272: How Networking and Interviewing Helped One Blogger Build Her Blog

How One Blogger is Making the Most from Networking and Interviewing Our series of stories from new bloggers continues with Penny Wilson, who started Lingo Mama to blog about language learning and travel. Penny’s reasons for starting a blog: Return to her passion for language learning Establish accountability and discipline with language learning Share love for language learning with others Inspire others to learn a second language Starting a blog involved a huge learning curve for Penny, especially when it came to the technical aspects of managing it. Fortunately, Penny hasn’t struggled for content ideas. The challenge is getting those ideas across in a way that’s interesting, entertaining and informative, and that adds value. One of the highlights of blogging came when Penny connected with bloggers she respects in her niche. She also created an interview series that lets her connect with other language learners. Making money from her blog has been slow, but Penny has been happy with affiliate ads she installed early on to generate traffic and referrals. Penny’s Top Tips: Don’t stress too much about being perfect Promote content that's most useful to readers Listen to feedback from readers Did Penny’s story inspire you to start a blog? Then, sign up for the free Start a Blog course as a way to celebrate our International Start a Blog Day on Feb. 7. Links and Resources for How Networking and Interviewing Helped One Blogger Built Her Blog: Lingo Mama Podcast Motor Further Listening 172: How to Build a Blogging Business Through Interviewing Others [An Interview with Michael Stelzner] 198: 6 First Income Streams Recommended for Bloggers Courses Start a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to Episode 272 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name's Darren Rowse, and I'm the blogger behind ProBlogger, a site, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you start an amazing blog, to grow that blog, and to make some money from the process. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today, we're continuing this short series of podcasts with stories from bloggers in their first year of blogging. Although stories have been gathered from participants of our Start a Blog course, which we are promoting at the moment, even though it's a free course, we're promoting it because, in the next few weeks, we have our International Start a Blog Day, which is being held on the 7th of February. Today, we're celebrating new blogs and we're launching a whole lot of blogs from students from our course, and we hope to send you a little bit of traffic as well to help that blog get off and running. We'll be highlighting some of those new blogs that have started our social media as well as on our blog as well. Each of the bloggers that are sharing in this series are sharing their story, just a really short story but also some tips that they've learned along the way. If you've been thinking about starting a blog, or you know someone who's thinking about it, or you know someone who should start a blog, please head to problogger.com/start-a-blog. You will find this free course that we've put together. It's a seven-step course that walks you through everything you need to know to get involved in our International Start a Blog Day but also to get that blog up and running. Now, today's story comes from Penny Wilson, an Aussie from lingomama.com. I'll link to that in the show notes as well today. You can find those show notes at problogger.com/podcast/272. I'm just going to hand it over to Penny because she's got a great story to tell, and I will come back at the end of her story just to wrap things ...