I have decided to merge Roaming Tales with my personal blog. You will notice a new category called The Niltiac Files that contains all my imported personal blog posts dating back to 2004. I’m still sorting out the sub-categories and tags to assist with navigation through the archive and over time I will also work on cleaning up the links.
I’ve done this partly as a pragmatic decision and partly out of principle. With my two three-month-old babies keeping me busy I don’t really have time to keep two blogs. In fact, even before I had the twins, I was pretty neglectful of my personal blog. And now that I’m back in Sydney, the main purpose of the personal blog – to keep in touch with friends and family while I was living abroad – is no longer applicable. That’s the practical side of the story.
It also reflects my changing blogging philosophy and represents me coming full circle in my blogging journey. I started out with a personal blog when I moved to London. I founded it in in February 2005 mainly to stay in touch with my friends and family in Australia and also as a home for all sorts of miscellanea. It makes me smile to read that very first entry as I clearly thought I was very late to the blogging game, when in fact I know so many blogs that have been founded much more recently! There are earlier entries but those were actually published in February 2005 and then back-dated – they are replications of the group emails I was sending home in 2004. Here is the very first one, about our trip to Turkey and arrival in the UK in April 2004. That site, www.caitlininlondon.blogspot.com, was eventually moved to its own URL at www.niltiac.net and the WordPress platform.
In January 2006 I founded my travel blog Roaming Tales. My first entry is a photo journal from my trip back to Australia for Christmas and when I look at it now, it seems funny how small the photos are. I had forgotten that I ever used Picasa for photo hosting! I founded my food blog, The Gooseberry Fool, in July 2007. My first post gives the recipe for the eponymous gooseberry fool and the second is an essay on jelly for adults with a recipe for “orange flummerie” that I wrote during a week-long food writing course at the Arvon Foundation in Devon.
I founded these two sites with the aim of building a readership beyond my personal network, having taken on board a lot of blogging advice that you need to focus on a niche topic in order to attract readers. Eventually though, I decided there was enough overlap between travel and food and in March 2009 I merged The Gooseberry Fool into Roaming Tales, which had the better known brand on social media.
And now I’m merging the personal stuff back in. I’m not just doing this because it’s easier, even though it is. I’m also doing it because I think it’s the right thing to do for me and my blog. I have increasingly found that I am divided over where to put certain posts and my gut feeling is that it’s better to have one blog that I can pour all my energy into. I this is the best way for me to create something I’m proud of. Penelope Trunk writes that it’s better to have just one blog and I have come to agree.
While it’s true enough that a niche focus can bring readers and search traffic and advertisers, I also know that all my favourite blogs have a strong element of the personal. There are so many blogs trying to make money and – let’s be honest – many (not all) of them don’t have any personality. There are blogs that I LOVE but there is also a terrible SAMENESS to many blogs. In the last year or so I have come to the realisation that I don’t really care about making money from my blogging. I just want to have fun. I’ve never earned a cent from Google ads and, while I’ve done a few sponsored posts, I’ve usually regretted it because the content those marketing agencies provide is just so dull. For example, I had to heavily edit this post on the Greek islands before I was willing to publish it – and I STILL think it’s pretty boring. I once knocked back a post on Egypt and the $100 payment I would have received for it, because it was just too tedious and superficial, like it was cobbled together from Wikipedia. (I then saw it surface on another travel blog so clearly I’m in the minority here). I get offers to do more of this stuff all the time but I want to love everything I publish here. I’m sure I’m just as capable of selling out as anyone else but the economics of blogging mean that the price isn’t right.
The return on investment for blogging has been more about improved professional visibility and being able to position myself as a travel expert. I have a professional site www.caitlinfitzsimmons.com (which needs updating and sprucing up before my maternity leave ends) but I know that it’s THIS blog and my social media presence that has impressed people and led to paying work as a freelance writer. I hope having a category devoted to personal stuff won’t jeopardise that. I don’t think it will.
Once I’m freed from the tyranny of feeling like my blog needs a niche focus for commercial reasons, it frees me up to create something that is an authentic personal expression. This is what blogging was originally about and I feel excited to be returning to those roots. There are advantages to this because I actually think readers – real, human readers rather than search engines – like a bit of personality and elements of the unexpected in a blog, as long there is some cohesiveness. I have a lot of friends who read my blog and I’ve made a lot of friends through blogging too and I want to write for the audience I already have and watch it grow organically. I just want to ENTERTAIN people and I don’t really care if I don’t reach a mass audience. Sometimes I feel like the only thing search engines bring me is comment spammers. I don’t think the search engines will hate it anyway – after all, there must be some SEO advantages to having seven years’ worth of content in one place!
The Roaming Tales and Gooseberry Fool categories will remain as they are. The Niltiac Files will have sub-categories for the twins – I don’t see myself as a mummy blogger but they are a big part of my life so OF COURSE I’m going to write about them. I’m also going to publish cute photos – and I’ve taken the liberty of illustrating this post with a cute photo of my son in the bath! I won’t go overboard though as I have other outlets such as Facebook and Flickr for this. So please don’t worry if this isn’t your cup of Earl Grey.
There will be also sub-categories for my years in London and San Francisco and now Sydney. I haven’t finalised all the other sub-categories yet but you’ll be able to explore some of my other passions, such as theatre or my attempts to write a novel. In the past I used my personal blog to publish posts with funny videos and links to interesting but random stuff. I don’t do that so much any more because I’ll share links on Twitter and Facebook instead. I might from time to time – the lovely thing about it being my blog is that I CAN – but probably not much. Over time I’ll work on tagging. Many of my earlier personal blog entries were actually about travel anyway so eventually I hope to get them all tagged with the relevant countries and cities so you’ll be able to find the travel blogging I did before I became a travel blogger! (Such as this 2005 post on Detroit).
I’m really loving the blogging that I’m doing at the moment. I’m very proud of my recent posts on Hama in Syria, Mother’s Day and pandas, the Royal Wedding and scones, and so on. I’m enjoying running guest posts from my fellow travel bloggers – I’ve published some great ones so far and there’s more to come. Roaming Tales is going to be all about blogging with passion and writing about things that interest ME. I’m excited and I hope you’ll take this journey with me!
Readers can of course continue to follow their own channel of interest. If you’re here for the food, just read the posts in the Gooseberry Fool category or subscribe to the Gooseberry Fool RSS feed. If it’s just travel, stick to the Roaming Tales category or RSS feed. Or you can subscribe to the whole thing. Go on, you know you want to! (By the way, I have changed the RSS feeds to partial rather than full because I’m sick of content scrapers stealing my stuff so I hope that doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much).
Here’s to blogging with passion!
Feedback welcome – please leave a comment!
Yay! I love the photo, love the sentiments. Blogging is fun and above all a creative outlet. It SHOULD be enjoyable. I don’t think many people are actually reading my blog but I would still be doing it even if NO-ONE was reading it because it is a convenient place to keep words and there is something so attractive about putting a note in a bottle and watching it float off into the internet-sea. My mum says that blogging is like walking down the street having a conversation with yourself out loud and just hoping that some-one, some-where, some-time will hear you and join in. Good luck to you as you begin this new phase
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Angela´s last [type] ..Painting with dirt
Probably it will be much easier to keep blogging in one place instead of two very related blogs.
Vi´s last [type] ..What is size of your bag
More Caitlin! Now in one handy place, with cute brutes, distant places, delish dishes and smiling faces. Frankly, m’dear, it’s not the subjects, but the way you write, the way you inject your own personal voice into what you have to say about life, the world, and the whole teatray.
Skyring´s last [type] ..Driving on the dark side
I like this plan. And yes, it is SO hard to keep up two blogs. I have a non-travel, for-fun-Tumblr where I used to write more candid, rant-y blurbs since my name’s not attached like C&C, and it became SO hard even just keeping up with that and my “real blog.” Now, I merely reblog recipes and pop culture news and do little writing, and it’s so much more manageable.
(The twins are darling. More photos of them, please!)
Camels & Chocolate´s last [type] ..Photo Friday- Bonneville- Utah
In my opinion, you should concentrate in one blog.
Two blogs may be too much, and depletes your energies. Fact, the question about two blogs raised.
Keep sharing with us.