hey guys, you know what today is? saturday. ok well its not just any saturday, today is the six month anniversary (birthday?) of the poverty luxe blog! a blog-iversarry if you will. i know most bloggers accomplish way more than i have in their first six months, but considering that i dove into this whole blogging thing completely clueless (and i almost never finish anything i start), i like to that just making it this far is a pretty dang big deal. so if you dont mind, id like to take a short break from my usual chatter to reflect on blogging in general:
first off this blog almost didnt happen. the "poverty luxe." blogger account was made almost an entire year before i wrote my first post. i had toyed with the idea of starting a blog ever since james and i got married and i moved to arizona, but was too overwhelmed by the hugeness of the blogging world and convinced myself that nobody would care about little old me and never got around to it.
then one day, a few months after moving back to california, i was talking to my friend marisa about how even though we were broke, i was able to keep alice in seventh generation diapers, because if you work the amazon mom system, theyre only a teeny bit more expensive than the target store brand. that conversation led to more discussion about all my tricks to being fancy without spending any money, and eventually to the conclusion that i needed to start a blog about it. so i made the blogger account.
and then out of fear, and laziness, and my general feeling of inadequacy in the computery department, i didnt do anything with it. i moved on and focused on other things, like my new job at joanns. and it was ok.
but sometime around the beginning of this year it hit me: i dont even like my job that much, AND i know exactly what i want to be doing with my life. all ive ever wanted to do was to make a living selling the clothes and such i make out of recycled fabrics. but it had been months and months since i had sewn or done anything really creative, and we really didnt have the space. but i needed an outlet. a starting point. something that would push me to actually work towards my goals in life.
i spent a good month researching blogs and reading blogs about blogging and in march i finally started blogging. and i was terrible at it. this was my first post, a wordy and disorganized rambling about coupons that now looking back is kind of embarassing. but it was a start. i had read somewhere that in order to maintain readers attention a good blog needs to post at least every other day, so i pushed myself to keep posting.
and over time it grew and evolved into something way better than id ever imagined.
see, i had originally intended for this blog to be primarily about moneysaving tips and guides to living well on a budget. but that kind of got boring, and i realized that there are A LOT of blogs doing that WAY better than i ever could, AND nobody was really even reading it. so i started getting a bit more personal, less informative and poverty luxe became more of a lifestyle blog about our daily life as a family. and thats when things really started moving forward.
and i found out that blogging is a constant learning experience, and its AWESOME.
first of all, ive learned to be more confident and open to talking about myself and engaging others in conversation, which has really helped me with my real life social anxiety (which had gotten really REALLY bad after coming back from arizona). ive been learning a ton about how to improve my writing, photography, and photo editing skills. ive learned that the blogging community isnt nearly as big and scary as i thought it was and ive even made some new friends, like aukele and allie. and the commitment to consistent posting? that not only helped me learn to be more productive with my time and energy, but it also toatlly jumpstarted my creativity, and i was able to re-open my etsy shop in july.
but most importantly, i learned that this little blog is going places.
maybe ive only just started, and maybe i havent made any actual money yet, but this month especially ive seen HUGE growth, and ive got SO many projects and ideas for both the blog AND the etsy shop that i cant wait to share with you guys. starting with.... drumroll please......
its still a little bit under construction, but i am SO happy to announce that i am now offering super affordable advertising opportunities to my readers!
well that ended up being way longer than i had anticipated, so ill let you go now, but stay tuned! ive got more fun surprises up my sleeve for next week. (like, *cough* another giveaway *cough*)
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