Blogger Interview: Mark from Lose That Tyre

Tell us a little about your blog.

My blog started on a bit of a whim in August 2006, it started off life as a blogger blog and is still there today here is the link if you want to see how it used to look all those years ago.  Initially I started it because I was overweight and wanted a way to track my progress. So I started off weighing myself each week and recording what I was eating as well.

And wrote a few posts about food, one particular topic I used to cover was something called superfood of the week. Which was writing apost each week about a particular superfood.

How long have you been blogging for? What made you want to start blogging?

I have been blogging for four years now I started in August 2006 as mentioned above. I started blogging purely for the fun of it and in a way to understand the technology more, but the main reason was to track my weight loss and have an online diary of what I was doing.

What were some of your biggest challenges when you first started blogging?

One of the biggest challenges I faced when I first started blogging was generating traffic, because all in all honesty I didn’t have a clue about how to generate it.

My way of thinking was set up a blog and I will get traffic or so I thought, initially what I did was submit my blog to some blog directories. This did generate some traffic and I did get some passing search engine traffic. But at the time I knew nothing about SEO what so ever. So I just had to be happy that I had some traffic rather than none.

How did you overcome these challenges?

A big turning point for me was in August 2007 a year later when I did something called the 30 day challenge, this taught you about the basics of Internet marketing and basic SEO, and roundabout that time I swapped over from blogger to WordPress and that is when things really started to change for me, although I must point out it took a long time to get where I am now.

What is a recent milestone that you have accomplished with your blog? How were you able to achieve this milestone?

A recent milestone that I have achieved my blog recently is I got an e-mail recently from one of my RSS publishers telling me that my blog is now on Amazon kindle which was a nice surprise.  Here is the link so you can see it, I achieved this by submitting it to a RSS syndication service called Newstex.

What is your next goal that you want to achieve with your blog?

The next goal that I want to achieve with my blog is get my traffic up to 1000 visitors per day plus.

What is your best tip for other people out there who might be new or struggling with their blogging?

My advice would be approach it with a open mind, and if you think you can do it then at least have a go because you never know might what happened. I could never have predicted where my blog would be now all those years ago it certainly has surprised me. My number one tip is be patient and it will happen.

Mark runs losethattyre.co.uk, which is a health and lifestyle blog about topics such as weight loss, diets, exercising, and overall well-being.  Follow Mark on Twitter at @markcoruk.