ten ways to show love today (guest post by katie of something winnderful)

hello everyone! today i have a really special treat for you. you remember katie, from something winnderful, right? (if not, please take a minute to get to know her here) well, today i am so, so happy to have here here on poverty luxe, talking about the AMAZING new linkup she's started and sharing some great ways to show love to the folks around you, obviously i don't want to spoil too much of katies wonderful post so ill get out of the way now...

take it away, katie: 

Hey there Poverty Luxe readers! I'm Katie from Something Winnderful and I've been hanging out at the bottom of Victoria's posts this past month. I'm excited to have been able to sponsor her this month and I'm even more excited to share this post with everyone today. 

 Question for you all: When was the last time you showed someone love? And I don't mean a hug and a quick, "I love you," I mean something that brings a little bit of sunshine into their day. I started 2014 off with the intention of showing love to my fiance every day. We are getting married this May and I feel as though all marriage advice boils down to always showing love and appreciation for your spouse. 

 Not far into 2014 everything changed. My fiance's grandfather passed away less than two weeks into January. It was sudden and a hard time for the family. His grandfather had a spirit that brightened the day of every person he encountered and was the life of the family. It still saddens me to remember the last time I saw him. My fiance and I had just gotten in town from a long trip and we stopped by to pick up our dog. I wanted the visit to be super short and hurry up and get home because I was tired and cranky. If only I had known I would have taken so much more time and shown so much more love. 

 This experience has taught me the importance of love and positivity. I feel inspired to promote love and not let negativity spread through my interactions. My intention to spread more love has done more than infect my personal life, but has evolved into a bigger movement I am bringing to the blogging world. 

 What if we all chose to spread love in some way through our daily lives? 

 This idea lead to the creation of Love It Forward, a link-up I will be hosting twice a month with Chasing Happy and As Always, Kara. But it's much more than just a link-up. It's a whole idea that each one of us can in some way spread more love into the world. 

 We are working to create a community of bloggers (and anyone else) dedicated to sharing the love and inspiring others to do the same. We are encouraging everyone to do some sort of loving act every two weeks (or more!) and then share it in a post. YOU have the ability to brighten someone's day, whether it be from sharing a smile or paying for their food. The opportunities are endless. We want to encourage you to be creative and help inspire others to take action. It doesn't have to be elaborate. Here are ten easy ways you can share love today.
 

1. Cook dinner for your parents or a friend. 

2. Make 52 weeks of dates for you significant other. 

3. Pay for the food of the person behind you in the drive thru. 

4. Put the cell phone and laptop down. The people you are with deserve your full attention. 

5. Leave love notes in places for your loved one to find. 

 6. Make Operation Beautiful notes and leave them in dressing rooms and bathroom mirrors at the mall. 

 7. Fill up the parking meter for the person behind you when you leave your parking spot. 

 8. Offer to babysit your siblings or friends children. Every parent deserves a night out away from the kiddos. 

 9. Write someone a letter. Who doesn't like getting nice mail? 

 10. Don't be so hard on yourself. You owe it to yourself to take a break every now and then.

Spreading love to everyone else is important, but you can't forget how important you are. There are so many ways to spread some love into the world. It can be creative or simple, elaborate or straight forward, time-consuming or only take a second. There's no reason to not spread a little love. If you still need help, we even have a Pinterest board to help inspire you with ideas. Be sure to visit the Love It Forward page to get details on how to participate. Not only is it an effort to spread love from person to person, but also blogger to blogger. We want to keep the love going and create a community of positivity and inspiration.

How will you spread some love today?

Connect with Katie: Blog // Twitter // Instagram // Facebook // Pinterest

three ways to simplify your life (while still getting everything done)

hey everyone! this post originally ran as a guest post over on the art of balance last month, but it got such a huge response, that i thought id share it again over here in case anyone missed it (because i really, truly believe that this is some super helpful information):

hello! today I'm going to share something very near and dear to my heart (and something that I've found to be EXTREMELY helpful in our family life): tips on how to simplify your life and free up more time to relax, without sacrificing a single ounce of productivity. 

why? because I am a TOTAL stress case control freak and SO not a naturally organized person. and for years I've struggled with feeling constantly overwhelmed by everything I need to do and how it wasn't getting done. this usually ended up with me feeling paralyzed and stuck and unable to do anything (which, obviously, only made things work. since the birth of my daughter Alice (she's two now) I've worked really hard to find the right balance of taking care of business, without the constant stress of busy-ness. 

conventional wisdom would say that the key is learning to say no and cutting back on the amount of things you need to do, but let's be real here: we all have crap that needs to get done. 

so today I'd like to share a few tips that have really helped me, and I hope they can help you too:

maintain a datebook.

write down all you commitments (work, school, social events, etc) as soon as you find out about them. this will help you manage your time and simplify your schedule in two ways: 1. it will keep you from double/overbooking yourself (very important when say, you have to schedule a doctor appointment in an already busy week) and 2. helps you see exactly when you have free time so that you can make sure that you get some of it for yourself. 

notice I used the word "maintain" here and not "buy" in reference to the datebook. the reason for this is that in order for this one to work, you need to keep up with it on a weekly basis.

take control of your chores/errands.

it's REALLY easy to feel like you're drowning in all the chores and errands that there's no getting out of (you know, doing laundry, paying bills, buying groceries, etc) that feel like they take up all your free time. at least, that's how I felt for a LONG time, but there are LOTS of ways you can take control of all those little things and get your free time back. things like assigning certain chores to a specific day of the week (we buy our groceries on Wednesdays), making a weekly to-do list (I wrote about this a couple weeks ago), or grouping your errands so that they can all be done on one trip are all great ways to cut down on the the busy-ness of daily life, while still making sure everything's taken care of. 

declutter, everywhere.

this is one that I definitely need to continue working on (thats an actual photo of what my actual closet looks like right now) but it is so, so important when it comes to both relaxation AND productivity. first of all, I don't know about you, but it is impossible for me to relax when I can see all kinds of messes and unfinished projects that I need to take care of, and second, keeping things neat and organized makes it MUCH easier to get things done quickly and efficiently (I mean, think of how fast you could get dressed in the morning if you didn't have to dig through all the clothes you never wear). 

those are my top three tips to managing everything I need to do without going absolutely insane, but I want to know if YOU have anything to add. how do you find your balance of relaxation and productivity?

how i monetized my blog (and what I've learned so far)

one thing I've been asked a few times by real life friends that aren't into blogging is "so how exactly do you make money from your blog?" which is usually met with a very long and nerdy answer from me and then followed up with, "so, are you making a lot of money?" at which point i start laughing hysterically and they have no idea why. 

but after having this conversation a few different times, i thought id take some time to talk about how I've monetized my blog, how its worked (or not worked) for me, and what I've learned in the process. because, as you probably know, monetizing your blog (that is, using it to make money) is a pretty big thing. 

when i first started blogging, i thought it meant, like, throwing up some adsense ads and could NOT comprehend how so many people were making a living (or even a part-time income) from their blogs. 

well, after spending nearly a year now blogging, and reading a LOT of "how to make money blogging" posts on pinterest, I've learned that this is very much not the case. I've also (obviously) tried to implement some of the expert bloggers suggestions and try to turn this little blog into something that at least justifies how much time i spend on it. and so far, it hasn't been a total failure. 

but it hasn't been easy, and like i said, its almost been a year. and you know what? i haven't made a lot of money (i have made a heck of a lot more than i ever thought i would, though). but I've certainly learned a lot, and since i basically want to learn as much as i can about as many different things as possible, thats fantastic. 

now, I'm not claiming to be an expert here, AT ALL, but i really do want to talk about the different methods that I've used to monetize, because too many of the "how to make money blogging" posts I've read are too broad and overwhelming with the sheer amount of information there is about ALL THE DIFFERENT ways that bloggers can make a little cash, without giving much detail and insight about what exactly has worked well for them. because there are tons and tons and TONS of ways to make money blogging and not everything works for everybody. so far I've really only been using three:

1. google adsense

2. skimlinks

3. passionfruit ads

each of these works differently, and thats important, because apparently the key to making a successful blogging income (just like any other business) is to develop multiple streams of income. sort of like how a person with money to invest would invest it in several different things rather than putting all their eggs in one basket. 

so google, skimlinks, and passionfruit are the three that I've chosen, and i want to take a minute to talk about how each one works and how they've worked out for me. 

lets start with google (because thats what i started with):

google adsense is great because its free and completely passive. meaning, once i put the little widget up on my sidebar i didn't have to do anything every again and the money would start rolling in. but the thing is, i have no freaking idea how it works and why some days i have 90 page views and make 45 cents and other days i have 150 page views and make 3 cents. also, its slow as molasses and I've made about $10 in a year (and they don't pay out until you make $100, so....). i realize that i have a little teeny baby blog and that as it gets more traffic adsense will generate more money (and I've already seen it happen a little bit), and since i don't have to, you know, do anything, ill leave it up there to do its thing. 

now, when i realized that simply slapping up some adsense ads wasn't going to pay our rent anytime soon, i did some research and found out about skimlinks, and it turns out skimlinks is pretty cool:

what Skimlinks does is called affiliate marketing, which is its own whole thing where bloggers talk about things and then make a commission when people buy things through special links. but whats awesome about Skimlinks is that it automatically makes any applicable links into affiliate links. it also crawls my posts for keywords and turns those into shopping links to, but that part is kind of weird. 

also, their affiliate network is HUGE and almost every website I've ever talked about is an affiliate with Skimlinks (amazon, target, modcloth, macys, zenni optical, asos), so i don't have to specifically tailor my content to try and make affiliate income (which is great, because I quickly figured out that I'm just not into writing about product) AND some of the partners even pay per click. specifically modcloth. (always click on the links when i talk about modcloth). 

also also, they have a super rad referral program, where if someone joins through my link, i get 35% of their earnings for a year, AND their minimum payout is only $10. the only thing that sucks though is that commissions take FOREVER to clear (and by forever i mean about two months). really most of the money I've made through Skimlinks is from when my mom remembers to make her amazon purchases through my blog, but hey, I'm not complaining (plus, you know, everyone i know could just start making all their amazon purchases through my links and that would actually be really awesome). 

the most recent addition to my blogging portfolio has been passionfruit ads:

if you don't know what passionfruit ads is then you must not read a lot of blogs so I'm really impressed that you've found yourself here. passionfruit is a company that does ad hosting, so that bloggers can sell ads (or services, or any number of things) through their blogs in a way thats SUPER user friendly for all parties involved. 

this is BY FAR the most difficult and labor intensive way to make money blogging but it turns out that its also been my most rewarding and lucrative channel. why? well mainly because I'm working directly with the people that purchase my ads, and every new sponsor instantly becomes a new friend. even though it is extremely time consuming (and i STILL haven't figured out a good system of keeping everything i need to do straight), offering sponsorships is a CONSTANT learning experience and its almost always fun (except those times when I'm trying to implement some kind of record keeping/organization system). 

now, i do feel the need to clarify that i jumped into offering paid sponsorships COMPLETELY UNPREPARED because i won a free year in a giveaway, so... learning exactly how to do a good job is something that I've been learning very slowly and painfully (and to be completely honest I still don't think I'm very good at it), BUT that doesn't stop passionfruit and paid sponsorships from being my FAVORITE way to make money from blogging. 

so far, i really like what i have going on as far as monetizing is concerned, and i feel like it has a really good balance: adsense is completely passive, Skimlinks is semi-passive (meaning, it does its thing on its own but i can tailor my content to include more affiliate links), and passionfruit is very, very active. but the main lesson that I've learned is that just like everything else in blogging, its a slow and steady thing, I'm not going to become a millionaire overnight, and I'm totally ok with that. 

yes, there are other ways to make money blogging, but most of those revolve around doing product reviews and sponsored posts and (at least right now) i don't feel like that would be a good fit for poverty luxe, so id rather focus on what I've got going now. 

now, I'm curious, blogger friends, have you monetized your blog? if so, how, and whats worked best for you?