Spanish Blogging

Interviews — February 5, 2008 at 12:36

A new round of the Bloggers’ Interviews is here!

Name of the blog: Voices en Español

Description: Voices en Español is a bilingual blog and Spanish language podcast directed at advanced students of Spanish as a foreign language. Each podcast is an interview in Spanish with a native speaker from Spain, Latin America or the United States.

Blog in English: http://spanish-podcast.com
Blog in Spanish: http://spanish-podcast.com/es

1. Let’s make a short introduction (name, age, location, occupation, favourite 3 blogs).

My name is Eleena and I’m an English language teacher living in Madrid, Spain. Some of my favorite blogs are are Daily Blog Tips, Monk at Work (monkatwork.com) and, of course, my own! (spanish-podcast.com)

2. What made you start a blog?

I love Spanish and I want to find a way to incorporate the language into my professional life. I currently teach English in Spain but I have an idea for an offline educational business involving Spanish and launching this blog is a way for me to test the waters, experiment and build my credibility as a go-to expert when it comes to the topic of learning Spanish.

3. Why did you choose your current topic?

I started the podcast for advanced Spanish speakers because when I looked at the foreign language podcasts, there were a plethora of podcasts targeted at beginners but very few for advanced students.

4. What ad networks (not affiliates) you currently host and what’s the most profitable so far?

I use a limited amount of Google Adsense. Because the traffic to the blog currently still is rather low, I’m not earning any real money from that yet.

5. How do you deal with regular posting and deadlines?

Starting in September 2007, I came up with a list of 50 ideas and then wrote up about 20 of them before I launched the blog in October 2007. That gave me some breathing room at the beginning, allowing me to continue to look for other ideas without having the daily pressure of having to find something new to post.

My initial goal was to have 100 posts in the first 100 days and now that I’ve accomplished that, I’ve become less fixated on writing up entries so far in advance. I still have a little bit of an idea backlog that I can turn to for a quick entry, something that I can dash off in less than an hour.

My current way of doing things is that I make notes during the week on topics that I’d like to blog about the following week or in the near future. I also check out a lot of language learning forums and make mental notes about the recurring questions or interesting questions people are posing. Sometimes there’s a blog entry in that, writing up a detailed explanation of a grammar point. Then on the weekends I try to crank out at least three entries at a time. Because I post one podcast a week, that is usually good for at least one, possible two days worth of blog entries.

6. How much time do you spend blogging (this includes commenting on other blogs, documenting for new articles and optimizing for search engines)?

Right now it’s a lot of time. I’m treating this like a job not a hobby. I’d say I put in at least 30 hours a week on this blog and the podcast.

7. What are the most rewarding parts of blogging? What about most frustrating?

The most rewarding part is, of course, the feedback from readers. When someone posts a comment that’s always great, but it is especially rewarding when they say that they find value in what you’re blogging about.

The most frustating at this point has been the getting noticed by Google. Despite my domain name (spanish-podcast.com) Google is still not ranking my page on the first page of searches for that term. In fact there are a couple of Spanish language podcasts which seem to have died since they haven’t posted new episodes in two to three years and yet they are still being listed on the first page of Google search for the term “spanish podcast.”

I’ve also been surprised by the less than warm welcome I’ve received from other bloggers in the learning foreign languages space. I won’t go into details here but there has been less willingness on their part to network than I anticipated.

8. Have you ever used any black SEO method for increasing your rankings?

No.

9. Do you see yourself continuing this blog for a long time?

Yes. The plan is to definitely continue and grow the blog into an enterprise that could spin-off or connect to a language-learning membership site.

10. What’s your plan for the next 3 months?

My plan for the next three months is to be more active in my social media efforts and online networking. While the downloads of the podcast have been increasingly steadily via iTunes, I would like to generate more traffic to the blog. My plan is to post at least 5 entries a week and look for opportunities to guest blog in other blogs.

11. What’s your plan for the next 6 months?

My plan is to reach 1000 subscribers to the podcast by the end of June. I also have another Spanish-language podcast, this one targeted at children, that I expect to launch during the Spring of 2008.

12. Have you been struck by the recent PageRank decreases?

No.

13. Describe your blog in 3 words.

Bilingual blog and Spanish podcast. That was four words. Sorry!

14. Tell me 5 tools you’re using in your daily/weekly/monthly blogging activity such as browser extensions, web site tools (netvibes.com, digg.com, facebook.com), email client, traffic and analysis tools, blog plugins, etc.

I use Stumble Upon for social media, Feedburner to track downloads of my podcast and Google Analytics to track visits to the blog. That’s about it. My intention for 2008 is to become active in another social bookmarking site but beyond that, nothing else. I’m not much of a techie person so I try to keep things very simple.

15. How do you get inspiration for you articles?

I read a lot of Spanish and English newspapers, both on and offline. I generally get a lot of ideas from things I read and also from my own personal experience living in a foreign country.

16. Tell me 5 biggest mistakes you’ve made since the beginning of you blog.

My blog is still in its infancy, it’s only be around for three months, so at this point there hasn’t been anything that I would classify as a mistake. Maybe six months from now I will feel differently but for now, I think everything is ok. I would like to network more effectively though. Right now a lot of the bloggers I’ve connected with aren’t in the same topic area, so I would like to find a way to build ties with bloggers in the language learning category.

17. What makes your blog different from all the other?

The fact that it is bilingual, with separate pages for both languages, makes it truly unique. There are other bloggers out there who might occasionally blog in two languages but when they do so it’s on the same page, not separate pages. Also, the design of my blog is striking. It looks professional and solid.

Thanks Eleena!

Tags: eleena, podcast, spanish