Thursday, June 07, 2007

To my first readers

I have been reading blogs for ages and thinking about blogging for a while, but it was exactly one month ago when I posted the first entry on my own blog. Blogging gurus say that four things matter in this increasingly competitive business: contents, design, promotion, and readers. Contentwise, it has taken a while even for most serious bloggers to find their unique selling point, and all of them have improved with practice. My web design has always been famously minimalist: I used to be a webmistress for a university society, and the webpages I created, to quote a colleague, could be read on a ten years old computer in Sudanese desert.

I have not really done much promotion yet, which made me pleasantly surprised to find the first readers' comments on my blog. They came from two countries I am fascinated with in equal measure, Spain and Italy. Bettina writes her Diario de una mujer normal, pictures of Spanish life full of useful Spanish expressions, from Madrid, and Saffron muses about food and life in the eternal city in Saffron and Pepper from Rome, the city to which I owe my interest both in cooking and in Italian literature. I am grateful to both of them and am very happy to have readers in these two cities: Rome and Madrid are where I actually would like to live, and if I am not there yet, it is simply because I cannot make my choice between the two. Perhaps, I should move to Barcelona, because of the sea, or to Milan, because of the industrial scene, instead?


6 comments:

Saffron said...

Thank you for this nice post! I think you should come here in Rome!!!maybe for holiday!
I appreciate the layout of your blog: clean and very easy to read.
Baci

John Oates said...

Hi there. I found your blog through Google Alerts, and was drawn to it because I recently launched my own blog for travellers to the Baltic countries (called Baltic Vistor). Although your blog does not cover tourism, I have subscribed – as a former English literature student, I find this sort of linguistic trivia fascinating.

Good luck dealing with content and promotion. I have not had a huge amount of time for either, although I try to post something most days. One particular story – about seven tourists arrested in Riga – has been by far the most read, with many times the traffic of the rest of the posts put together!

Baltic Polyglottic said...

Saffron: yes, I would like to come to Rome again one day, to revisit my old favourite places, to discover new places, and to talk Italian!

Baltic Polyglottic said...

John Oates: thanks a lot for your comment and the link. Baltic countries are so small and so well hidden that few people know about them and even less have been there, so stories from the region often appreciated by those in the know. Tourists in Riga is a on-going tale.

BETTINA said...

Funny, isn't it? I'd love to live in Rottingdean, near Brighton, by the sea!
I loved it when I was there. Dreams do come true sometimes. You never know. Thanks for "promoting" my Diario.

Baltic Polyglottic said...

Bettina, your diario is a treasure chest, full of wonderful Spanish phrases. I got a bit worried when you said 'voy a cerrar el kiosko', but it is now back in a new dress.