” Follow your dreams and pursue your passions. Bloom like a flower and don’t be afraid of the wither, much like change itself.” – Julie
A Budding Start
Taking a step into my blog, one will see the pastel colours and the cherry blossom flowers blooming in the header image. These flowers are a representation of my blog and the personal growth of myself. Through my one-year adventure in Korea, it was not all sunshine and rainbows as I make it out to be. There was hesitation. There was reluctance, and there was uncertainty. In the beginning, I struggled a lot because of the homesickness and missing my family and friends. I hated change and I knew that was the hardest part of adapting to a new environment and building friendships with others. How can I learn to love a new place when I was still afraid of leaving the old? The emotions and feelings I felt were indescribable, but I learned to take on the different steps and responsibilities of living abroad thousands and thousands of miles away from home. I had to focus on myself first, or how else can I be a positive and encouraging teacher to my students that I taught. I want to motivate my readers to do the same. To know that it is okay to have change, and to not be afraid to follow what your dreams entail.
This is much like the change of how I developed while writing this blog. I wanted to compare the change of myself through this publishing class to how I changed while living in Korea. It was both similar in that I learned so much about myself – how I learned to process my ideas in a new environment and how to curate to an audience. Much like how I taught English to my students in Korea, this blog is an expression of my experience to my readers; it is not only about teaching them, but guiding them. I am by no means the strongest writer, but I have put an exceedingly great amount of effort into writing my blog that is about me, but also about the people I met and the experiences I’ve been through. There is the growth, the development, and change throughout my Publishing 101 class and my blog’s process journey. I want to reflect on how it made me grow as a person, like how my teaching adventure in Korea changed me as a person too. I learned to follow my dreams and passion in Korea, and through my publishing class, I learned to accept my writing skills, and to not compare it to others like I use to. Everyone is unique and different in their own way of writing.
A Sprout of a Petal
A sprout of a petal is much like the development of my blog as it starts to grow and grow. To give a bit of background on my blogging lifespan, the first blog I ever had was back in 2011. It was a Tumblr photo blog where I reblogged about cute, pastel coloured Korean fashion and accessories. I still have the site here! I remember Tumblr was such a popular site back then, and it was a great online space for me to gain fashion inspiration from. I also formed a close community with the other bloggers that were interested in k-fashion too. Browsing through my old blog brought back a lot of nostalgic memories, as I haven’t blogged on it since I was 18, which was over 5 years ago! Similar to the process of creating my current blog now, back then I also wanted to achieve a high amount of followers and took an unbelievably long time to code my theme to make it look perfect.
As Travis Gertz accurately states “ The products we work on are meticulously monitored, optimized, tracked, and tweaked, more than any other medium and during any other time in history.”(Gertz, 2015) This holds very true to the amount of time and effort I took in creating a blog that illustrated me. I spent hours on choosing the perfect theme that would showcase my work. The use of photos in my blog are very important, and that is why I have so many – to allow my viewers to visualize and experience it with me. I wrote this blog from my heart and I wanted to give as much information and photos as possible in my blog entries to encourage people to go out and travel or do something fun. I used cheerful tones and colours throughout my blog to create an inviting space for people to learn about my teaching and travel experience. I made the site easy to navigate by having simple menu headers at the top right of the page. I hope that my readers will enjoy reading my blog and be able to learn useful information from it. In my online blog, I wanted to be able to express who I am as a person and showcase the sincerity when I am writing. Through the voice of my blog, I want to keep the authenticity of my real life self within my writing. I want to be an encouraging and friendly writer that encompasses the heart and soul of my experiences to guide those to follow their dreams.
I created this blog to motivate, encourage, educate, teach, inspire, empower, love, accept and create strength for others. I am passionate in showing that we have what it takes to succeed if we believe in ourselves. As said in my previous letter to my audience, I written this blog for the ones who want to follow their dreams and start on a new adventure! For the wonderful people who want to travel to Korea to teach and explore the beautiful cities and learn about the amazing culture. To find passion in what they are doing. To face their fears, and to step out of their comfort zone and fly thousands and thousands of miles away from home.
The Brilliant Sunlight from my Audience
The growth of my blog is all thanks to the ray of light from my lovely audience. From my amazing peer reviewers to my loyal and new viewers, I want to give a warm thank you for the support and acknowledgement of my growing little blog. I created what Danah Boyd describes as a networked public, which essentially can “network people into meaningful imagined communities in new ways.” It provides a mechanism in which we construct our social world. Through this engagement, people can develop a sense of others that ideally manifests as tolerance and respect. (Boyd, 2014) By creating this space, I hope that I can form a community with my audience. I want this space to be a freedom for my readers to express their own journey and experiences they encounter.
I want to thank my classmates for giving insightful peer reviews to help develop my blog. Through Makshada’s review, I added a gallery to improve my blog’s connection with my readers. It will allow for a deeper and meaningful presentation of my journey. Kimberly talked about the design elements of my blog and I took her suggestion of taking down the unnecessary features on my sidebar to make it simple and easy to read, as well as linking my Instagram to my website so more people will be able to see it. Finally, I listened to Hilda’s great advice to add more engagement to my blog content by asking questions at the end of my blog posts. I went through each of my old blog posts to add an engaging question to it, and by doing that, I hope that more viewers will engage with me if they encounter my posts. It also creates a personal touch to my blog.
To the Full bloom of Me
Looking back, I wanted to reflect on how my thinking and process has changed through the journey of my publications. I always had passion for this course in sharing and expressing my experiences, but I didn’t think I had the greatest writing, and especially looking at my peers’ remarkable blogs, I didn’t feel confident at all in my abilities. But I thought to myself, this was like my hesitancy to move to Korea, my nervousness to teach, and how I thought I did not have what it took to be a great teacher. Pushing those thoughts away, it made me realize “how can I do well if I don’t even focus on the positive?” I learned to let go of all these negativity in my thoughts and focused on writing what I do best, which was my passion in teaching students and giving advice and experience to others that want to pursue similar dreams like me.
Through Google Analytics, I was able to see how my blog grew over 3 months. I had a decent amount of views and it made me very glad to create a target goal for how I hope my blog will continue to develop and grow. I want to be able to reach at least 600 new users in a year and to be a site that returning users will come back to. Majority of my viewers came from the USA and Canada, but I noticed that one of my users that viewed my blog was actually from Korea! It is amazing to see how my blog can reach out to people all across the world. My overall bounce rate of my blog was 41%, which is not bad because it represents the number of viewers who enter the site and then leave. That means the rest of the percentage are the people who does stay and continue to read another page.
Additionally, I created an Instagram called juliezinkorea to promote my blog. I was quite surprised, but happy when I saw someone actually messaged me asking for interview tips and my TaLK teaching experience. Unfortunately, since I was pretty new to Instagram I didn’t see the message she sent me, and I replied very late. She never ended up replying me, which made me a little disappointed. I did see in my analytics that many of my viewers came from the links I posted on Instagram, so that was a great choice to do! As for the comments, I did not receive many on my site, only two from my kind peer reviewers. I hope to see more people comment and participate in the #julieinkoreacommunity discussion forum that I have set up. That will be one of my future goals! I wish to see more people read my posts too, because I spent a lot of effort in writing them and I feel a little discouraged when no one reads it, but I understand that I should be patient and continue writing from my heart. I want to continue to blog about my experience in Korea from time to time. I still have a lot of stories and insight to share. I want to elaborate my online presence through my recently made Instagram that I created to promote my blog and bring viewers to it.
And finally a gracious thank you to my amazing professor Suzanne, my incredibly helpful ta Ellen, and my fun, engaging class! 🙂
Throughout this publishing course, I have learned so much through the informative lectures to the supportive tutorials that led me to create Julie in Korea. I never thought I would be able to write so many posts weekly as writing is not my specialty, but I actually did it and I am so proud of myself! I have learned to grow and change, much like how a flower blooms and blossoms, see how that works as an analogy? 🙂 Thank you so much to everyone and stay tuned for more in the future!
Follow your dreams!
xoxo Julie
References
Admin. (2019, February 27). Process Post 6: My Audience: To the adventurous dreamers ! Retrieved from http://julieinkorea.ca/assignments/process-post-6-my-audience-to-the-adventurous-dreamers/
Boyd, Danah. (2014) “Searching for a public of their own.” It’s Complicated. pp 213-227
Gertz, Travis. 2015. “Design Machines. How to survive in the digital Apocalypse.” July 2015. Available from: https://louderthanten.com/articles/story/design-machines
Google Analytics (2019). Retrieved from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
Kasyanju, Hilda (2019, March 21). Julie in Korea brings the Summer to Winter! Retrieved from http://talkaboutthetea.com/academics/julie-in-korea-site-review/
Kowlessur, Makshada. (2019, February 05). Julie in Korea. Retrieved from http://thoughtshada.ca/academic/julie-in-korea-peer-review-1/
Yick, Kimberly (2019, February 26). Peer Review #2- Julie. Retrieved from http://abiteofvancouver.ca/posiel/peer-review-2-julie/
