In my very first post I had mentioned that this wasn’t just like any other blog, but that this blog was part of an assignment for one of my classes at the university that I attend. This was new to me, as a Public Relations major we are taught about putting ourselves at there and connecting with people; so the thought of connecting with people that I didn’t even know and sharing my thoughts with them seemed rather far fetched. Especially promoting myself through social media and content here on WordPress. I was accessing myself to anyone who had access to my blog and I believe having that connection really helps you grow as a person.
The tools that were really effective I believe were the widgets that were in my menu button, hitting that button would give you to access to my Instagram and my twitter; both of which displayed many of my travel locations and pictures. If you wanted more information or rather just keep up me and my travelling endeavors than these widgets made it easier for you to find me on these social media apps. The tools I believe weren’t as effective may have been the layouts of the designs, when choosing a design you were’t very aware of the options that came with that theme or how exactly to direct things the way you would want on the themes. Had you had better access within those then you could’ve designed it a little bit easier. A way I would improve the site is by organizing it differently, like I said above in regards to certain designs that only had their access a certain way whereas some themes had buttons and some themes didn’t. If you were to provide an option for each theme to have the same access as the others than it would’ve been more convenient. I think having this blog can really benefit me in the future because it has taught you skills of organization and writing that people don’t consider a lot for being PR majors. I had the benefit of travelling to many of the places I mentioned but I also had to take into consideration of the places you guys may have wanted to know about versus the places that you didn’t. So I used my access to the internet to realize that more people would want to know about travelling to NYC then a small town in Montana. The power of flexibility will really benefit me in the future. Using everything I have learned and the tools will benefit me in my job. No matter what job you have, you need to be prepared for anything which is why flexibility is important as well being organized. Writing is especially important because as being part of PR we need to know how to communicate and writing is one of the main forms of communication.
As a blogger, it’s important to look back at your progress and see where you started. So it only makes sense to include my statistics on this last post. My most popular week would’ve been the week of 18 Nov 2018, during this day I had 7 views and 5 visits on my blog. I know that this amount seems small but to me as a new blogger means that I was still able to connect with those people and will hopefully connect with more. My most popular post of the semester is my “Big Lights Big City” post that was over NYC; this post had received 5 views and I think the reason for this was because I was beginning to get out of the shadow a little bit and NYC is a very touristy location so many people may have found this information more useful than the others. In a shocking way, I was surprised to see that had this many visitors. I know that seven wasn’t a lot but seven complete strangers who took an interest in my blog is a shocking but good feeling. After adding my Twitter and Instagram widgets, I did gain about 10 new Twitter followers and 5 new Instagram followers. Overall this experience was taught me one thing and that’s the power of people and power to connect with one another. I hope you guys enjoyed this as much as I did.
Till next time my little travelers,
Ariana
Ariana Wilkinson 