Get Social and Find Your Tribe

You might think that as someone who’s been blogging for almost 7 years, I’d have it all figured out by now. You know, this whole blogging thing. Looking at my blog though, you’ll know I don’t. I think a couple of factors weigh into why my blog is suffering.

First my time. I just don’t have much of it left over at the end of the day. I work full time. Then once a week is date night. Wednesday night is church. Now I’m kickboxing twice a week, so I’m gone for 3 hours. Did I mention the whole “every day life” that’s included in my day. Last weekend we were down in Williamsburg. This weekend had a soccer game, a memorial, church, shopping, and a concert. I plan on blogging on the way to the concert (fingers crossed).

I remember how much easier it was when I was working part time. I had a lot of free time to focus on blogging. If you look at my archives you’ll see that there were more blog posts per month than there has been for the past two years. I think as long as I work full time it’s something I will struggle with.
At the beginning of October I joined Bloggers Get Social. Through work I’ve had the opportunity to see Krystal’s blogging work over the past year. She does amazing work and that gave me the confidence to try and win the opportunity to be part of her group. She and Rachel spent the past month helping bloggers new and old get their blogging amped up.

I’ve watched conversation after conversation of bloggers thanking them for how their blogging and social engagements have changed in that time. One of the things they encouraged me to do was change the look of my blog. I made it with one sidebar so that my blogging space was bigger. I also cleaned up my sidebar and got rid of a lot of things that just didn’t need to be there.

I’ve got numerous emails to go through still because I haven’t been able hit most of them. It’s been really hard knowing that all of this learning is out there, available to me, and I haven’t had time to implement it. Some days I wish I were a micro blogger. I do really well chatting on my socials, it’s just creating an entire blog post with edited photos that I struggle to find time with.

One of the biggest things I was able to take away from my month with BGS is a tribe! At the end of the month we were able to sign up to be part of a tribe. Krystal and Rachel took the time to go through all of us who signed up and assigned us to our own tribes. We’ve got 5 people in our tribe and I can tell you that I dig them already. We’ve all been part of larger groups/tribes before so we’re still working on how our tribe will work. I think we’re getting started really well though!

A few things I know I NEED to do is to utilize Facebook better in regards to my blog. We did a Google Hangout explaining how to use tabs on our pages, something I have YET to do. We were also given a printable blogging planner. For me, having ADD knowing what I’m going blog on each day of the week will help me stay focused to a degree. I just need to come up with WHAT I want to blog about on those days and be consistent with them. Consistent, a word that isn’t part of my blogging vocabulary.

I will have to go back through all of the emails from the past month and watch the hangouts and find out what I can do to put them to use for blogging. I know I need a plan. I just don’t know what that plan is yet. What I DO know is I’m already extremely thankful for Bloggers Get Social because it’s the kick in the pants that I know I need.

So here are my questions for you:
1) Do you have a tribe? Do you have people who support you and your blogging?
2) Have you got it all figured out? Do you know all the tricks of the trade? If so, who do you share that wealth of knowledge with?
3) Are you trying to figure out this whole blogging adventure, but are struggling to get it off the ground?

If you want to grow, to develop your blog, to get to know people who have similar goals, I would consider joining a group like Bloggers Get Social. Not only will it benefit you, but it’ll benefit your readers as well! Until the end of the year, you can use BGS14 and get $30 off. Totally worth it in my opinion!

If you have a tribe, what do you love most about it?