MY BLOGGING STORY

This is going to be a nice personal read as it is about me and how my roller-coaster blogging journey started. 

So, stay along - it's going to be long.

It's me, Saathvik

Howdy Reader!

I'm Saathvik - a literature enthusiast from Sagar, Shivamogga.

I started blogging in 2015. 

When I read a article on the internet which my father showed to me one fine Sunday morning. I was wondered and told myself, 

"Wow, I'm seeing the story of a person written from the other side of the world. Awesome!" 

So, I was eager to have one of my own. Till then I had no idea about owning a blog or a website. Meanwhile, I came across blog of our family friend Rajendra uncle one day, and decided - I too have my own!

(owning thing is much fun. My father may have bike but I had my cycle. I'm owning it😎)

Hence, my first blog went online in 2015 - writingsofsathvikapn.blogspot.com and it was much thrilling experience. I used to post my every little writings, poems, essays written for competitions, homeworks given by my kannada teacher, english teacher - almost everything I wrote was there on that blog without any filter or any modifications.

I used to tell this to my sister, in swag -

"SUCCESS IS THAT PEOPLE START TO SEARCH FOR YOU IN GOOGLE INSTEAD OF FACEBOOK"

That was the recent quote, back then, which had caught my attention. You search my address in address bar, my blog will be there. How cool was that 👦 (except for the fact that it never came in google search - you'd get only if you typed it in address bar)

But my blog was never more than that of a scribble sheet - yet special, only because it's online.

HEY BLOG - STEP UP

I was much interested in literature. My parents gave me an amazing diary and I used to store all my compositions in there. Once our school team went to a  competition organised by Chirantana Club at JNNCE-Shivamogga on eve of Environmental day. I was the team for Poetry competition. And to much of my surprise - I won 1st place in competition and many appreciated. One among them was my competition judge. She came to me and asked if I have anymore of my compositions. It's all at home, in my diary, I said. Then she told of this blog again and I just listened. 

Because I was shy enough to show all my shredded scribbles. I thought it would be cringy. 

This made me to organise my blog thenafter, removing unfinished things so that I could show to someone confidently if asked.

I didn't used to share my blog to everyone. It's probably because I wasn't writing regularly for blog. All I did was, making it as a storage space - rather a clean one. That's all. It included every bit of my unfinished poems, essay homework my social-science teachers gave everything dumped at one place. (which later got sorted out)

After my 10th board exam, my parents encouraged me to participate in essay competition by AKKA organisation It was open across all age categories. I prepared an essay - very much satisfactorily as I had holidays and to much of my excitement,  I received consolation prize.

What's even more exciting was, while filling up the form - it had asked for my website address if any, which I duly gave mine and "Woah", I started to get visitors now and then- not from my city Sagar, Shivamogga but from United States! I went on to cloud nine. Still I wasn't blogging - I just had some collection of my writings.

THEN CAME THE IDEA OF PROFESSIONAL BLOGGING

I didn't opt to go out of my city in PU and joined a college in my city itself. So, I was home and it gave me lots of lots of free time. My college timings was from 8am to 1pm and finished. Isn't that cool that everyday was like Saturday for me?

Then I liked to see myself as a professional blogger. My college afternoons were filled either with a random hollywood movie in TV (5 channels in total) or computer games (from Miniclip to NFS, Call-of-Duty) or Sleeping or renovating blog.

The major mistake I did while blogging was, too much obsessed with the look and not of content. So, blogger(blogspot) seemed to have very little options left for me.After searching for many days, I moved to WordPress. 

As my wish to look professional (not to be professional) grew, I spent lots of and lots of hours in customizing theme changing font, size, color, gadgets placement sidebar, comment section and what not. Since I wasn't on my premium plan, I was unable to customize my theme entirely. It took days together to get accustomed to new WordPress dashboard and customizations.

Meanwhile I came across the success story of ShoutMeLoud and I was inspired. When he showed his income report, I was like - who wants to study all this boring things, I'll be an Entrepreneur. Weeks have went dreaming that 😂

But things were missing here for me. I never had the idea of the consistency, patience for long run and what exactly I want to blog about. If it comes to professional blogging, it's never ever stands only on your personal writings you wrote for fun. But I didn't understand at that time as I was flying between classes and home circled around manual writing and sleeping.

Coming back, even when a theme seems to be good enough,  I would come across another dozens of free themes and boom, I went after and after them discarding the present one. It costed me not just hundreds of hours but also some strain. I also went looking around for self-hosted WordPress blog which all professional bloggers use and suggest - I didn't had enough courage or confidence  as I wasn't sure about my niche.

Some of my old blogging bits I worked on: (In no particular order)

Unfortunately, I don't have any of these blogs live now. I just have some pieces.

Pooling resources for UPSC

About Writing and Literature

Made for Movie Review

Sharing tips for exams

To give info about smartphones

Days were passing, I was engaged here decorating - my parents thought I'm preparing for exams through online videos sort of thing at my room.

It took me months together - almost a year you can say what blogging truly demands. I just immersed myself in exploring the commercial blogging - SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Content Strategy, Social Media Marketing etc. All this was going on with pure excitement. Nothing big motive behind. But the major thing - Creating Content, went quite neglected.

 

If you are interested in there, I would suggest my top picks.

• Neil Patel
• Problogger
• ShoutMeLoud

WHY I'VE MOVED IT AS A HOBBY 

I never had the consistency that I'm proud of and I don't know how I put myself here. My grades were coming down faster.(If memory serves me right, my mathematics was almost came down to 57%) All this blogging circus was being done behind the curtain without sharing my blog to any of my friends. (Strange, as I wanted to present fully fledged blog, once and all) But it was never upto my expectations and also I learned that blogging is not that easy as it seems.

In my 2nd year, I deleted my blogs both on Blogger and WordPress as it was much of a distraction for me. (Quite strange - My Facebook never was in my distraction list as I was using it very rarely). So I resorted, I won't delve in blogging but to have a mere online presence, I thought of a portfolio website.

WordPress free themes were meant for blogging and not feature list for portfolio website. So again I searched all over internet - reading about Weebly, Squarespace and came across Wix which was successful to impress me with amazing functionalities it offered for a website even though I had zero programming knowledge. The simple drag and drop came really useful for me.

Spent about a week making it, nothing much to write about myself (just a college guy) included some pictures. Done. I kept it aside.

Want to know what I managed to get from remaining 5-6 months for exams?

• Read: My Test scores at my LinkedIn Profile 

I'M HERE AGAIN 

After almost 2 years gap, I'm back here - back to my Blogger platform (from where I started) taking it just as hobby and happy with that. Lot have changed in blogging world and many resources, SEO techniques are going outdated in less than a year and number of blogs just seems to be rising enormously!

Now,  I'm not under some deadline to post, I'm free to post whatever I write. 

I just make some series-of-post I work upon if found useful and make them available for you as beautiful resource. Happy blogging.

That's my little Roller-coaster blogging journey. Hope this helps people out there about the challenges of starting a blog with this particular case-study. [Though it's not a success story]

❤