Hi everyone, it’s Sharon (aka skyezak) here with another What Matters Monday.

Did you all survive the weekend Digital Scrapbooking Day sales and activities – have they ended yet?  My gosh, my Inbox was just bombarded with emails for sales, cybercrops, promotions, freebies, sales and more sales!  I know 4 Shared was down for maintenance or did the mad world of digi scrappers overload it!  It was certainly a huge day all over the internet and our store was on sale too, so hope you got some serious scrapping in and picked up a bargain or two (or ten in my case)!  LOL

So, today I’m going to give you some tips on blogging.  For those of you who are new to the digital world or have been contemplating whether you need a blog or not, it might be well worth you setting one up just so you can share your projects and thoughts with the rest of the digital community and document your life for scrapbooking purposes.  There are loads of sites that offer free blogs so you don’t need to outlay lots of money and most of them have sufficient help forums to guide you on your way.  I had no idea about running a website, so blogging seemed to be the cheapest and easiest way to go for me.

I initially started my digital scrapbooking blog up as I taught paper scrapping classes out of home and my friends were always asking me snippets about what seemed like a foreign world to them!  I also wanted to let them know things as I came across them and initially started communicating that by email to them but it soon became too hard that way.  I also wanted to show them my layouts and point them to sales I’d found, or freebies people were giving away or anything that I found inspiring in the digital world.  So off I went to Blogger and set my first blog up.  I’m now using Typepad and have done so for well over a year now.  I have become so obsessed with maintaining my blog but it’s a bit of a hobby for me and a great way to meet people from all over the world.  I have a stat counter and have recently gone past 10,000 hits, so somebody is stopping by to look at something I’m doing!

To find out about what companies offer blogs, just go to Google and type in ‘setting up a blog’ or something to that effect and I’m sure you’ll find quite a few – I mainly know of Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.  Firstly you’ll usually choose a template and the set up of your blog then you can start posting, adding photo Galleries which can include links, layouts, polls, etc.  It’s really a big old world that I’m still exploring.  You can jazz things up, you can add slide shows, music, video clips, fancy backgrounds and loads of other goodies called widgets that give you and your reader an eyeful of things to see when they stop by.  My parents are travelling at the moment, so they can just stop by my blog to find out what we’ve been up to and see my layouts of their grandchildren who I seem to scrap about the most.  So it’s also in lieu of keeping a written journal which is why they are also referred to as weblogs.  I have never been a big journaller (prior to scrapbooking) and really only kept a handwritten diary through my school years, so as scrapbookers, keeping a blog is a wonderful way to document the daily happenings and special moments in your life that you can refer back to when you want to scrap about them.  If you’re anything like me, having children has sort of eaten away most of my memory cells so if I don’t document it somewhere, I’ll totally forget about it!

I can sit at my computer and just blog-hop for hours on end as there are so many blogs out there in the digital world.  Most designers, stores and CT members have their own blogs and it’s a fabulous source of inspiration, an opportunity to download and sample many designers kits and a way you can leave feedback/comments to the blog owner.  It does become a little addictive after a while, so watch out!  Just check out the Scrap Matters designers and store CT members blog links to the top right hand side of this blog and tell me I didn’t warn you if you haven’t checked them out already!

If you have any questions or feedback, just stop by the Scrap Matters forum where I’m sure there’ll be plenty  of people willing to share their experiences with you or give you some advice.

With that, I’m off to bed (it’s just gone 2.00am on Monday morning here in Australia)!  Hope you all have a fabulous Monday.