This is a very long article about being a blogger and blogging, what, how, how much: your questions/my answers

Daily organization

“What’a typical day for you like? How do you manage to post so often and to be active on social media?”

First of, I don’t spend all my time blogging, I’m also managing a guided tour business in Boston, and I’m a freelance writer. I deal with these main 3 activities depending on the seasons and clients orders. I post regularly on the blog because I’ve been doing it for years: it’s part of my routine. Sometimes I can’t take it anymore and I’m fed up with the blog and all that’s around, but in some other times I’m super grateful to have it and really motivated to do a lot on it. I try not to force anything.

A typical day starts early. I am an early bird and don’t use an alarm to wake up – it’s obnoxious to my husband who is the opposite, but to me it’s just a habit. A day can start with a phone call with France, going to the gym or a guided tour. I can also just start the day sitting at my desk: I read my Feedly, I think it’s important to read other travel blogs, and blogs about whatever else. I also listen to the news on NPR, check my Twitter feed: it’s my over-connected moment. I start working right after that, either at my place, in a coffee shop or at the library and the first thing I do is to take care of the emails. I know it’s not a popular thing to do among well-organized people because there’s a temptation to be caught up on internet forever but I like to have a clean inbox when I start working on more serious topics. To know what I’m up to, I check my weekly goals.

At the beginning of each week, I set up some goals, short-terms ones, for one week: mostly 3 or 4, and try to move forward with several projects at a time. Some of them are more interesting to me, of course I have a lot of flexibility on how/When and where to do them. It can be: writing 10,000 words for an upcoming book, having 2 blog posts ready, translating 3, think about the next thing, deal with administrative s* (going to the post office is the most difficult thing). When I have important deadlines though, I can only stay focused on one thing.

I try not to have a specific schedule to work, even though I know from experience that I work really well in the morning. I also know myself well enough to know that I need to get out/work out/lunch with a friend/ go out to the coffee shop to switch up the freelance/solo worker mode. My enemy in terms of productivity is to believe that I can stay put on my chair for 8 hours straight. I’d rather work super well for 2 hours, than working more or less in 6. But sometimes I can work for 8 hours straight without being distracted. It depends on the project. I don’t do really long day in general, but I work every day, even on weekends.

I think organization overall depends on the personality of each and every one. Don’t feel bad because you’re a night owl.

▶ I posted this video on how I create a blog post (in French)

“Do you have any piece of advice to build a routine to post regularly, specially at the beginning?”

To get set up with a routine, you can pick a day or two when you’ll post, and that’s pretty much it: then you just have to do it. Right now I try to post on Mondays and Thursdays. When I first started it was 3 times a week. It can be less. 

Posting regularly creates the habit of blogging, if you don’t do it, it’s hard to get back to it, but I agree that saying that doesn’t help creating an habit. If you don’t manage to post, ask yourself why you’re blogging: it’s good to do some check-ups sometimes and to set up some reasons/goals to blog.

I think that starting a blog is easy. At first, we get super happy, we post a lot (I posted 21 articles in January of 2012). It’s keeping up with blogging that’s hard. I’ve seen for many years people starting to blog when they move to the US, they are so excited about it, but after a few months they are already over “I don’t know what to say, it’s harder than I thought”.

The question I had in mind when I first started was: do I want to read what I write? If the answer is NO, well, I don’t write this article. There’s no need to over-care about your articles at first (and probably no one will read them anyway), just post, you can edit them afterwards, be careful and proud of what you do, but do be too tight/perfectionist: it’s useless.

It took me a lost of time to “find my voice” (what does that even mean?! I asked myself many times). “Is this article could only have been written by you?” that’s a question Manu, who helped me edit myself, asked me, and I loved it because it forced me to find this voice. I needed also to be able to take a lot of criticisms (boring/not funny/irrelevant). I didn’t want to sound like a Cosmo journalist or start a blog post by “Grand Canyon is so prettay”. I tried as much as I could to add specific emotions: it’s more interesting than just facts. That’s why I think it’s important to keep notebooks when I travel!

“How much time do you spend weekly on your blog?”

Today, if I only count the screen time and not the research/travels, I’d say in between 10 and 15 hours a week, sometimes less if I just publish once, and more if I post a big article. There’s also some time spent on social media to promote the articles. Manu takes care of the technical part of the blog, he makes sure that everything is safe, clean and fast ; recently for instance he switched the blog to https. It’s an important work even if we don’t see it.

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Me? Famous?

“When did the blog start to get really known?”

Fun fact: the first time I was recognized by a reader was in an American Apparel in Boston. It was strange and fun at the same time. The blog has grown slowly yet constantly, there was never a big outburst, no link from a huge website. It stayed confidential for a few months, and you can still feel that in the first articles, more personal (I even deleted some of them). To have allowed myself to have a very personal tone was a good way to make the blog real. Nowadays, many new blogs are very “clean”. They are awesome but they lack some soul, to say it bluntly, their authors are interchangeable. I think that what makes a good blog is a good balance between the too perfect and too personal, with a hint of information. Blogging, to me, is not supposed to be :

• a general website that gives facts and informations = that’s too cold and boring
• a travel magazines like NatGeo = it’s too perfect! (and I can’t do that anyway)
• a reality tv show = too trashy and embarrassing.

They were a few key-moments at the beginning:

• in July 2012, I talked about the fact that I was looking for a job, and it broadened the audience, it could reach more people that just talking about me living in Boston.
• from September 2012, I posted about my first road trip in the USA, and the blog became all of the sudden more like a source of information for people who wanted to do the same. I was featured a lot on the French version of Bloglovin. Nowadays, the traffic coming from this website is inexistant but at that time it helps me. At the same time, I was also featured in a few magazines, like l’Express, Elle… There was no impact in terms of traffic, but it boosted my confidence.
• in February of 2013, I opened a blog about yoga, and once again, the audience was broadened: I gained more attention from people who may have not been interested in a travel/lifestyle/expat blog but were interested in yoga, and from there started to read my other blog.
• Basically, the fact that slowly, one by one, I got a large amount of cohesive blog posts about my specific topic made Google sent me a lot of traffic.

It may seem obvious in retrospect to tell myself “yeah, a blog is about anything and everything”, but knowing what to post about and talk about isn’t that easy. I was asking myself a lot what can I talk about? Only about travels? Only about the life as an expat? How far can I go?

I’m sometimes told, in a way that I think is kinda not nice, that my blog is known because it was “the first one” or “the only one” on this particular topic. It’s often add afterwards: how much did you pay to be ranked that well on Google? I think these 2 assumptions are false (and I’ve never paid to be well-ranked on Google). To be the first one and the only one isn’t enough to stay relevant in the long term. If the content sucks, people don’t stay, and some people have left, the content quality has not always be constant, it’s fine. Anyway, I’m not the first blog to have talked about the US or Boston (in French), the ones that were there before me had a family/crafty vibe. Mine too was experimental at first, but I put a lot of efforts in it, from the beginning, and tried to improve the writing and the pictures. I was an editor in a publishing house in Paris, and that also helped me putting my craft into the blog.

I posted a lot, it became a rendez-vous. I tried to be personal but not too much, and give enough informations on the places I’ve seen. I wrote the blog I wanted to read.  I tried to be innovative on the way to present things and on the topics. It was a game, an experimentation. The blog was copied, and it was a surprise at first I was upset. Now I see all this as a proof of success, and it pushes me to be more creative in order to stay relevant.

Having a niche when I first started (= Frenchie in Boston) helped me become a local reference, and then I’ve opened this influence to talk about the USA in general, still my “French twist”.

If I only look at the numbers…

In 2012, 240 000 pageviews, 22 000 visitors
In 2013, 810 000 pageviews, 155 000 visitors
In 2014, 1 200 000 pageviews, 320 000 visitors
In 2015, 1 665 000 pageviews, 505 000 visitors
In 2016, 2 430 000 pageviews, 800 000 visitors
and in as far as 2017, in November, the blog was at 2 200 000 pageviews and 780 000 visitors !

Blog & Travel

“When you travel, what are your tips to enjoy the trip and take nice pictures at the same time?”

The question here for my is: what’s my priority when I’m on vacation? Taking pictures – not too many pictures – help feeling present I think, you pay attention to things. Manu takes most of the pictures on the blog, he loves it, and that helps to like it so it doesn’t become a chore. On my side, I take pictures with my phone, the small square ones you can see on the blog posts. They are more silly and personal.

Manu doesn’t take pictures all the time, but he pays attention to the light! When the weather is awful, he’s sad! He also has to juggle between videos and pictures… and it’s not easy. When we hike for instance, he only takes pictures on one way. I don’t do a lot of social media on vacation, my priority is to enjoy myself.

“Have you been to all the places you show on your blog?”

Of course! All the stories on the blog are personal experiences.

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How to deal with comments/emails of readers

“When do you answer to the comments? Do you set up specific times?”

I try to answer quickly, just because it’s nice for the readers. But it depends on the type of articles (and if I’m super busy or not): for a big travel story type of blog, there’s not a lot of comment, only if the article is about a super famous destination. In that case, I answer 2 or 3 days after, I wait until there’s a little bit more comments. For the lifestyle articles, I get more comments, and I answer by waves, after 4 or 5 comments on the day of the publication. I also get comments on old articles, and I deal with them once a week, when I’m about to post a new article.

☞ A few months ago, I deleted the contact page of the blog. I used to received many emails of all kinds, some very insistant, not super relevant to what I do, very intrusive. Sometimes I felt like I was a public service and answers were needed A.S.A.P. It’s not a popular decision for a blogger, but I decided to stop the contact page. It’s still possible to talk to me in the comment sections or through social media. Ideally, I’d rather have everything in the comment section of the blog, just to centralize everything, it stays there longer and can be read by other people. That being said, I have a special relationship with some of the old time readers, and to them I’ll take the time to answer. The guy who just lands on a page and ask me to prepare his road trip: I say bye!

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How to make money out of blogging

“After 6 years, do you consider your blog a professional endeavor, or is it just a time consuming hobby?”

My blog isn’t just a hobby anymore. It’s given me many professional opportunities, and this is something I haven’t planned at first. Nowadays, many blogs start with precise goals, wishes to change careers. It wasn’t mine, but that’s what it’s became: a plateform that creates possibilities. As far as I’m concerned, there are 3 types of opportunities created through the blog:

1) one year after I started it, the blog gave me the opportunity to become a travel writer. I was contacted by Michelin to work for them on the French version of the Boston and New England guide. Then I wrote a book about my experience of yoga, and then it kept going.
2) I was able to create a business out of the blog: Boston le nez en l’air is a tour guide company of Boston in French.
3) The blog generates its own income though ebook sales, adds and affiliation. Affiliation confuses people, it means that I get a percentage of a sale made via the blog: if a reader sees something he likes (an hotel room, an activity like whale watching), clicks on a link and buy the thing, I get a percentage out of that sale. I like this way of monetizing the blog because it’s not intrusive and I don’t look like a salesperson at every corner.

“Did you sign a contract with affiliation websites?”

No, there’s no contract: anybody with a blog can subscribe to these websites and put affiliated links on his/her blog.

In my opinion, I don’t recommend a blogger who has just started to do it, only if he/she’s out there mostly for the $$$$. Let the blog grow and be interesting first.

What I do not do, or don’t do much, it’s blog trips (I did one in 6 years), tests, gifts, hotels nights, sponsorships: a lot of people do it, it’s not my thing. I think it creates an inauthentic relationship and it’s hard to believe paid recommendations despite the disclaimer that “opinions are your own”. But I get it, everyone wants to find his/her own way to make money on his/her space. I would recommend to use sponsors with great care, and not too much. I also said in the video that I’m not very well connected to the community, I don’t go to fairs and don’t network. It’s probably a mistake! Let me know fellow bloggers what you think about it.

“What the percentage of the blog in your total income?”

If I take the income made out of the blog only (ads, affiliation, ebook): it’s 20% of my total income. It’s new, it’s the first year it’s that big. There’s also indirect revenus though the books and guided tours.

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Design

“Did you do the design of your blog by yourself?”

The blog had among the past 6 years had 2 different templates, and I did it myself each time with Manu. I draw the illustrations on the header and picked the font. For my company Boston le nez en l’air though, I asked a professional designer, for the blog, I didn’t think it was necessary, even if I think about changing it sometimes, just for a change. I’ve noticed that big French bloggers are very aware of the looks of their blogs, the size of the pictures in general, whereas for the big American blogs, they don’t have the same care and most of them look like Blogger 2005 (even if they are probably making more money).

I would like to change the design, it’s always nice to change and to make things more findable (they are 700 articles on the blog now!), but it’s not my priority for the moment.

When you start blogging, don’t worry too much about the design. Keep it simple and write.

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What about your blog about yoga?

“Do you still practice yoga and are you gonna publish more on your yoga blog?”

Yes and no! I started blogging about yoga when I did my yoga teacher training and I wanted to come out as a yoga fan when there was not a lot of fun yoga blog (in French at least). What I read at that time didn’t reflect how I practiced and I wanted to write something different. In a word, I had stuff to say, and a way less tight-up to say it (I got a lot of critics for purists). I liked a lot sharing this for 2 years. Meanwhile, yoga became bigger in France, it was already big in the US, pictures start to be more important. I wrote for a couple of magazines, and it wasn’t a good experience. I wanted to let it go, and the blog was a “finished thing”: I said what I wanted to say and moved on. I wanted to go back to a more personal and silent practice, without sharing it publicly anymore. But I talked to 2 different publishers who were awesome and I wrote for them… It was a good deal, and 2 books came out in 2017, another one is on its way for the spring of 2018. The yoga blog is on a break, but I still write about yoga.

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“Have you ever thought about blogging in American? I still want to read you in French but your success could be translated in English?!”

The blog is already translated in English! I’ve started doing it when I first started the blog, Manu, who deals with all the technical part of the blog, added a plugin to translate in English. I translated the blog for 2 years, it wasn’t great. I stopped because I didn’t see the point of doing it. I’ve been back to it recently. It’s a lot of work though, because it can’t just be a mere translation, there’s a lot of adaptation, the audience is different. I’m doing it to see if it could develop more income.

“I am French living in Mexico, and my blog is in English, French people don’t read me, do you recommend bloggers to write in their own language?”

Everyone wants to be read, even if it’s only by 15 people and half of them are your friends. It can be frustrating not to meet to success you’re waiting for. I think you need to ask yourself: to whom are you talking to when you blog? Is it to your family, your friends, peers: you won’t write in the same way. It’s the same for the language you use: if you want to reach a French audience, I think you should write in French.

“You do many different things (writing, video, photography) and you say you like podcasts, have you ever thought about starting off with this media?”

Yes I have! and I have already tried 3 or 4 years ago. I’ve recorded an episode with Laura from the “Far West Coast” blog when she was still living in Santa Cruz, California. But the result wasn’t great. We should have tried more, buy some nice gear, spend some more time. Today it’s not my priority, I’d like to do it but I haven’t started anything. I’m just an avid consumer of podcasts!

“Do you have a Youtube Channel?”

I do, I’ve started making videos from the beginning of the blog ! But it’s not my forte and I post less and less videos, that’s probably why you probably didn’t know I already had a Youtube channel. It takes a lot of time to create and edit a video, and I’m not sure I want to put my energy on it.

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