BBB Wrap Up!

I am finishing up with the Biannual Blogathon Bash.  It's been a long three days!  I went into this not knowing much about blogging.  I thought I did, but man, was I wrong!


I've been blogging on my personal blog for six years and saw it as my journal.  You don't need to know much to post to a journal.  So, when I started this blog, I didn't think it would be any different.  And I thought it would be easy to put in the recommended 24 hours over a three day period.  Sheesh!  I feel worn out from all the info I have tried to absorb over the past three days and I am working on close to 21 hours put into this blogging weekend!  Whew!  It has felt like I have done little else and yet, I didn't even meet the recommended time!

So, what did I learn?  One of my favorites was learning about making Pinnable images on PicMonkey.  I love editing a photo (duh, I'm a photographer!).  And don't tell anyone, but I like some of my iPhone editing apps, so sometimes I transfer a photo onto my phone just to use that super cool app!  PicMonkey was better than I expected and I will definitely be using it often!  I have already created three images with it, including one for the post I wrote about crocheting.  One big surprise with that was that I was able to put my logo overlaid on a picture.  I tried so hard to get my doodle to be a transparent overlay, to no avail.  I am sure that it's doable, I just couldn't figure it out.  With a few clicks, I was able to put it right on top of a picture and get rid of the white background.  Amazing!  Keep an eye on Pinterest because I think you will see many more of my newfound skill at creating images on PicMonkey!

I worked on figuring out my niche, though I had really already done that.  I also wrote down a game plan for categories and tags for this blog.  A giant help to me were the challenges on growing your Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ followings.  My Facebook page has been sparse in the likes department, so I will be skulking around under my page name and commenting and liking things to get people looking at my page.  I have used Instagram, but never considered using it to bring in traffic.  And the hashtag thing was a total mystery to me!  I am going to be a hashtag-ing fool!  I had never used Google+ before, so I created a profile there and will be learning to navigate that more and more in the coming days.

I also learned some other ways to bring in more traffic and to improve my page rank.  I'm going to be looking into more of those things I learned in the coming days.  And I was encouraged in some organizational skills, as well.

I know, it looks like I put a lot of links in this post, but that's primarily for my benefit, so I can go back later to the blogs that I learned from and reread them and apply what I learned.  Feel free to visit them and learn from them as well!  I want to go back to last year's blogathon posts and read those and see what I missed.  And, I have four tabs open right now with things I want to look into more.

I had a great time and it was a great kickstart to this new blog!  I can't wait to put all I learned into practice and make this an amazing blog!  And I can't wait until the next blogathon!  But, right now, I need some rest!!!