Blogchatter Classes with Richa Singh

Richa is a wonderful lady, a blogger/writer among many other things. This was our first meet. I had only interacted with her on twitter, mainly via @blogchatter and this is where our first exchange happened after I saw one of their tweets, which was about #blogbuddy circles. Just skimming through the tweet peaked my interest and I immediately responded.

So all you #blogbuddy circles how is it coming? We know two groups have given themselves new names! #Wordsmith and #Writehouse! Lovely no?

— Blog Chatter (@blogchatter) November 12, 2015

By the end of that conversation, I had signed up for the second round of the #blogbuddy program. And since then I have been a part of this thriving community of bloggers, more precisely a sub-part of a larger community as a member of our blogchatter team #blogbuddymavericks – a group of 7 bloggers including me –

• Chandni
• Akshay
• Ishani
• Rachit
• Namrata
• Vikram

Today (Sunday 24th April 2016), Mumbai had its first edition of Blogchatter Classes. It was something I was looking forward to since I read their tweet about the Pune edition. 

Remember this 20th March we are coming to Pune with #Blogchatter Classes! Here FB event page: https://t.co/vF2t4TMoRq

— Blog Chatter (@blogchatter) March 2, 2016

When I made to venue – The Hive, Kha – on the 24th of April 2016, I learned that this was a part of their country-wide tour, and it was going to be Bangalore next.

Now, on further reading, I found out how this lovely idea had sprung from the countless discussions within the community on twitter and the overwhelming response blogchatter received during its chat sessions.

The birth of Blogchatter Classes

The workshop was superb! A Sunday afternoon spent like none other. A totally inspirational and insightful class was lead by Richa which was followed by the Creative Writing workshop sneak-peak plus launch by Jaibala and Arti.

Join @RT_writes and me for a writing adventure @HouseOfWow1 #amwriting #mumbai #writers #bloggers pic.twitter.com/jA6cGYCrWI

— Jaibala Rao (@JaibalaRao) April 23, 2016

Here is an overview of what was covered.

Richa’s Session:

1. Finding your voice on blog through Mojo Content

At length, Richa spoke about how to create content that connects, importance humanizing and authentic storytelling, shared examples of innovators and bloggers who have revolutionized their fields with their ideas, extracted insights from these examples and case studies, discussed mojo content, and touched on various aspects of a bloggers journey.

Your content can be bought by somebody, if they find that it’s tailor made for their brand..

2. Understanding basic statistics and numbers related to your blog
Here we dove deep into the importance of statistics, back-end tools, and general site monitoring tactics.

Richa covered several topics including – importance of tracking the statistics and numbers related to your blog, how to evaluate the performance of your blog and plan ahead, what stats to track in order to improve your strategy, which tools are recommended for self-hosted websites and third party platform / free websites and blogs.

3. Social media and blogging
This is where we got a tighter grasp on the importance of social media, why it works, it’s real power, how businesses are born on social media and how they flourish in that space, the importance of such social networks, how they work as a platform, how to use this platform to your advantage.

The power of social media: free, democratic, empowers grassroots people

“You don’t have to be a journalist to get a word out, you can just be a person sitting at home who has an access to an internet connection.”, stated Richa Singh

4. How to ace your Alexa rank
Here we saw how Richa raced her blog to under 100k (up to as high as 82k) Alexa rank from her 10 million something position in just 10 months, we learned what Alexa ranking for websites is, how it works, why it matters, and how you can increase your site/blog ranking.

5. Community Vs Silos in Blogging
This was a short section where we saw what kind of writing works where. In agreement with Jeff Goins’ observation, Richa asserted that tribes work best for blogging. Also, we glossed over how the kind of approach changes with the kind of writing – for literary writing Silos are good whereas and for bloggers communities are a must.

Jaibala and Arti’s Writing session

Finally, at the end, we had a 10-15 minute long session on writing where these two writers did a lovely little narrative presentation where they introduced themselves, shared their backgrounds, their dreams and highlighted the importance of authentic storytelling and writing. A published author, a Huffington Post columnist, and both active bloggers and experienced writers, further invited us to their first Creative Writing Workshop.

The creative writing workshop will be held on the 20th of May at House of Wow in Bandra. The topic will be ‘Styles of Writing’.

This 2-hour engrossing workshop smoothly stretched into the third hour, and then after it was concluded, we marked the occasion with our group selfies, group photos, goodbyes and ambitious intentions for our journey ahead as independent writers, bloggers and a growing community of bloggers of India’s first weekly twitter chat on#Blogging – Blog Chatter.

A photo posted by Omkar Jadhav (@writeromkar) on Apr 29, 2016 at 11:54am PDT

Honorable Mentions during the workshop:

Jeff Goins, Sid, Christoph Trappe, Corinne, Malini Agraval, Miss Malini

-end-