Another Reflective post, I’ll be blogging about what I’ve done the last month and Things 10, 11 & 12 including networking, collaborating and my World Wide Web presence.
I find blogging enjoyable and cathartic. It’s an easy way to get your ideas onto “paper”
and a great way to get your message out.
With a small amount of computer skills and a couple of months practice
it’s possible FOR ANYONE to have something that looks good. I remember trying to create an online
presence for my local Scrabble Club about 12 years ago, this was before the
likes of Blogger, Wordpress and ready-made websites like Go-Daddy. It was a nightmare and that was even before
you tried to upload some images and change the font. Everything was so fiddly and time
consuming. Today with the use of Blogger
you’re up and running in minutes.
My previous reflection concentrated on the look of my blog
and I’ve played around with it a little since then, my favourite addition being
the recent posts widget (note to self, write a short blog on tweaking the appearance
of a blog) -
I was aware another reflective blog was imminent so I did a
mini mid-season reflection after 77 days and posted about it HERE. This purely looked at the stats; I concluded that to reach
more of an audience I needed to concentrate on creating good content and share
it across my social media platforms. A
well known saying is “write what you know” so I mostly stuck to writing about
Scrabble and wrote these 4 blogs;
Scrabble & Literacy Skills viewed 261 times - HERE
Introducing Scrabble at your library viewed 264 times - HERE
Starting a new Scrabble Club viewed 54 times - HERE
And I went all out combining a blog about Dogs at Christmas
and Scrabble viewed 250 - HERE
These four blogs together got 829 views by 7th
December. That’s a great success. They were shared across Facebook, Twitter & Instagram
amongst several pages including those dedicated to Scrabble, Libraries and the
SPCA. I’ve also trying to encourage more
collaboration between the Rudai23 participants.
Thing 10
was setting up a Facebook or Twitter, I had great fun resurrecting my old
Twitter account and have started tweeting my blogs with great success. The blog covering this task is HERE
Thing 11
task was to work on my personal online presence; I’ve written a new bio and
updated my online presence. For years I’ve
always been aware of my online presence and with the scary fact that half of
all future employers check out your online presence before an interview, I’ve
always kept it clean and professional. There
are no videos of me getting drunk and doing stupid things. My blog covering this is HERE . I’ve just started my LinkedIn page so will be
working on that over the next couple of weeks.
This will take a while as I want to fill in all the jobs I have done,
experiences and skills I have. I will also be
joining with others I know or that have the same jobs, experiences or hobbies. This kind of work takes a lot of time,
fine-tuning your account. I’m aiming to
have this complete by the end of the year.
Things 10 & 11 have helped me develop my digital
footprint and I am happy with what is “out-there”. When I finish tweaking my LinkedIn account in
the next couple of weeks this will complete my personal brand and when I get it
to a stage I am happy with it I will work on connecting with as many people as
possible and of course sharing it across my social media platforms. I find working on something like LinkedIn
cannot be rushed and cannot be done in one sitting. You need to look at what others have done but
I do love the part of going through your CV and jogging your memory about all
the things you can do. I have a
consistent message and most importantly I’m happy there is nothing on the web
that I am embarrassed about. However, at
the end of the day I will be working with Wexford County Council so my online
presence doesn’t matter when it comes to job promotions and interviews.
Thing 12
is all about Collaboration so I discussed how the Wexworlds team collaborates HERE. I’m looking forward to using a new event
planning application next year whilst putting together Wexworlds 2018. I've also begun reaching out to other bloggers.
The slowing down of the tasks has helped me work on my blog a little more and develop my online presence. It would have been much more difficult to get to where I am without easing up on the deadlines. In conclusion, I’m really happy with where by blogging is
going and my ever developing online presence.
My blog has now over 3350 views with a massive amount of that traffic
coming from Facebook. I will need to use
Twitter and Instagram a little more in the future so all my eggs are not in the
one basket and hope to help others shares their blogs too. A great way to get a blog noticed is cross
promotion between other bloggers so I will be looking for a few other bloggers
to do this with.
That’s me done for now.
John The Captain Ryan
No comments:
Post a Comment