Friday, December 2, 2011

Celebrating My First Year of Blogging


It was December last year that I started blogging. This means my blog is ONE YEAR OLD.

Happy first birthday Tork's blog!!  Oh, what an interesting time it's been.

To celebrate my first year, I want to give back to you guys, my readers.  The only thing I can give you is the stuff in my brain.  My blogging knowledge.

I've been reading and learning loads about blogging over the past year.  A lot of it I wish I knew when I first started.  I would've done so much very differently.

So, in celebration of making a year, I'm offering you my services FOR FREE to help improve your blog.

Contact me today and ask me anything you like about blogging, especially if you are new to blogging. I'd really love to help.

Over the next few days I'll be looking back over my bloggy year.

You'll have to deal with my boring nostalga :-)

In the mean time, here is a guest post I did for a well known Aussie site that never got accepted. :-(  I put a lot into this post, so it's time it saw the light of day.

Enjoy!

- tork


A Father amongst the Mums

What is a dad doing writing a blog? You don’t see very many
of us. We are a rare species amongst a flock of mums.

I stick out like a thorn amongst a bed of roses, but hopefully I
give a father’s perspective of parenting amongst the mums.

In Australia, a majority of blogs are Mummy blogs. That’s not a
bad thing, its great! I love mums because they are the majority
of my followers, so thank god for the mums!

It’s great seeing mums writing and being creative. It’s better
than sitting on Facebook building up a farm on Farmville like so
many mums do.

So, why do I write?

I’ve said this previously on my blog:

Times are not kept in Facebook updates nor Twitter hashtags
Stories are held for our future.

I like to think that one day, someone can easily pick up and read my thoughts and stories from the
past. You think someone down the track will read all your tweets or updates? I don’t think so.

That is why I write. But! That’s not just why I blog.

Let me take you back to the start..

A Blog is Born

Ahh, I remember the day clearly. My wife is pregnant with our first child. I am sitting in my study
freaking my face out.

I ask myself “Am I going to be able to afford to feed and clothe both my wife and my first born on a
single salary?”. So it’s off to the internet!

I jump onto Google and type ‘How to make a million dollars whilst sitting on your big fat arse eating chips all day’.

Nah, I didn’t actually do this. It wouldn’t make any sense anyway as ones backside is fantastic and not fat, although I does enjoy me chips!

*ahem* But I digress.

I was actually on YouTube and I type in something along the lines of ‘make money on the internet’.
I was just intrigued at how folks are running websites and making a great living from them. I was
also extremely jealous, having tried to create a website myself years earlier without success.

So I find a video of some dude jibber-jabbering away about making dollars on the net. Blah-blah
this and blah-blah that. Then he stops and says “GET A BLOG. I cannot emphasise this enough!”

Yeah, okay. Let’s do that.

I had heard about these blog things and didn’t get the whole appeal about them. I do enjoy writing,
so, why not?! Onwards I go! Over to a little place called blogger and I set up an Aussie Dad Blog.

What to write about

I wasn’t exactly sure what my blog would be about. I knew that I’d be writing about being a father,
but what else could I do? So I basically did whatever popped into my mind. The moment I had the
blank text box in front of me to write something, I just wrote. I still do the same to this day, so you
never can be sure what you get with me.

The first few weeks were the pits. No one wanted to read my ramblings. Occasionally I got
someone to accidentally click a link, but they didn’t stay. *boohoo*

Nobody came because I wasn’t telling the right people to come visit.

So, I learnt from the best on how to blog, on how to tell the right people what I’ve done. I’ve learnt
tips on how to set out a blog, on how to write posts, how to use social media, as well as learning
from my own mistakes.

Now, I still make mistakes, but I’m sharing what I’ve learnt with blog tips of my own. I also post
inspiring songs every weekend, have my own blogger award I love running, but my favourite thing
to do is just write.

So, who is Torkona?

That is a good question, a question that I still ask myself. I am often asked more about myself, of
what makes me tick. The best way I can answer that is, I am just me.

I’m a country born Aussie living in the big sticks. I’m into every sport you can think of. I am
also quite clever at the art of ‘hand fart noises’, a technique I aim to pass down to my future
generations.

But, I’m just some guy who likes to talk about the things I love.

And finally, I am a Dad.

My world revolves around my son, so the majority of my posts are about my boy and the realisations that I am now a Dad and have to be a grown up.

Pfft, nuts to that! Grown ups are people like my parents or my school teachers. But, we’ll see how long I can get away being a clown. I’m sure when the young fella starts acting up like I did growing up, I’ll have to be one of them nasty grown ups!

But I love my new little family. I can’t wait for what is going to happen over the next few months and years in my household. And I’m sure to be blogging through every step of it.

Writing is in my blood

So, after about a month of learning the basics on blogging I realised I’ve found back my passion
with a new way to express it.

Writing. I’ve loved it always. I can’t say I am a big reader, well, reader of books at least. I have
read about as many books as I have fingers. And no, I’m not some freaky side show act with more fingers than Tiger Woods has girlfriends. About ten books would be the total amount of books I’ve read.

So I’m not sure why I love to write, I just do. I grew up writing poetry, which I am trying to find more time to do so. I’ve always wanted to write a book, I just don’t have the time or patience to nut one
out. I’ve always said, I’ve never had much patience. I guess I’d never make a good Doctor.

*Boom-boom tish!*

So even though my blog was solely created to gain the second wage that I wanted for my new
family, it no longer has that sole purpose.

My passion for writing is back.

I want to make people laugh. I want to make people cry. Joyful crying of course, as in “ohh, that’s
beautiful!”, not “I’M-A gonna make-a you cry!!” Hmm, not sure why I did the Super Mario brothers
accent there.

Anyway, whatever my posts may be, I write for my family. That is what my blog Tork’s Blog is for.

But hopefully one day, you’ll type into Google ‘How to make a million dollars’ and you’ll land on my
blog to see a picture of me sitting on my fat arse eating a bag of chips.

Ahh, it is to dream.

In the mean time, I hope you’ll come over and visit. Thanks for reading.

- tork