I always believe that to become successful in any task, I need 99% of perspiration and 1% of inspiration, and the website assignment was that 1% of inspiration to encourage me to do what I really love to do. I have been a travel enthusiast since I was a kid. Especially because I am a great partner to my dad. He loves to drive long distances and I like to enjoy the beauty of different places and eat amazing cuisines. And my mom always supports us. I was decked up with so many travel experiences that I wanted to find a way to express it. I tried multiple times to create blogs on Bloggers.com, Wix and Facebook. But I couldn’t really continue doing that because my schoolwork always kept me busy. This FDOM class gave me an opportunity to do what I haven’t been able to do since so many years. Now that writing blogs has become a part of my schoolwork, I can spend some quality time in this.
Personally, writing these blogs was not like an assignment to me. I just really enjoyed going down my memory lane, recalling my travel experiences, looking at my pictures, and then using all my potential to express my feelings in words. People spend a separate time apart from their studies and assignments for leisure activities. For me, doing this assignments for the FDOM class was noting less than a leisure activity. I actually started loving this activity so much, that I want to continue this in future. May be not as my main occupation, but again as a leisure activity. Apart from this, all the skills that I have learnt through this will definitely help me in reaching my goals. Hence, this is not really a wrap up post because this is a start to my journey.
Even if I did not earn many followers from my blogs, learning was something more crucial and valuable to me. Firstly, I learnt the criteria for a standard blog: at least 300 worlds of quality content, at least 1 image and at least 1 link. Secondly, I learnt to frequently and regularly keep posting according to a specific schedule. That sounded very difficult, but, through this class, I learnt all the different types of content that I can create on the same website theme. For instance, I thought that I should be posting only travel blogs, but I learnt that sometimes I can write a review of other travel blogs, relate my website topic to the current situation, create videos or podcasts. My experience learning to click photographs and create videos was really interesting. One thing that I learned from my experience is that video blogs attract more people that written blogs. For example, I created a lot of quality content on blogs, but I got 5 subscribers on the same day I posted one video. I know that is not a lot but it is still more than my blogs. Overall, the assignments for this class was a complete package to get started on my journey of all sorts of content creation.
Based upon my experience, I have decided to invest little more time on YouTube because I see more possibilities of reaching my content to a lot of people. I could also use my YouTube videos to promote my blogs. Further, if I get a chance, then I want to continue exploring new places and write about it. I have to definitely work more towards establishing keywords and getting audience on my website. I will continue on my learning process. Being an aspiring Broadcast Journalist and content creation being such a crucial part of this career, the website project helped me get started on the ladder of reaching my goal.
When I look back at all the blogs posts I created, I am proud of myself to realize that I also have the potential to create travel blogs. From this entire spring semester, my most popular week was the 8th week (03/23/20 – 03/29/20). For that week, I got total of 64 views. I guess that was because I published some of my best blogs about Shirdi and Ajanta Caves. These blogs were very detailed and in-depth. I also tried to use a lot of hashtags to promote my blogs on twitter. There were also no surprising statistics for me because everything was so obvious. However, overall, my video was the most popular. I got 50 views and 5 subscribers on the same day I posted the video. I know that these are not great scales, but I believe in perseverance. This is just a start. I still need to learn and improve a lot. Then maybe one day, I could gain more followers.
With regards to my twitter promotions, obviously my promotion about the Ajanta Caves gained the most impressions. I guess that was because I used a lot of hashtags. Hence, that was the top tweet for the month of April. I hardly have 12 followers, so I think thats the reason I did not receive much likes.
Nevertheless, I will not give up. I will implement more social and digital media strategy to get more people to see what I got for them. No one reaches the heights over night. It all requires determination and patience. Nothing can discourage me for doing what I love to do!
Journey Through India. 