Tetyana from #teachingisfun chats all things Blogging
Part of running a business is marketing and communicating what you do well, but chances are you didn’t start your business because you wanted to do marketing. It’s much more fun staying in your zone of genius.
But marketing and communication can be fun when you find what works for you, and that’s why I’m chatting with my friend, Tetyana from #teachingisfun, so she can share some great tips on writing, blogging, editing and YouTube.
Tetyana is a foreign language teacher and helps her clients run their language businesses successfully through neuromarketing techniques focusing on communication. A big way she does that is through her blog, which she translates into multiple languages (English, Spanish, German and Ukrainian), so if anyone knows about writing and blogging, it’s Tetyana!
We’re chatting all about blogging, the masses of unpublished content most of us seem to have, languages and having multiple translations on your blog, editing and writing tools, tips for writing, the Bloganuary challenge and a whole lot more!
Hit play below to hear all the juicy bits!
If you prefer to read, you can skip to the word-for-word show notes here.
Find Tetyana around the internet:
Read the word-for-word show notes
YouTube and having heaps of unfinished content (1:26)
00:00 Jessica - Hey there, it's Jessica from Jessica Haines Design, and I'm here with my lovely friend, Tetyana, from the Ukraine. She's actually joining me tonight, my time, and it's sometime in the middle of the day there.
So Tetyana is a foreign language teacher, and she helps her clients run their language businesses successfully through neuro-marketing techniques, with a big focus on communication, which I think is really awesome.
We're going to have a bit of a chat here about her business and writing and different things like that, so I'll let Tetyana introduce herself and tell us a bit about what she does.
Go ahead Tetyana.
00:32 Tetyana - Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me today. Oh, well, I think that you summed it up about me and I don't know what to add.
00:41 Jessica - That's okay. Well, I'd love to hear a bit about how you got started with your business and why you chose helping foreign language teachers, if you'd like to share about that.
00:50 Tetyana - Well, it all started in 2016, and I realized that I knew too much about methodology of teaching and I just wanted to share with my colleagues. And back then, I was having a course from Arizona State University. It was online, and it was challenging because they told us not to actually write our task and submit to them, but they asked us to record a video, which is no longer than four minutes, and if a video was like four minutes and one second, that would be a fail.
01:25 Jessica - Oh, wow.
01:26 Tetyana - I had to learn how to film videos, and if you remember in 2016, we didn't have that fancy mobile phones. The cameras were with the low quality, let's say, but it all inspired me to have a YouTube channel and it was a great way to share my knowledge with my colleagues and other fellow foreign language teachers.
01:50 Jessica - I love that. Do you actually still have a YouTube channel?
01:53 Tetyana - Yes, I do, but I haven't posted there anything for about a year. Last year, I posted, I guess, only two videos, and I feel ashamed of it because I didn't stop recording the videos and I've got tons of videos on my laptop, I just need to edit them and upload them.
02:15 Jessica - That's nothing to be ashamed of, I think we're all the same with content. We have a million ideas. Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I know I have about 50 or so blog posts that I've started in various states of completion, so you're not the only one, and I have quite a few different videos that are the same.
Editing videos isn't very fun compared to brainstorming the ideas and recording them and things so... I'm with you! I actually didn't know you had a YouTube channel, though. I love that.
So you started helping your colleagues when you first were starting out. What sort of things were you helping them and teaching them about?
02:51 Tetyana - Well, I helped them with getting ready for the international courses about methodology of teaching and also to get ready for the international Cambridge exams in terms of methodology as well, and also planning lessons and writing lesson plans.
03:10 Jessica - I think that's a big one a lot of teachers can use help with, so that's really awesome. And is that still the sort of thing you help them with?
03:17 Tetyana - Yes, I do.
Speaking multiple languages and translating a blog (3:18)
03:18 Jessica - One of the fun facts you've shared with me in some of our chats, because we've been chatting for a while now, is that you speak quite a few different languages. Do you want to share a bit about your language learning journey and some of the languages you speak and how you ended up with such a good collection of languages?
03:36 Tetyana - Yes, sure. Oh well, I started learning English when I was at school, and also at school we had the second foreign language, which was German, and I never ever liked German because our teacher didn't explain well and I was like "Oh my God, I cannot understand, what should I do?" But then, well, I went to the university and I had their bachelor degree in teaching English, foreign literature and also there I was studying German.
04:09 Jessica - Oh, wow.
04:10 Tetyana - And also I had Spanish lessons, when I was, I think, 18. I went to private language school and I was learning Spanish there and also brushing up my German. So that makes English, German, Spanish.
Then I went to Budapest, Hungary, it was about 9/10 years ago, and if you remember that back then, we didn't have wifi internet everywhere, and we didn't have Google Translate on our mobile phones and people didn't speak any English, and I was like "Umm sorry, is the restaurant like in this direction or should they go left or ?" "Yes. Yes. Yes."
The final thing was at the supermarket, you go and shop all you need to do is just pay for your groceries and that's it, you don't have to talk at all. But I had to ask for baguettes. Two baguettes. "Two baguettes. That's one two". "What?" And I was like, okay, tomorrow I will go to private language school and I will learn German Hungarian.
So I went and I had a great teacher. He helped me a lot with Hungarian and I could communicate in a way. I could say what I wanted, I could understand the answers. And after that, we went to Budapest every year, twice a year, and every time I came there, I had private lessons with him, so this is how I learned, to some extent, Hungarian, kind of basic level.
And then, 11 years ago, I was working a little bit in Turkey, and I had to learn a little bit of Turkish, but my Turkish is way worse than my Hungarian, I must say. And my native language is Ukrainian.
06:10 Jessica - Yep.
06:11 Tetyana - So... English, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Turkish, I don't know if to count it or not, Ukrainian, and also I speak Russian, which I'm trying to forget because of the war.
06:23 Jessica - Mmm hmm. Understandable.
06:26 Tetyana - And last year and a half I started learning American Sign Language.
06:32 Jessica - I love it.
06:32 Tetyana - Just without a purpose, just as a brain train.
06:36 Jessica - Yep.
06:37 Tetyana - It's complicated because the word order actually is different, and I need to think what I'm going to say and it all has to coincide with my signs. Dominant hand, non-dominant hand, where do they go?
06:54 Jessica - Yeah. I always wanted to learn sign language. I've never had a reason to learn at all, but it was really interesting, one day last year sometime, we were in the car. I was with my five year old and he started pointing at different symbols on his hands, and he's like, "What does this mean?" and I'm like they're sign language signs.
It didn't click like why he would know that, but apparently at the daycare they were doing a morning song which was the alphabet and they were learning the letters of the alphabet through the song, and I'm like, that's awesome.
07:25 Tetyana - There is an approach with the babies. So when babies cannot talk, people use sign language for them just to, to communicate like what you want. Do you want to pee? Do you want to eat? Do you want more? All done. Just those basic things like water or hungry, something like that, and it really works. And then the baby learns how to talk.
07:50 Jessica - I've never taught either of my kids sign language as a baby or anything, but we've always had a really good communication between me and them. I think it's just, I'm with them all the time and I really pay attention to their signs, so usually, we can figure out the communication thing pretty well.
But, yeah, I do definitely see the value especially if kids are struggling to speak and need that bit of extra support. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who's 2, 3, 4, who can't communicate what they want, so definitely value in it for sure.
08:23 Tetyana - Yeah.
08:25 Jessica - I have say, I only speak English. I've dabbled with a bit of French and Japanese in high school, but not very much at all. But I have to say Spanish language is the sexiest language ever. I love it. It sounds so beautiful when people talk it.
08:42 Tetyana - My most favorite language is Ukrainian, and Spanish. They sound a little bit alike, and that's so nice. I just love it, love it. And that is one of the reasons why I decided to have my website and my blog all, not only in English, but also in Spanish.
09:00 Jessica - I love that. You've only recently transitioned to have your website in Spanish and you're still going through translating some of the posts.
09:07 Tetyana - No, it's all done.
09:08 Jessica - All done now?
09:10 Tetyana - Yeah.
09:11 Jessica - That's awesome. Do you have many clients who speak Spanish or is that mostly people who speak English if you don't mind me asking?
09:19 Tetyana - Mostly people who speak English, but I know that there are many teachers who do not know English and they could benefit from my Spanish version of my website and my blog.
09:28 Jessica - Yep. And over time with the translations on there, I'm assuming you'll start to show in Google a lot more as well, so that will help.
09:37 Tetyana - Yes, I hope so. I've just finished the translations, so we will see. But I also heard that when a website is in multiple languages, Google likely will not promote that much the blog posts, which are in the second or the third language. We'll see.
09:56 Jessica - Yeah. I'm still thinking it will help because search is always getting better and every country does have their own search platforms, even if it's not necessarily Google that's the primary search, so while Google may not necessarily have much of an impact, you might start seeing some of the other more random search engines from those other countries. I'm curious to follow along and hear how it goes, I have to say.
10:21 Tetyana - Thank you. I'll keep you updated.
The Bloganuary Blogging challenge (10:23)
10:23 Jessica - Thanks. And recently you've actually just completed the Bloganuary writing challenge through WordPress. Do you want to share a little bit about how that went and what your favorite things about it were?
10:36 Tetyana - Yes, with pleasure. Well, I wasn't sure if it was worth my time and actually blogging every single day, I was afraid to lose my blog followers, because every time when I publish a new blog post, people receive it automatically on their emails. And to spam every day my followers, I was like, oh my God, I was not sure, that is why I wrote the question on your Facebook group and the members of your group, who are incredible, incredible helped me a lot to make my mind. I decided to go with the challenge, so it started on the 1st of January and also it finished on the last day of January.
The topics, like, I liked it very much. The community was super supportive. We had a closed group where we shared our blog post and it was really amazing, the traffic was the best ever, ever.
11:37 Jessica - Yep.
11:38 Tetyana - It was incredible. Let me open my blog post, and oh my God, I I've got my takeaways there, but what I can remember is that there were super weird topics, which are not connected to my work or whatsoever. For example, I've got a list here.
11:56 Jessica - Oh, I've just loaded the post as well.
11:58 Tetyana - How are you brave? Write a short story or a poem about rain. What's the most memorable gift you have received, or describe the happiest day of your life. Favorite meal to cook or eat?
12:13 Jessica - Mm hmm. Yeah.
12:15 Tetyana - And every day, WordPress would send us an email with the topic to write, so we didn't have the whole list of the topics before the challenge or on the first day of the challenge, and it was, I don't know, sometimes I was super frustrated because I was like, Jesus, to write what's a lie you tell yourself?
12:36 Jessica - Yeah. That does sound challenging.
12:39 Tetyana - Yes and also I thought that they would give us some prompts, tips on writing, on blogging better, something like that, but they didn't. And after the challenge, I decided to archive all the blog posts.
12:55 Jessica - Mmm hmm.
12:56 Tetyana - I left only two or three of them, I guess. I left about books, about what languages you wish you could speak. I said that, no thank you, I've heard enough.
13:09 Jessica - When I read that post you actually taught me a new word, and I can't remember how to say it now, but the one, the word for someone who speaks lots of languages. Poly something...
13:19 Tetyana - Polyglot.
13:22 Jessica - Yes, I had never heard that word before, but I love it. And what did you actually learn from going through that process of blogging daily? Were there any takeaways you had from it, or anything like that?
13:34 Tetyana - Yes. The biggest is support. I knew that whatever I wrote that I would be supported by other members of the community.
13:44 Jessica - Yep, that's a good thing for accountability, like if you know there's people waiting there who want to read your posts, such a great way to actually keep on track with it.
13:55 Tetyana - Yes, and actually I got private messages from my blog subscribers. They said like, "Oh my God, we love your blog posts. I saved all your posts just to read over the weekend". "Keep writing. Thank you so much". I was like, wow, and I'd like to say that only two people unsubscribed, but on the other hand, I got new blog subscribers from that challenge.
14:18 Jessica - That's awesome.
14:19 Tetyana - And there were many people, like interesting bloggers, and I started following them. I like reading blog posts of others and I do enjoy your Thurthing. Could you tell me the right, how you call it in the right way?
14:36 Jessica - Yeah. I think I just call it #BlogThursday with the hashtag in there so it's searchable in the group if anyone ever wants to go back and look at some of the older threads, but it's one of my favorite threads to go into when people share their blog posts and I can go check them out, it's so fun to learn about different lines of work people do and different places they are around the world and all the little personal details you pick up from them and everything. It's such a great way to get to know people.
15:03 Tetyana - Yes, and also one of my takeaways from that challenge is that there is no need to wait for inspiration, you just sit and write because you need to write.
15:12 Jessica - Yeah. I love that, and I'm terrible at it sometimes, but I know what you mean. Sitting there and bum on seat, actually doing the thing. You may not start with the best writing necessarily if you don't have the inspiration, but eventually it will come. It will kick in at some point.
15:30 Tetyana - Yes, and what I didn't like about the challenge is that we had to post the same day, as quickly as possible and I had to post my first drafts. And as you know that first drafts are the worst!
15:45 Jessica - Yep.
15:46 Tetyana - But I had to do that. I had no time to proofread it well because I had to work also, and normally I would proofread it, rewrite it, and rewrite it again and proofread it again, but also I had to translate it into Spanish, which takes a lot of time.
16:04 Jessica - Yeah, it sounds like it. I never thought about the time factor for the translation side of things, and I have to say, I'm pretty bad at proofreading. I'll usually do a quick skim through things, just to make sure it flows and somewhat makes sense, but I've had perfectionist tendencies for years and I'm trying to break away from that, so if there's typos in my stuff, it's out there still.
Editing your content and great writing tools (16:27)
16:27 Tetyana - I'm actually writing a blog post about editing text. I hope that I will finish it by tomorrow because tomorrow is Thursday. It's time to share our blog post.
16:37 Jessica - Yep. By the time I share this video, you'll be able to go read that blog post, so I'll make sure I link it and some of the other ones we've spoken about as well, just so people can go have a read of them as well.
I actually liked the one you shared last week, I think it was. The writing resources, the top 13 websites you use for writing text. There was a few in there that I hadn't heard of before.
17:01 Tetyana - The Convert Case, I remember. That was new to you.
17:03 Jessica - Yes. Convert Case where if you need to change something to all uppercase or from uppercase to lowercase and things like that. I've always retyped it, that makes it way easier to do it. And the other one, Word Counter, I thought sounded really awesome, so that one that shows you basically the keyword density of what you're writing. I thought that was pretty cool from an SEO point of view, so I loved reading that and finding those new tools because it's always fun to see the tools people use.
17:32 Tetyana - And also in the Word Counter it tells you actually how much time it would take a reader to read your text, so you could see that one could spend one minute or 15 minutes.
17:45 Jessica - I think that's really handy, especially for emails. Like, I see some people send out emails and they're like, this will take 7 minutes. I've never known how they work that out but it kind of makes sense, especially if I'm in emails. Not so much for blog posts, I'm happy to read longer blog posts, but, yeah, I think that's really fun that it includes that.
18:03 Tetyana - Yes, and it's free of charge. You don't have to pay for that and it's online, you can use it when you've got your internet connection.
18:11 Jessica - Always handy. And free business tools, always a winner because we have enough expenses as business owners.
18:18 Tetyana - Yes
18:20 Jessica - I'll include the link to this post as well in there, so if anyone wants to check out the tools, there's quite a few, there's 13 of them in there, so there's lots.
18:28 Tetyana - Yes, and also there are tools which will help you not only for the text in English, but also for other languages, because I was struggling actually, there is plenty of everything when you write a text in English. But if you write in Spanish or German, like...
18:48 Jessica - Not as much helpful things?
18:49 Tetyana - Yeah.
18:51 Jessica - I can imagine. I think because so much of the world speaks English these days, most people just default to that because it's easy, I guess.
18:59 Tetyana - And also there are many, like not many, but actually some websites which help you with the Spanish language, but there are no free versions, so you do not know what to expect from that website, from that services, and there is no opportunity to give it a try if you will enjoy it or not.
19:21 Jessica - Yeah, okay. I find that's one of the good things about a lot of the tools we use in English. A lot of them do have free trials and things so you can test it out and see if it's actually helpful or not.
19:33 Tetyana - Yes.
Tips for writing and editing (19:34)
19:34 Jessica - And did you have any writing tips, whether it's around blogging or just writing in general that you'd like to share with anyone watching?
19:42 Tetyana - Yes, I could share something. For example, if you need to write something and you've got no inspiration, you could just type something. For example, "I'm sitting here, I'm supposed to write, but I don't know what to write", and while you are writing something, at least something you're thinking about right now, it will help you to move on, and then go to intro and always remember that there will be many drafts, so do not be afraid to fail at your first try, because I was taking one interesting course about research and writing from Arizona State University, it was really cool. So they taught us that, you've got draft draft number one, then draft draft number two, then draft draft number one, then final draft, and etc, etc, so it's okay to have those draft drafts and drafts and only then you've got your final version.
20:41 Jessica - I love that too.
20:43 Tetyana - Yeah, also when you proofread your text and actually I'm gonna write about it in my blog post, I like printing out my text and I've got different look at them.
20:56 Jessica - Yeah.
20:56 Tetyana - Honestly, I don't know why, but I see my text differently when it's printed out, and if for example, I write, I use Word on Google Drive. It's online, and if I read my text and it's not coherent, then I print it.
21:14 Jessica - Yep.
21:14 Tetyana - Like, I don't know. And there are the drafts. I get my scissors, I cut into paragraphs, I shuffle, and then I read paragraph-by-paragraph, and I put them into more logical order, and then I fix it online. It helps a lot.
21:37 Jessica - Yeah, I can imagine. Sometimes reading on the screen can be challenging. I don't print stuff out to proofread it that way or rearrange it, but I find for me, if I read it out loud, sometimes that helps me to see where the problem is, but half the time when I'm reading something, like proofreading, I can actually hear my voice saying it in my head anyway, so it's really weird.
22:03 Tetyana - But you could try reading out loud not from the beginning until the end, but from the end. For example, you write a text, you like it, but you do not read from the beginning, you read from the end, end, end. "It's like you text and write you", and you can see, and you can hear it differently.
Also one cool tip is that read your text a couple of times, but every time you've got a different goal. For example, this time I'm reading my text only to check my punctuation because yes, you can use Grammarly or LanguageTool, they are great, but they may not see that you've got full stop and after that you've got an exclamatory mark.
Or then I read, for example, the second time, but I pay attention to transition words. For example, "also, moreover, but", and we know that for SEO, we should have 30 percent in your text, which is challenging, that is why I printed out like a list of it. You can find it on Yoast. They've got those lists in different languages, so for example, in Spanish, today printed it in Spanish, four pages.
Then I read my text and, okay, here I could add some words, and then I add them. So every time you set a different goal: to check for adjectives, or to check grammar, then check spelling. It's all up to you.
23:36 Jessica - Yeah. I like that, cause I find if you're trying to look at everything at once, it's overwhelming and sometimes you can just be looking at it and you can tell something's wrong with a sentence, but not necessarily why, because you're just trying to look at everything and figure it out altogether, so I like that tip.
23:53 Tetyana - Yeah, I got that tip from my editor. Right now I'm having a project. I write blog posts for one American educational company, and I write a post in English and then I translate it into Spanish and German, but I spend so much time staring at my text that in the end I cannot see anything, honestly. Even if I started a sentence with a lowercase letters. So I've got editors. And my German editor, she's been working as an editor for many years. She, she taught me that thing actually, so this time you proofread it for punctuation...
24:31 Jessica - I like that, it's a really handy tip, especially for anyone who does blog or who's writing a book or anything like that.
24:39 Tetyana - Yeah, there are many tips.
24:41 Jessica - Mmm hmm. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing all this helpful stuff with us. It's been a lot of fun.
24:48 Tetyana - Thank you.
Where to find Tetyana (24:49)
24:49 Jessica - And would you like to share where everyone can find you online so they can go check out your blog and follow the blog so they can get the alerts when you have new posts and things like that?
24:57 Tetyana - Sure. My website is TeachingIsFun.net and recently I've set up my blog as the homepage, so once you go to TeachingIsFun.net, you will see my blog and not my homepage.
25:13 Jessica - So you're straight into all those awesome tips.
25:16 Tetyana - Yes, and below there is a section subscribe to my blog post, and once I publish a new text you will receive it on your email.
25:25 Jessica - Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. And you're on Instagram as well, is that right?
25:31 Tetyana - Yes, TeachingIsFun_Tetyana.
25:35 Jessica - Okay. Awesome. I'll include all these links with the video when I share it as well, so people can easily go check it out.
25:42 Tetyana - Thank you.
25:43 Jessica - Thank you for joining me today, it's been a lot of fun chatting with you and I've really enjoyed it.
25:48 Tetyana - Thanks for inviting, I enjoyed it very much. Finally, we met online by video.
25:54 Jessica - Yes, face-to-face as much as you can from opposite sides of the world.
26:04 Tetyana - Yes.
26:06 Jessica - Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me.
26:09 Tetyana - Thank you. Bye.
