content but a blog that will be changing several times as I move from my existing theme to a new one.

As I stated in the title of this post, it’s being written to accomplish the first five assignments of the Blogging Fundamentals course. I already talked about changing the theme, so in the interest of actually completing the first four assignments, here they are as assigned in the emails I received.

Day One – Publish a “who I am and why I’m here post: This is simple isn’t it? I am here to write and have people read and enjoy what I write. Actually, it never has really been simple. In my very first post on this blog, I wrote, One single thread of advice is repeated over and over in everything I have ever read or heard about writing – “just write!” Get started! Write something today, and tomorrow, and again and again. Today, that is what I am doing. That is why I was here six years ago and it is why I am here today.

Day Two – Take Control of Your Title and Tagline: It’s very easy to complete this assignment, I’m not changing anything. My title and tagline are both fine with me and they are well established so they actually have some SEO value. Again, no change needed.

Day Three – Visit the Neighbors: This is where the whole concept of a blog as a community starts to come together – visiting other blogs and developing a relationship by starting to comment on other’s works. Over the years I have done this and followed several blogs. Since I am going in a new direction now, it’s incumbent on me to find new blogs with similar interests to start engaging as my new peers.

Day Four – Identify Your Audience: This is going to be a work in progress for me over the next few weeks as I refine exactly who I am trying to reach out to with my new business focus.

Next up over the next day or two will be unveiling the new look of the blog and a couple of posts to complete the next course assignments. Hopefully within the next few weeks I’ll have this going in the general direction I want.

 

Happy Anniversary to Me

 

So far, February has been a completely unforgettable month. I’ve been stretched and squeezed and confronted with many more situations in the last twenty-five days that I am literally trying to catch my breath to catch up.

On the second, as you can see above, Automatic reminded and congratulated me for the six year anniversary of this blog. Since I was already thinking about some major changes, I decided to make them as part of completing the Blogging University Blogging Fundamentals course. So, I enrolled.

Of course, my timing could have been a little better, since we were also preparing to move to a new apartment.

So here I was, packing and preparing to move to a new apartment, getting ready for the daily assignments for the Blogging Fundamentals course to start filling my inbox, and generally just doing all the other things that constitute living life – then I got sick. I thought it was the flu, but turned out it was just a minor cold, that didn’t go away, and didn’t go away, and then put me in the hospital.

I spent five days in the hospital getting well enough to come home to the new place. I came home and after a few days I started trying to get back to all the plans for updating this blog and completing the course I earnestly wanted to do. And that’s where I am now.

Rather than completing the assignments from the course on a daily basis like I would have had I not gotten ill, I intend to spend the next week or so combining assignments and making the changes that I want for this blog. So that’s whats coming up next.