Some advice from experienced and regular bloggers

[Rojak]

I want to start writing a family travel blog, in order to capture and record for my DCs the experiences we have had and to see if I could move into blogging / guest blogging as an alternative career.

We live abroad and in the last 2 years have had many interesting travel opportunities. But all the photos just sit on the computer and the DCs forget where or what they've seen so quickly.

I have an old blog, started in 2006 (only 14 posts), capturing our experience when we first moved abroad.

I look at that blog now and think it was perhaps a bit too text heavy.

So my question for the experienced and regular bloggers is:

1. do your regular readers / followers prefer less text, more pics?
2. how do you publicise your blog or get more people to read it? I do want it as a record of our journeys but I also want to see if I can get into blog writing as an alternative career.
3. is there a preferred writing style in cyber space? The best blogs I have read tend to have a direct, chatty style over more formal prose?
4. how do you keep going? My first blog, I ran out of steam with 14 posts!

Many thanks

Blog articles should be no more than about a page of text - short and sweet. It's a blog, not an essay. Photos, yes - but be aware that (even these days) some readers may have slow internet connections. Plenty of people browse blogs on their tablets or smartphones too.

Publicise your blog via social media and SE submissions. Pretty much the same as any website, really. Blog directories and good backlinks are also helpful.

The best writing style is the one that is true to your own style and fits your topic. Blogs are very personal, so readers do expect some quirks. Very formal prose suggests it is a corporate blog - but don't go too far the other way. (I'm talking: bad language. Any such use must be justified by your target audience.)

Choose a topic that you can confidently talk about for an hour. If you can do that, then you can probably write a short article, at least once a month. If you find it difficult to write about your topic... then you won't do it. Your blog needs regular/fresh content, which will not appear if all you want to say about your topic can be summed up in one or two articles or, say, 10 minutes of conversation.

Finally... this is just general advice; like new baby advice, take the bits that work for you and ignore the rest. GL and have fun! x

Thank-you so much for your advice.

I have to confess I am not really a techie here (should start reading the tech tips page, I think)

But when you say publicise on social media and SE? What's SE?

Also what are back links?

Sorry, I am quite new to this and seem to have spent the last 10 years mired in little children and obviously, reading the wrong sections of mnet!!

Social media is Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.

SE = search engine(s)

Backlinks are links from other websites to your site.

HTH x