Blazing Minds

Welcome to another 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: This is a great idea Karen! I like reading your interviews because I always learn from your interviewees no matter how much I thought i already knew. Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Mandy and I come from South Africa originally. I moved over to London, England in 2007 with one husband, two cats and two dogs. I blog under the name “Emm” (as in “Emm” is for Mandy).

Q: Hi Mandy, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: I started my blog http://passiontounderstand.blogspot.com/ on 12 February 2009 although I imported some entries from my previous blog. My blog is called “A Passion to Understand” and the tagline is “a passionate view of world events and the desire to understand why”. I had been trying for a long time to make sense of the events in Zimbabwe, Rwanda and the Balkans and to understand how things such as genocide and crimes against humanity could happen. I had the idea that if I broke it down for myself in a way that I could understand it then perhaps other people would find that useful too.

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: Blogging does take a lot of my time although that is mainly because I am a sucker for punishment and have decided to maintain three blogs. I would say that I spend at least 10 hours a week blogging, in addition to working full time as an Office Slave. It is not an excessive amount of time but still… it adds up.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: The primary source of traffic to all of my blogs comes from me actually posting. I spent so much time on social networks trying to drum up traffic for my blogs only to realise that I got huge peaks from Feedburner whenever I do post. Over time though, I have noticed more and more traffic coming from search engines too. That is always a great bonus – I read on a blog called The Blog Report the other day that readers are already interested in your content if they arrived on your blog through a search engine. That means half your work is done.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: I use Entrecard and CMF to promote my blog as well as BlogCatalog. A lot of people are really against Entrecard but I find their systems of catagorizing blogs to be excellent and I really depend on them to find blogs in the areas I’m interested in. For example, Entrecard has an excellent and varied group of political bloggers which I like to read. CMF has an excellent community and really helpful maintainers. By really getting involved in both Entrecard and CMF and focusing on reading other blogs and leaving meaningful comments, I find that I make friends and obtain readers too. So many people leave rubbish comments on other blogs but that is just silly. Your comment is often the first thing another blogger sees about you; it is similar to the covering letter on your CV. If you write something intelligent and meaningful you are far more likely to make people interested in you and want to read more of what you have to say.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: So! Write decent comments and get involved with other people. Reply to comments too – it is so important to acknowledge people who have taken the time to interact with you. Always aim for quality not quantity in your blogs. “Experts” say you should blog four times a week but believe me, your readers would prefer two well written, original posts. Be patient (I think everyone says this). Write every post as if it is your most important post.

Thanks Mandy.

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3. Latest Blogger Interview with Eve from Letters to Breathe
4. Latest Blogger Interview with Ricky Shah from TechGenuine
5. Latest Blogger Interview with Ileane from Ms. Ileane Speaks

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 8:56 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.