Tag Archives: public

Semester Reflections

Habits for Contentment Is a website that started as a hope I had for the semester. During the pandemic, I had been feeling everything but content, and I wanted to use this blog as an opportunity to build healthy habits into my life. This essay will cover why I created this blog, and what I have learned over the course of the semester.

What is it about and who is it for?

Habits for Contentment is all about building healthy habits into your everyday life. This is demonstrated through blog posts about thankfulness, generosity, staying active or building a morning routine. While this blog can be for anyone that is looking for ways to find peace during the pandemic, it is mainly for students who are also struggling through the hardships of completing a semester online.

One blog I have taken inspiration from is Andi Anne. She writes about nutrition, health, and messy stories from motherhood. I love this website because of its neutral tonal pallet and clean organization. She creates a sense of order in an occasionally chaotic cyberspace. In my website, I hope to use a similar sense of design and layout to engage with my audience. Check out her blog here.

Who is your public image?

The public image I am hoping to create is one that values vulnerability and honesty. One resource I used when I was first building my public image was Creating your Online Persona by Jack Canfield (n.d.). Canfield talks about how first you must decide who you are, then you can begin building your website and advancing your brand with content (n.d.). This article helped me to focus on understanding who I am as a writer and then decide what to post and how to present myself.

I want to use my blog posts to explore new ways of finding contentment in my life, but I do not want to paint an unrealistic picture of myself having a perfectly content life. I will share the success I have in running and painting, but I will also share my frustrations when I sleep through my alarm or cheat on my morning routine. I want to create a public image that is relatable, accessible, and joyful.  

Something I want to try and counter in my writing is the Online Disinhibition Effect which describes how when there is anonymity, people are more likely to shed their usual restraints or integrity (Konnikova, 2013). This can promote engagement and risk taking, but in my website, I want to promote honesty and vulnerability, so I hope to create a different style of engagement with my audience.

This infographic I created talks more deeply about the values of Habits for Contentment. The core values I want to represent through this blog are people centered, vulnerable, honest, and fun loving. Read more about my values here.

How are you addressing your audience through editorial, design, content?

Once I had decided on the purpose of my blog and the online image I wanted to portray, I put together a vision board to help guide my posts, design choice and voice. Take a look at my vision board here.

I want to capture a feeling in my vision board. I want readers to look at my website and feel a sigh of relief like when you take a refreshing walk outside or see a beautiful sunset. My goal is to create a blissful feeling throughout my entire blog.  On my homepage I do this by using a clean font and leaving lots of white space. Additionally, I have a picture of wildflowers as a banner on every page of my website to begin curating a feeling of refreshment and peace. My colour pallet has deep greens to symbolize trees with deep root and consistent growth and includes some light pinks to symbolize fun and curiosity.

This article published by Blogging Explorer discussed the importance of understanding your target audience and how to cater your content online (Mikke, 2020). Two points he made were about how your target audience will help you create better content, and have great post ideas (Mikke, 2020). Understanding your audience will help you to know their needs and desires, and understand what they might be looking for in their digital content. This will help to increase reader engagement and build my audience.

One blog post that highlights the purpose and design of my website is Being Thankful for Rain. In this blog post I wrote about how being thankful for the small things in your life can help you to get through hard days. Making thankfulness lists is one way I try to find contentment in my life and is reiterated throughout almost all my blog posts. The design of this post incorporates lots of white space separated by curated pictures that I took of a recent thankfulness list I had made. Being Thankful for Rain is a post that highlights the values of my blog and captures the design aesthetic I hope to maintain throughout my website.

What value are you providing and to whom?

My hope is that through these blog posts I can provide value by offering practical tips and advice on how to live with contentment and joy amidst a pandemic. Some blog posts that do this are 5 Reasons to Try Running and Morning Mishaps & Daily Routines. Both blog posts offer a glimpse into one habit I have tried to implement in my life, and some practical ways they could be applied to my readers lives. Both posts contain external research into how these habits have been proven to improve your health or decrease stress levels.

In the future, I may build monetizing features into my posts such as product promotions or specific collaborations with other bloggers, but these must be directly relevant to my core values and not be misleading to my readers.

What have you learned through Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has been a very fun tool to learn how people are interacting with my website. The most helpful thing I learned was that I had a very high bounce rate, meaning that people would quickly leave my website after visiting the first page. As I was investigating this, I noticed that my home page did not give the reader somewhere to go after reading the introduction. To address this, I linked some of my favourite blog posts to my home page, and my bounce rate has decreased by 15%. There is still lots to learn from Google Analytics, and I have so much to benefit from understanding my audience more and learning how people are interacting with my blog.

Blogging has been an incredible experience in learning about writing, creativity and finding contentment during a pandemic. I look forward to continuing this blog in the future and building my brand image.

Works Cited

Anne, A. (2020, December 02). Andi Anne: About. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://andianne.com/about/

Campbell, G. (2009). A Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2009/9/a-personal-cyberinfrastructure

Canfield, J. (2019, November 26). Online Branding: 5 Steps to Create Your Online Persona. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://www.jackcanfield.com/blog/online-branding/

Konnikova, M. (2013). The Psychology of Online Comments. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-psychology-of-online-comments

Mikke. (2020, July 24). How to Find Your Blog Target Audience in 2020: The Ultimate Guide. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://bloggingexplorer.com/blog-target-audience/

Reflecting on my Experience as an Online Publisher

This website has gone through a lot of changes since September. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to share my work on a blog since I feel that I best express myself through writing. However, I had never created a website before, so I had to learn quickly. It has taken me a lot of research to figure out everything from changing fonts to using plugins, but I am finally satisfied with what I have.

Masked Retail has been my way of sharing my personal experiences working in a retail environment during the time of Covid-19. Since I started working in retail 2 ½ years ago, I noticed that I would leave every shift with a new story to tell. Through blogging, I have been able to unload some of my frustrations by sharing stories that combine the difficult parts of retail and the pandemic. There is a lot of misinformation that is spread by people who don’t believe in the pandemic or think that wearing a mask represents relinquishing freedom. Masked Retail is my way of countering that illogical narrative by supporting scientific evidence with real experiences in the hopes that people become more conscientious about the way they behave during this time.

Initially, I used this website to rant about how inconsiderate some customers are. After a few weeks, I started to recognize that my peers would be reading my posts and wanted to ensure that the content I provided would be useful to them. I started adding posts that offered advice, such as my post, “When Should I Shop?- Covid Holiday Edition” to help my readers stay safe (Masked Retail, 2020). Other than my peers, my imagined audience comes from a younger demographic looking to learn more about consumerism during the pandemic. Using Google Analytics, I came to the conclusion that the members of my audience are young (under 30 for the most part), which supports the idea that my audience is made up of people who may be experiencing similar things in their work environments. Through Google Analytics, I learned that while there are a lot of bots out there (I assume that I don’t have legitimate readers in China), there are people outside of this class who have viewed my work, including some legitimate viewers from the USA. I’ve learned that most of my audience comes to my page between 10am and 4pm between Tuesday and Friday, which gave me the idea of posting primarily during those days and times. I have also learned that linking back to my other posts when blogging keeps people on my site for longer, as they are inclined to click a link and see where it takes them.

In terms of editorial, I address my audience by being clear about the purposes of this site and by considering their thoughts and feelings when writing my posts. I am constantly aware of the fact that people will view this site, so I ensure that I make things as easy as possible for them. For example, I write all my posts in Microsoft Word so that I can spell-check my work prior to posting. The design of my site is centred around usability. To make my site easy for everybody to use, I use a grid layout for my posts, which includes a picture and an excerpt of the post. As the article “Should the Block Editor Have a Grid System?” points out, grid layouts are great for creating a clean, visually appealing page (Tadlock, 2020). I wanted something that was simple but structured, so this was a good choice for me. The menu and my posts are easy to access, and I have created ways for the audience to interact with me and the site. For instance, I have a contact page, I allow comments on posts, and I use a plugin to allow users to share my posts on social media. By doing so, I encourage my audience to get involved with Masked Retail. As described in the article, “Why We Need Social Paper”, a good public will create space for discourse that can continue even as the audience changes (Glass, 2015). Hopefully, I will have time to keep blogging even when the semester ends, and in doing so I will encourage new types of discourse with my ever-evolving audience. Overall, my content addresses the audience by answering questions that I would ask someone in my position.

I feel like the value Masked Retail provides is insight. Not many people get the opportunity to share their work experiences with the internet, and I am glad that I get to show what working in retail is like from all angles. I try to make relatable content and empathize with how people may be reacting to what is happening in the world. There are things included in my blog that I would never have thought about before I started working in retail. For example, I used to be shy and would never ask for or accept help from a retail employee. Looking back, I know that I had nothing to be afraid of, and I am more conscientious now with how I approach and treat retail workers when I am the customer. I hope that this blog does a similar thing for my readers by providing industry knowledge and tips for success during the time of Covid-19.

So far, I have not received any comments on my posts, so I cannot say that comments have really influenced me. Based on the article, “The Psychology of Online Comments”, I think that if I were to receive hate via an anonymous comment, I wouldn’t be too hurt (Konnikova, 2013) and I would simply delete the comment. Even if an anonymous comment were positive, I doubt I would be very affected because the sentiment of the comment seems less real without a name or face attached to it. Comments that are attached to a name would have a bigger impact on me, whether that be good or bad.

Prior to this class, I had a very outdated perception of what publication was. All that I really considered was book publication and notable companies. I never would have imagined that I could run my own publication from my computer! Now, I see that there are so many ways to be a publisher, and that there is no correct way that it must be done. Though the semester is ending soon, I am optimistic that I will continue to blog. This pandemic and my job are not going away anytime soon, so I am sure that I will have plenty of material to draw upon. Years from now, I would love to be able to look back at my posts and remember who I was and what I experienced in 2020. Ultimately, my hope is that even once the topic of Covid-19 is no longer relevant, I will be able to use the knowledge and skills learned in this course to establish some other online presence.

References

Masked Glass, E. (2015, December 11). Why We Need Social Paper. CUNY Academic Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers/45249/

Konnikova, M. (2013, October 23). The Psychology of Online Comments. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-psychology-of-online-comments

Masked Retail. (2020, November 10). When Should I Shop? – Covid Holiday Edition [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://maskedretail.com/blog/when-should-i-shop-covid-holiday-edition/

Tadlock, J. (2020, April 27). Should the Block Editor Have a Grid System? WordPress Tavern. Retrieved from https://wptavern.com/should-the-block-editor-have-a-grid-system

(Featured Image by Pepe Reyes on Unsplash)