This is the end of my PUB 101 class, but it’s just the start to my blog. In these few months, I gained a lot of experience blogging and also learning about myself. I always wanted to start my own blog but I never actually did until I took PUB 101. It allowed me to focus on the things I enjoyed the most and share them with others. I focused on fashion and lifestyle because it was something that I looked for on social media and the internet. My online self completely changed in this period of time. I learned a lot about the blogging process through Google Analytics, design, and audience.

During my blogging process, I discovered Google Analytics. It’s a great way to find out how people use your website. It’s fascinating to see how my number of audiences translate into online engagement. We can also see in the overview report on Google Analytics the site-wide bounce rate. The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who bounce off my website without interacting further with it. My bounce rate is 47.17%. The lower the bounce rate, the better. People averagely spend around 3 minutes on my site. My blog is very visual, and that’s why people don’t have to spend a lot of time reading it. The other interesting thing to see through my analytics was where my audience are located. Most of my viewers are from Canada and the USA. I have a few visitors from Malaysia, Belgium, Germany, UK, and India. It’s exciting to see that people from other countries visited my blog. Google Analytics is essential to understand what people enjoy reading and what posts are the most popular. I really enjoyed using Google Analytics and learned a lot from it.

I also learned about blogging design through PUB 101. At the start, I spent the most time on trying to pick the theme that perfectly matched my blog content. I tried so many different ones, and I chose the Minimal Grid one. It’s immaculate, modern, and pure. This theme is visually-appealing and has a clear post listing layout. I prefer the simplistic design that prioritizes the content. My blog is mainly focused on the visuals. In my opinion, images are a compelling element that helps connect the users to the article before actually reading it. Creating the content of the blog and being able to present it clearly can be very challenging. This theme allowed me to create a better first impression of my site and make everything matches perfectly. I really enjoyed customizing every part of my blog.

Blogging has quickly become one of the most popular ways of communicating and spreading information and news. And I always wanted to create my own blog to share my interests with the world. Learning about fashion really inspired me. I mainly focused my blog content on fashion and the latest trends. My blog helped me to understand myself better. The most important part of my blog is staying true to myself. My audience should know that I care about what I share with them. Being original and speaking my own voice is also another skill I gained through PUB101. It can be hard sometimes since I am reading so many blogs and what I read gets embedded into my brain. It’s also very important in keeping up with my blog. I’ve been posting every week for every section of my blog while taking PUB101. After the course is over, I am planning on posting every two weeks. Later, I am hoping to connect with more people who are interested in the same things as me. I am hoping to share more content which would help my blog grow automatically and engage with others.

I am very grateful that my school provides a course as PUB101 and gives the opportunity to share my interests through the blog. PUB101 taught me a lot about the online culture. I would like to thank Suzanne and Ellen for teaching me about the process of publications. It has been a great experience setting up my own blog. I am for sure planning on continuing my blogging journey and creating some interesting content in the future.

This week we had a speaker Darren Barefoot from Capulet Communications who talked about multi-channel marketing. Nowadays advertisement became so accessible to everyone, we can use different channels to get different information, such as TV, magazines, ads online, social media, and others. Companies work on attracting audiences from different categories. They use different advertisement tools.

People spend a lot of time on social media; therefore, companies use social media to reach the audience. Advertisement became very accessible that we stopped noticing it. Brands sponsor influencers all over the world who share information about certain products on Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms.

Personally to promote my blog and reach out to specific audience, I would use Instagram. Instagram is the platform I use the most. It’s very easy to reach a large amount of loyal followers that I could later connect with my blog.

This week in class, we had a guest speaker, Monique Sherrett, who shared with us some tips and SMART goals that bloggers should know. The blogger always has to keep track of his audience and what kind of topics interest them the most. Setting SMART goals can help improve the bounce rate and also help to find ways to keep audience longer on my blog.

• Specific: specific target to hit.
• Measurable: a metric that can be tracked.
• Actionable and achievable: possible to improve based on this action.
• Relevant and realistic: based on the history of performance, this is a reasonable goal.
• Time-based: the clear timeframe.

Setting SMART goals is a great way to improve my blog, attract different audiences, and get them engaged with my blog. I learnt a lot of tips for blog improvement from Monique during this lecture.

For my third peer review, I got a chance to review Marium’s blog . This peer review will focus on the blog’s marketability to the intended audience. The main focus of Marium’s blog is poetry.

The audience can get a clear view about Marium’s content of the blog by looking at About the Author section of her main page. It’s on the right, and it’s separated by color from all her other posts. There she shares with the audience the way her friends describe her. She intends to create a more united world by understanding the feelings people go through and share it through poems.

The design of her blog looks like it’s a book about magic. The colours she uses caught my attention immediately. Even though her blog design looks very girly, and you would think it will only attract the female audience, but once you read her blog posts, your opinion would change. Her poetry content is very deep and can connect with different groups of people.

My favorite part of her blog was that many of her posts include songs. The lyrics of the songs she uses for every post match her poetry. I believe that listening to the song and reading the poem at the same time, allows the audience to experience better Marium’s feelings.

On the menu tab, Marium also has a FAQs section. It’s a great way to allow visitors of her page to get answers to some of the important questions.

Through Marium’s FAQs section, I discovered that she also has an Instagram page with her boyfriend. There they share poetry while being in the long distance relationship. It’s a great way to inspire other people who are in the same situation as them.

I really enjoyed reviewing Marium’s blog and can’t wait to see how it develops. Everyone should go and take a look at Marium’s blog!