Blogger Recognition Award #2

Last month I did a bunch of awards, a lot of them, including this one, the Blogger Recognition Award. But as time went by, I got nominated a few more times for this award, I realized that although the “origin” story will be the same, I could put some more thought into the advices.

So here we go, Blog Awards – August Edition: The Second Blogger Recognition Award!

A huge thanks to Paperback Discovery, Anjie @Love Thy Shelf, Jesse @Books at Dawn, Smiling Notes, Janna @BlowOutBooks and Melanie @ Dat Little Blog, all of whom have nominated me for this award!!! Go check out their blogs!

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Rules:

• Select 15 other blogs you want to give the award to. Do some digging if you must! Find those blogs. You cannot nominate yourself or the person who has nominated you.

• Write a post to show off your award! Give a brief story of how your blog got started, and give a piece or two of advice to new bloggers. Thank whoever nominated you, and provide a link to their blog. List who you’ve nominated in the post.
  • Make sure to also attach the award itself! (You can do this by right-clicking, saving, and uploading the image in the right).

• Comment on each blog and let them know you’ve nominated them. Provide a link to the award post you created.

• Provide a link to the original post on Edge of Night. That way, anyone can find the original guidelines and post if needed, and we can keep it from mutating and becoming confusing! (It happens LOL).

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The Origin:

It’s kind of boring actually… after a few months of being here in Barcelona, I started to watch Vampire Diares (of all things) and I wanted to talk about it to someone. There are a couple of people that I talked “shows” to, but lets just says that at the time we couldn’t have more different tastes… I was into Game of Thrones, Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and what not, and she was into Grey’s Anatomy and all the heavy dramas that I had quit some time ago.

I still needed to vent about it, so when I got home from Christmas vacations, on January 2013, I though: “why the hell not?!”. I wanted to keep it anonymous, you know, I didn’t want all of my facebook contacts to read what I thought about certain things. But I soon realized that if I wanted to spread the word, facebook would be a good start.

See?! Boring!

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The (PRACTICAL) Advice:

• Have fun. Sure, I’ll maintain my original advice, because I feel like it IS important. You should to it because you are enjoying it. Blogging should be fun, captivating, interesting, when you feel like it’s a chore or an obligation, take a breather!

• Choose a theme well. You should obviously choose something you like and identify with, but some details will make it easier on the viewers, such as the contrast of the background and font colours, it should be easy to read, the lettering should not be very small (or very big, for that matter). More than anything, make it appealing.

• Use images. I will tell you for my experience as a reader of other blogs, I’m more likely to read a post that has an image, a long block of text is kind of boring (even if the contents are amazing!). So, use a picture, in the header, on the side, in between the text… just use some visual graphics…

• Don’t make extremely long paragraphs. Again, I’m speaking from my experience as a reader, use shorter sentences, a paragraph with 10 lines it’s already a challenge, make it easy on your readers.

• When you are tagged by another blogger, or you tag someone, link back to their blog. Preferably, link it back to their About page or to a recent post, this way they’ll be notified right away that you mentioned them on your blog. You can also link back to their main page, but LET THEM KNOW you tagged them, by commenting somewhere on their blog. (If you don’t know how to link back to a link or post, ask! 🙂 )

• Tags and Awards are important. They are a very important way to get to know other bloggers and to let other bloggers know you. Most of the blogs I’m following now, I found on other people’s tags and awards post.

• Take time to interact with the community! This is a choice, obviously, but when you put something out there for the world to see, you want the world to actually see it, so it’s nice to have feedback. If you feel super awesome when you get comments and likes, take some time to read other blogs and share your thoughts on their content.

• Have a search bar on your blog. It might not look important, but if another blogger wants to see, for instance, if you read “Fangirl”, it’s easy enough if you have a search bar, otherwise it is unlikely that they will lose time going through all your blog…

(I hope any of this helps somehow…)

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The Nominees:

Now to you. I would love to read how you started blogging and what advices you have for fellow bloggers.

• Rae @bookmarkchronicles
• Makayla @Random Reads
• Rogan @Signing On
• Kimsiang @LazyCaramelReads
• Thuong @I Read Therefore I Am
• Nicole @Nymphadora Winterfell
• Aira @Aira Reads
• teenage lunatics
• Erika & Miedjel @Partners in Books
• Tori @~ BOOK DREAMER ~
• Camyll @Camyll Reads
• Anything and Everything
• Bianca @The Ultimate Fangirl
• Katie @Into the Bookcase
•  Annemieke @A Dance With Books