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Book Blogger Confessions is a meme that's held every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month and is hosted by For What It's Worth and Tigers all consuming books
The question for today is this:
We have created a blogging time machine! Pretend you can start over. Knowing what you know now about blogging – what do you wish you did differently when it comes to creating your blog?
I've been blogging now for almost three years (holy crap, I can't believe it's been that long) and I can definitely think of a few things I'd do differently if I could go back.
First thing first, I'd think a lot more about my blog name and my url. When I decided to write a blog, I wasn't exactly sure what all I was going to do with it. I didn't know if I wanted it to be just a book review blog or something else. But I was watching the movie Must Love Dogs and because of my love for that movie (and my laziness to come up with anything else) I decided to go with Must Love Books. The only problem was someone back in 2005 decided to create a blog with that url, wrote one post, and never come back. So I had to pick a different thing to put in my url. I went with "labradors" instead of "books" because, well I dunno, I just did. Maybe it was because my Labrador was sitting on the couch next to me at the time or just my all around love for that breed of dog.
If I could go back and change this, I'd think about creating a theme and having the name fit with the theme of my blog. But back then I had way too much fun changing my layout about once a week. I couldn't make up my mind.
Next thing I would do is I'd work a lot harder at finding other book blogs and getting more involved in the blogging community. It took me a year to really get involved in the community and I'm sad it took me so long because I'm sure I missed out on a lot of cool things and opportunities.
And lastly, I think I would go back farther in time than when I first started, maybe a year farther back and tell myself to start blogging then. I was getting really into reading a year or two before I decided to start blogging and there are a lot of books that I wish I had some form of review or documentation for because I'm having trouble remembering my original thoughts on the book.
I did a search on my blog name and url before I committed so that was *one* thing I did right. Maybe you could come up with a url with hyphens (must-love-books) or something...? I think the book blogging community has been so helpful. I was lucky enough to start blogging right when the first Book Bloggers Convention happened in 2010.
ReplyDeleteThat's so funny. "must love labradors" lol
ReplyDeleteMy twitter name is teamsheltie and my husband always bugged me to change it to my blog name so it would match but now everyone knows me by that so I'm stuck with it.
I know what you mean though about discussing books before you started blogging. I don't remember them well enough to review now but I still would love to recommend them to people.
Yeah it's too late to change my url. I'm pretty sure if I did change it I would lose all my followers. Plus I've been told multiple times that people never noticed that it is "labrador" instead of "books" so I guess it's not that big of a deal. Haha.
DeleteI love the name of your blog! It sucks that someone had already taken it (and to add insult to injury, abandoned it!).
ReplyDeleteI know how you feel about having all those books you read previously, but didn't review. I could have thousands of reviews if only...
I still am at sea when it comes to connecting with the blogging community. I have really been trying to focus on it in my second year of blogging. I agree with the timing thing. I should have started blogging earlier but it never occurred to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm lucky I had some great advice when I started my blog. Besides a professional design I'm pretty happy with my blog.
ReplyDeleteI love your blog name and I can understand about name change. I agree also with connecting with community.
ReplyDelete