From blogging to blahblahblahging: What I've learned since starting this blog

I'll admit, this blog has taken a brief hiatus as of late. Until I applied to Canada's Web Shop, my blogging partner (hi Lana) and I did not consider new blog posts a priority in our day-to-day lives. We consider this blog to be an outlet for funny ramblings or recently screencapped photos. In other words, to anyone other than us, the blog got boring. But we were no longer using this blog as a tool.

Pre-2010, when Tjejsajten was a fashion blog, we posted everyday and waited in anticipation to check our daily page views and comments. We were just a little personal style blog with a weird header in a sea of beautifully designed, professional fashion blogs. They got 500+ comments a day, we got 20. But of those 20 commenters, 4 would be from Europe, 2 from Australia, 8 from the United States, 3 from Canada and 3 from South America. We would go shopping in Winnipeg, and people would recognize us on the street. Connie Tamoto wrote about us in the Winnipeg Free Press. We made it to the final round of a national fashion reporter search for Canada's FASHION magazine. It seemed like overnight, this little personal style blog had people talking.

How did it happen? We put ourselves out there. We spent hours on other personal style blogs, reading and commenting, getting our name out, hoping to be remembered. It turns out the sea wasn't really that big, and the fish were really friendly. For the most part, I feel like bloggers have this understanding - support me and I'll support you. Starting a blog is intimidating, but us bloggers have all been there. It's all about reaching out to others. For us, it was the personal style blog world. Even though we've retired our daily style posts, from time to time I still go back and visit those blogs that we visited so loyally 6 years ago, and most of them are still doing their thing. I still follow a lot of our linked blog friends (see right) on Twitter and I even have a few of them on Facebook. In other words, I still feel a part of that community.

So if you're thinking about starting to blog, or you've just started one, awesome. You're probably putting hard work into it that you probably want people to notice. No one will see your efforts unless you make it visible! Don't be afraid to self-promote (everyone else is doing it) and don't get discouraged, you'd be surprised how many people are reading your blog that you don't know about.

Using other social media outlets is an easy and efficient way to promote your blog (or yourself!), but I'll leave that til the next post.