likes and followers | Mama Cormier

….3 hours before the end of 2012

Story #7 for Daily Post Writing Challenge

Reaching Goals

Why is it that some people achieve their goals and other hard working people don’t? I often discuss this with my students. Many people set goals to become millionaires but very few people achieve this goal. The difference is that millionaires developed a plan early in their careers to reach this status and reworked the plan until they achieved their goal. In other words they worked to achieve this goal where the rest of us only wished for it to come true.

I know this is a pretty simplistic point of view but there is some truth to it. The other thing that successful people do is network. It is often who you know that helps you on the road to success.

This holds true for bloggers as well. I was hoping or should I say wishing that my blog would reach hundreds of people around the world. I’m not sure why but when you put so much effort into something it’s nice to know that someone out there is taking the time to read your posts.

I started to read suggestions on how to make your blog more noticeable and draw more followers. I decided to visit at least 10 new blogs every night and leave a comment or a ‘like’. I routinely went to ‘freshly pressed’ and eagerly read the successful blogs that achieved this award. The styles of writing and the topics were diverse to say the least. Some I thoroughly enjoyed and immediately followed.

Soon I started to notice that some of the bloggers where I had left a comment came over to my site. I went from three or four likes to as many as twenty but how does one get into the hundreds. Well I discovered that happens when you’re ‘freshly pressed’ and when someone reblogs your post onto their site. This happened to me when Sue Llewellyn from A Word in Your Ear reblogged one of my photo challenge entries onto her site. I’ve reached over 100 likes on that post alone.

Sometimes to reach a goal you have to ask for help. Two days ago when I posted my stats for the year I told my readers that I hoped to reach 200 followers before today. I was very close. As luck would have it Rarasaur read my post and decided to help me reach my goal by following me and asking her husband and friends to do the same. As of today I have 202 followers. Thank you!

I also quietly wanted to surpass my most views for one day. I reached an all time high of 76 back in May. I’ve come close but just couldn’t seem to draw anymore attention. For whatever reason that goal also came true today. Just before I push the publish button I’m sitting at 90 views for today. Yahoo!

So to reach your goals you definitely have to do more than wish for them to come true. Hard work, perseverance, and a little help from your friends will make it happen.

Best Wishes for a happy, healthy and productive New Year on 2013.

Cheers!

Carol

…..being ‘reblogged’ by someone with a huge following

I’ve only started blogging in mid April of this year. It was never a goal to reach thousands of readers (or so I thought). I just wanted to share memories, ideas, photos and recipes with family and friends and I wanted a public forum that would help keep me honest and motivated on my weight loss journey.

Most successful bloggers would probably tell me that I need to be more focused on one topic, (i.e. photography or weight loss or food articles or DIY projects or etc., etc..) and not dabble in so many different areas. My blog is like my life. I’m interested in a diverse range of subjects and I like trying new things. As a teacher I also like to share lessons that work well and I love supporting the arts. This includes work that my students have done, workshops that my daughter runs, art exhibitions of my 91 year old friend and photographs that my cousin and I share.

When I started to get ‘likes’ from complete strangers from all over the world and when some of these same people started to follow me I was initially nervous about putting myself out there but I met some great people in the blogosphere and I started looking forward to checking my stats and seeing who was reading my blog. I started experimenting with different styles of writing and posting more photographs. I read ten to twenty new blogs every night and tried to make comments on some that were of particular interest to me.

Over the past six months I would be delighted with three or four ‘likes’ for each post. As my readership started to increase and the number of followers reached 180, the number of ‘likes’ also increased. My best number of ‘likes’ for one post went as high as 19 but sometimes it would take several days to get there.

I’m somewhat competitive and I like a challenge. A few days ago I set a goal to write a post that would get 20 ‘likes’. When Sue Llewellyn put out her lastest challenge I had no idea how posting four photographs that were taken this summer would bring me so much attention. Not only did I reach my goal, I surpassed it. When this post was published I had received 92 ‘likes’. Wow!

I have to give a big thanks to Sue Llewellyn from A Word in Your Ear. She graciously reblogged my post, The Word a Week Photograph Challenge – Blue and the majority of my ‘likes’ came from her followers. I’ve secretly wanted to be ‘Freshly Pressed’ but this was the next best thing.

So what’s my next goal? Trying to figure out how to get some of these bloggers back to my blog would be one goal but another one is getting my number of followers up to 200. It’s time to check out 90 or so new blogs and leave a few comments. “Phew… I’d better get busy.”

Cheers and Thanks!