*There was a time that I didn’t feel like to write much. But later I decided to make it a venting site and just dump out whatever I have in my mind :-p

But I think a lot of good stuff you put on forum discussions you should collect them and make them into blog posts. Sometimes there are very good discussions that you don’t easily re-locate after a while. But when you put it in blog, it’s more systematic and easier for both you and other people to retrieve.

This is a difficult question for me to answer… which is why I avoided answering it the first time I saw it.  🙂

The hardest part for me is creativity.  Even though I pride myself as somewhat of an artist and a creative person, sometimes, I don’t feel creative and that interferes with… or rather, causes a lack of desire to actually write.  

To overcome that, I try a different tea.  I usually set the teas out that I want to review for one day (I do try to stay organized), but, if I’m not feeling creative, it means that I need something a little different… so I reach for a different tea, and that is sometimes enough to inspire me to write.  Or, maybe I’ll just take a little break and do something else … sooner or later, I’ll find the words developing in my mind and have that desire to write again.

Did that even answer your question?  I feel like I’m babbling.

I wait for an idea, and then when I get it, it has to come out. Sometimes they need to age for a day or two, sometimes they have to come out NOW.

Many of the ideas have nothing to do with tea when they first come out. Others might be half formed for a while, for example, I have an idea where I wish to make fun of 12 other tea bloggers, but I’ve only settled on six.

 I never sit down to write a blog and just think of something to say. And I never write just because it’s been a while.

I just need time to do it.

Ideas I have, time to write them down… not always.

To start with the hardest part for me was finding my “voice”. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the blog but I was kind flailing around writing any old thing tea related. I’ve got a bit more of a structure to it now, which definitely makes things easier.

I know what people mean about having difficulty with being creative. Even with my current structure I still have a couple of days where I can freestyle it, I can end up staring at my computer for a while before I actually get anything done. I won’t lie, using ideas from the forum is really handy when I’m feeling uninspired (as my rambling posts on Saturdays will testify). I do enjoy being creative though, so it’s not normally long before I think of  *something*… 🙂

Finding a topic and linking it to the leaf is the hardest part for me.  I don’t generally sample teas and write reviews so there is no steady influx of topic. My additional concern is the interest of the readership, will what I write be relevant to the audience. 

Not entirely sure how to answer this, which is interesting because I almost always have an opinion.

Despite its whimsy and sometimes haphazard appearance, I take my teablog rather seriously. Soon after I started, someone told me that blogs were best when they were updated daily (if not multiple times in a day). 

I kept that up for a while, and it was great fun. In some ways, it was both a challenge and a pleasure to come up with content so regularly. As I’ve so often said, I like to get as far away from tea as possible and it still be tangentially about that often brown, nearly always delicious beverage. 

I suppose if I had to come up with a ‘hardest part’, it’d be finding something to say/write about that’s really worth saying. One of the reasons I’ve slowly veered away from tea reviews is that I just didn’t like how bland my descriptions were. Though I could come up with creative ways of doing tea reviews (Geoff’s immediately come to mind), I find myself focusing on other aspects of all of it.

So, I periodically find myself looking at a half-written blogpost and think to myself, ‘This isn’t worth continuing. It just doesn’t say anything that really needs to be said.’ Some of you are probably thinking, ‘He should do that more often.’ 

Yes, you’re probably right.

Interesting topic. I reserve the right to come back and pontificate further on this one.

Thanks for the reply, @jackie, and also for following me on twitter.

The only problem with hosting my blog on Tea Trade is that I lose the .com in my domain, I think that’s a good part of the branding…

But I’ll consider it, thank you for your offer!

@riccaicedo – just to clarify what @jackie said, we support domain mapping. I took a look at your site and after reviewing it, we could certainly host it here on Tea Trade without altering it all (aside from it having the Tea Trade header bar and the social app at the bottom). I could even help you get your theme over here and support you with that.

When someone has a tea blog, I always encourage them to migrate here with it. No reason not to take advantage of all the built in tea lovers that Tea Trade has to offer.

If you are interested in this, just send me a PM.

Discovering fresher ideas happens to be the hardest part for my blog at http://www.darjeelingteaboutique.com/blog . And when fresh ones arrive, they arrive in bunches. Overwhelmed by the numbers, so mush so that those ideas get lost in a jiffy. Now trying to keep all ideas logged onto my phone or any piece of paper I happen to have at that moment.

Hardest part? The writing bit…
Ideas are easier to come up with, but trying to write for a mixed audience is tough. I’m surrounded by people and friends who know so little about tea that they call me their “expert,” yet I’m acutely aware that my depth of knowledge is lacking when reading other’s efforts. And I’m not nearly as disciplined in journaling as others – I have to have something inspire me and have it be meaningful or it’s not worth jotting down.
So for the most part I try to describe what I learn and what context it’s in. There are some who cannot stand that approach – the “describe what you’re wearing and what kind of day you had” narrative for a tea experience – but that’s how some of us experience things.

Good topic!

Hm,really a good question.

I am a Chinese tea seller,and I really love tea.
There are two places I feel the most difficult to write a tea blog .
First, I have not been to the producer of tea, some local tea culture to me is just on website or TV,of course in chinese.
Second, many of China’s tea story is difficult to depict with English,Especially the verse about tea, because my English is poor.

@xavier Depends. If the blog is directly or indirectly linked to tea, it doesn’t matter. But tea has to be the talking point. That brings in a lot of juice from other topics too. Trying to do the branding stuff right now via my blog
http://www.darjeelingteaboutique.com/blog
Just included the branding aspect of marketing Darjeeling Teas. It’s first of a series and there’s many more to come.

Writing tea blog needs more information and accurate data. If you have the skill you will go a long way.

@jackie you are like all of us. You need a tea break.

@riccaicedo your blog is very nice! I think it’s a good idea to have a site on teatra.de. My blog has its own site but I enjoy having a blog at the same pace on teatra.de. Because teatra.de is a society of tea drinkers and promotes communication of tea bloggers, I often get unique valuable feedbacks on my teatra.de blog site.

Your blog has nice topics, and nice photos. You probably would just need some time to let your audience size grow. I didn’t see a date record of each of your blog post and usually I would like to see a date on a blog. Generally I’m more motivated to comment on a recently written blog so I would need to know the date.

@jackie I think you should write more. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist and don’t wait till you must get a “whole piece” of something. I think you can have fun writing smaller pieces and we can surely enjoy it!

That being said, I’ve written less frequently than I would like to recently. I guess my biggest challenge now is too many other things are going on. But I hope to keep the blog going, maybe a bit slowly.

Thank you for the compliment @Gingkoseto
I saw your Life in a Tea cup blog and it’s great. You’ve been writing for so long! I liked the article about the fungi in pu’erh. The pictures you have about tea leaves are also well taken.
Regarding the dates on posts, from what I’ve researched it’s a double-edged sword. As you say, people like to comment only on the newest articles. If someone lands on an old article of yours, say through a google search, they can be put off because it’s not new. Even if the content is great.
Same thing happens to the whole blog, by the way. Even if it’s an awesome blog, if you haven’t updated it in some months, people will just assume that it’s a dead blog and won’t even bother reading anything! I must admit that I’m guilty of this too.
@jackie, I’m eagerly waiting for your next post!

My posts tend to tell a story sometimes with a tea review mixed into it. But other posts take time to work out…like the Taking Tea With _____. I’ve got one in the works. But it isn’t something I can hammer out without giving it some thought and perhaps researching the person or character a bit more. 

I’ve always liked telling a story and tea tells a story…trouble is sometimes the story takes a while to turn up.