What Good Bloggers Do

About one year ago, I wrote a post about my rather unsuccessful blogger-career in my first semester as an SUK-student. Although I already had some blogging experience at that time, I was a bit overwhelmed by the task of writing a blog for a wider and more public audience. Luckily, things seem to have changed and I have become a more successful blogger in the meantime. I don't hesitate to share my opinion about something anymore and I realized how much fun it is to write about your own interests and to share your thoughts and knowledge about something.

Especially the sharing of knowledge is something I really grew fond of, because the process of writing about a topic I am enthusiastic about forces me me think of the best way to convey what you want to say in a clear matter, instead of writing "GUYS, THIS IS AWESOME!" in capslock. You have to organize your thoughts and make it easy to understand (and, naturally, also interesting) for people who don't know anything about that very topic. It is not about explaining the whole topic to the audience, but to explain what is interesting or cool about it and why you are interested in it. And maybe also why it could be interesting to the readers as well.

Naturally, not every topic somebody is excited about is automatically interesting to other people as well. But if you learn something new from a post about a topic you know not much about, then the blog (or rather the author) did everything right. That's also something I think most of the Top 10 Bloggers from the last semester did right: they managed to offer clear insights into topics that were interesting to them and mostly new to us. Some of them also used catchy post titles, funny pictures or a background story to catch the readers attention. But still: the post itself must be interesting to read as well.

What I also really liked about most of the top bloggers was that they stuck to one or two main topics in their blogs. Some wrote mostly about traveling, other focused on American history. That they were so consistent with that without becoming boring was something I was really impressed by. This way, you knew almost instantly what you can expect from their blogs and also if you might be interested in their future posts. I, on the other hand, posted about things that just came to my mind with no connection to the other topics I was talking about. Don't take me wrong: this can also work absolutely fine! But I decided that I also want to stick to one or two main topics so that people get a feeling about what I might be posting about in the future.

There are also two further things I want to change about my blogging behavior: firstly, I want to post more frequently and secondly, I want to read more blogs by others SUK-students and (okay, that makes it three things) leave more comments on their posts. This way, we might inspire each other to post about certain topics and consequently will also get motivated to post more as soon as we realize that people do read our blogs. Wouldn't that be great? I think it totally would.

Food Blog: have cake, will travel

source: keenhaven.com

Vegan recipes that don't require expensive (artificial) alternatives for animal products are often hard to find. And also vegan cookbooks that aren't trying too hard by thinking of the most exotic recipes are rare as well. Fortunately, I found the perfect vegan cookbook a few years ago: The Complete Guideline to Vegan Food Substitutions by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman. It's a cookbook that not only offers simple recipes, such as like vegan pancakes or vegan feta cheese, but also guides on how to "veganize" traditional recipes. They provide a huge list of alternatives for certain animal products, such as milk, cheese or eggs, at the beginning of each chapter.

Although this book really simplifies vegan cooking, I still like to read food blogs to find new ideas. I usually stick to German-speaking food blogs (mostly because of the measurements), but when we were asked to write about an English-speaking food blog, I thought of looking up what the authors of my favorite cookbook are doing. And it wasn't surprising at all that they had their own food blogs as well.

I instantly fell in love with Celine Steel's blog "have cake, will travel". I have to admit that this is mostly to her breath-taking photographs, as everything in her photos looks so natural and like it's straight out of grandmother's kitchen. But as soon as I took my eyes off her photos (which is very hard, because they take all the attention away from the text), I recognized her witty writing style from the book. In her posts, she usually starts with a personal story about the ingredients or how she craved for something special. This is followed my mouth-watering pictures of the recipe's target and the recipe itself. Unfortunately, her blog (in difference to their book) offers more food for people with a sweet tooth like muffins, tarts, cookies, syrup, and so on, which actually isn't quite my cup of tea.

Why I'm not a good Blogger

source: ler0c

I was doing a bit of brain-storming for our first homework of this semester today, you know, how we plan to improve our blogs and what we like best about the blogs of our fellow students. All I could think of during gathering my thoughts was: why is it so hard for me to post regularly? How did the other students manage to post so much, while I was struggling with it all the time?

Blogging is not even new to me. I have always been writing about my private life, starting in 2004/2005 with shamelessly spamming my blog with writing ridiculously detailed posts about my everyday life (which mostly consisted of going to school back then). Obviously, I wasn't the only one doing this -- I knew lots of people on the internet who did the very same, although it wasn't that "mainstream" during that time. It was kind of a scene you belonged to when you managed to let your readers believe that your life is always full of adventures and fun. It made me feel good to present the kind of impressive parts of my life, because most of my readers didn't know me personally. This made it easier to act like a super heroine since they couldn't prove the opposite.

When social platforms like MySpace and Facebook came along, presenting your life on the internet became much more common, and slowly but surely also privacy on the internet became a topic. It was (luckily) the end of my glorious time of thinking "Notice me, internet! I'm interesting!". I started becoming more careful with my privacy, thinking twice whether my posts are worth being posted or not.

However, there was also the other direction: out of a sudden, a lot of people started blogging about their everyday life as well and/or posted their opinions about certain topics with sheer passion, while I more and more hesitated posting on my blog. I just felt that my everyday life was not interesting enough. I felt and still feel that blogging was yet again a way of showing off. My personal impression is that lots of bloggers think of themselves as being extraordinary, and that their metaphorical voice on the internet is loud and of big importance. On the internet, I am one person amongst millions and so in most cases, hardly anybody will be interested in what I ate today or why I don't like ridiculous high temperatures in summer.

In the end, I might be on the way of finding an answer to my question at the beginning: either I'm not self-confident enough to write down my personal opinions or I take blogging far too seriously. Either way, I have to find a better solution to be able to post on this blog more regularly than not posting at all -- at least for the sake of a good grade.