Blazing Minds

Welcome to the second interview in my new series, as mentioned previously each week I will be interviewing a fellow blogger who has kindly answered my blogging questions, so let’s get on with it…

Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?
A: I’m Vic.  I live in SW London with my husband and five year old and have another on the way.  I work full time as a PA in a law firm in town.  I go there to rest each day – it’s much easier than running a household!

Q: Hi Vic, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: I first started writing online when I was 15, publishing my diary entries on an angelfire site.  It fell by the wayside but I picked it up again on a different angelfire site in 2002 (I was 19) and discovered a very early version of the blogging community.  It was through that blog I met my husband!  I registered glowstars.net in 2004 just after the birth of my son.  It never occurred to me then to be a mummy blogger, and as I’m not entirely one now, it’s something I’ve come to be glad of.  The name came from a Heather Nova album, one of my favourite singers.  That and I’m just a bit of a fan of little stars in general.

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: Yes and no. The act of writing a blogpost itself can be quite a quick one. That said, it can sometimes take ages to type out something incredibly simple. It’s participation in community that takes the time; reading and commenting on others’ blogs. I’m lucky in that my job tends to be quite quiet so I can usually devote a large portion of my day to reading blogs. On an average day there’ll be 300 or so items in my reader.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: It’s an unfortunate truth that it’s probably spammers. But I’d say more important than general traffic are your regular readers, those who keep coming back for more, commenting on your posts and offering support when you need it.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: I’ve signed up to so many social networks it’s impossible to keep count. Now I’ve pretty much limited things to facebook and twitter. I find facebook that bit more personal than most and tend to keep up with fewer people, although there are a fair few bloggers on my friends list. I do also spend a large proportion of my day on twitter. It’s great for catching up on the general things people might not post to their blogs and there’s a real sense of community and discussion on there. It’s definitely worth trying a number of networks out to see what works for you.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: Don’t just expect search engines to do all the work for you. Get out in the blogging community, reach to people, read and comment on their posts (although commenting “great post” every time isn’t likely to get you very far). Show a real interest in other bloggers and don’t be afraid to follow someone’s blog and/or comment, just because they seem to be one of the big guys.

Thanks Vic.

You can check out Vic at @glowstars and her blog glowstars.net..

If you are interested in an interview on Blazing Minds then please use the Contact Me button at the top of the Blazing Minds blog..

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 8:03 am and is filed under Blogger Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.