iZine.me: How to Create an Awesome Apple Blog in Just 6 Months
Running a good, niche blog is hard. It’s even harder when your subject is hardware which isn’t supported as well in your region as it should be. Thankfully, that didn’t stop the guys behind iZine.me, the first Montenegrin blog dedicated to iPhone and iPads. With daily reviews of games, apps and hardware, as well as interesting editorials, iZine.me would surely be as popular as TUAW or TouchArcade in the Apple blog space if it was written in English.
However it’s not, and that’s because its founders Pedja Popadic and Sacir Surulic are dedicated to supporting not only Montenegrin but also other regional iPad and iPhone users in their usage and love for Apple products.
iZine.me mostly writes about apps; both the serious ones like Box.net and the fun ones such as Groovebug. Special care is given to apps made by regional developers from Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia etc. such as Atomic Ball and Eye Dots. Unlike lots of blogs, Pedja and Sacir have made a real effort in creating original content. I sat down with Sacir to ask him how they got started:
Why did you decide to start iZine.me?
Pedja Popadic and I started iZine.me as a project based on pure enthusiasm. Since we both are iPhone users, and we loved the device for its capabilities, functionality and great number of applications, we decided to share our experiences with other people. Also, the fact that there are very few Apple oriented blogs and web sites in the region, was an additional motivation to start iZine.me. This is our first blog, and are still in a process of building our own style in writing a content, and also we are trying to keep our content fully authorial, without “copy-paste” journalism.
Unfortunately for its readers and Apple users in general, there are specific issues when covering such a topic in Southeastern Europe. Sacir explains:
In the region covered by iZine.me, Apple and its products are, or until recently were, hardly available. Due to a lack of major and official resellers, public awareness about the products, affordability and other factors – Apple was, and in a great deal still is, “exotic” to this region. An other specific issue is widespread software piracy in the region. Unlike some other blogs, we are trying to promote the idea of buying software and applications. We don’t deal with jailbreaks, nor do we cover any topics about jailbreaking techniques and supported applications. We try to raise popular awareness that by buying a great application, you support its developer and make new applications possible. As support to our efforts, we often do promotions of applications from regional developers, application giveaways and other actions to promote the idea of buying legal software.
Popadic and Surulic have spent 6 months working on iZine.me. They say that they have kept working on it thanks to the positive reactions of the readers as well to the emails they have gotten from developers from around the world:
In the last 6 months, we made great efforts and spent a lot of time in developing iZine,e. What we found out is that it is very hard to maintain a blog about topic which is interesting to a relatively small community of Apple users in region. We are also limited by the language we write on. Because of these facts, we are constantly trying to promote our work using various social media, because without promotion, our writting and efforts would become useless.
While iZine.me has a long way to go, its 6 months of hard blogging have produced an interesting publication dedicated to a range of products that a lot of people, including lots of us at .Me, find dear. Steve Jobs would have been proud.
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