Part 1: My Blogging Journey
I have been blogging for 6 years and have only written piecemeal about why and how I started In My Own Style. Last week, I was reminded of my blogging journey when I took my passion to make my dream of becoming a magazine editor come true. I consider my blog, my magazine where I am the editor-in-chief. :-)
I have to backtrack a little to tell the story of how my creative life began. For me, it started back in grade/high school where all I wanted to do was create, but the curriculum of the day only taught one way…“teach to pass the academic tests”.
I didn’t do well, but got by. I knew then that there was a different path for me. I just had to find it. I couldn’t concentrate on the numbers when I had to take math tests. All I wanted to do was reach for the box of crayons in my desk to make my test paper look pretty.
When I went to college, I flourished because the courses I was finally allowed to take fueled my passion. I was no longer being taught “to the academic test”. In college, I was being taught about the things I wanted to learn about…creativity, style, and fashion.
College allowed me a chance to see that there was a way I could use my creativity to make a living and it didn’t involve smarts in chemistry, algebra, or Shakespeare.
The most important thing I learned while in college was that even though I was amongst thousands of other creative students, we each had a unique gift. Finding it and being confident enough to use it in our own unique way would open doors. This way of thinking led me to a dream job of working in retail display where I could make and create every day and get paid to do it.
I remember when I decided to start the blog. I had started one 2 years earlier called, Style in the Making, but I abandoned it to create a website for jewelry I began making. That site was called Styledi.
I created that site from scratch and was quite proud of it, but knew in my heart that a blog was where I could share more than just handmade jewelry. I finally decided to take a chance on my dream. A voice inside of me kept whispering that I could do this. I decided to close up the jewelry shop to start In My Own Style.
To start any website, you need to have a domain name. I really wanted to use Style In the Making again, but someone else had taken it. I didn’t know back then that I could have kept the name for $10 a year so no one else could claim it. I had to come up with a new domain name for my blog before I could proceed.
About the same time, Ed lost his job and we had to reprioritize the way we lived. We vowed to stay positive and make the best of what life had dealt us.
Reality often swamps and paralyzes our imagination. For me, the reality of living with Ed’s unemployment had quite the opposite effect. It fueled me. I found that it’s better sometimes to have too little, because it makes you more resourceful and creative.
We had already paid for a September vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina so we decided to still take it. It was just the two of us; we were new empty-nesters since both of our daughters were in college.
While on that vacation, I kept a spiral notebook with me to jot down all sorts of blog name ideas. I literally had pages of names. I knew when we returned I would have to register a domain name as a first step to start the blog. I decided on In My Own Style as the name of my blog for two reasons.
The first reason relates to the writing of my book, Instant Decorating. I wanted many parts of it to be arranged differently, but had no say in the layout and how the content was presented. The editors at Meredith made all of those decisions.
I am proud of my book, but missed out on doing it my way. My blog was where I was going to do it my way. The second reason for naming my blog, In My Own Style was that I didn’t want the name to only reflect decorating. I wanted it to encompass lifestyle, travel, and all of the other things in which I was interested. I did post this stool cover tutorial from my book on my blog. You can find it here: Dish Towel Stool Covers
It took me about 2 months from registering the domain name to publishing my first post. My first post was a sketch I drew of a favorite outfit. It was not decorating-related, but something I could easily scan and place in as a test of how the whole back end of a blog works and then you magically press Publish and it is out on the Internet for the world to read.
I remember getting my first comment. It was from Kim Johnson Gross, the author of the Chic Simple series of books. I realized then just how far my reach as a blogger could go.
Blogging was still fairly new when I jumped in with both feet. I learned as I went. If I had waited to learn first, I might never have started the blog.
Learning became easy since I was following my passion. I asked tons of questions and read everything I could. I also had a great local resource to tap into that helped get me over the hurdles. I cannot thank Jo-Lynne Shane enough for the affordable monthly PSMM workshops she ran.
She started a local Philadelphia area bloggers group where I learned almost everything I needed to know about the technical side of blogging, including simple HTML, CSS, SEO, photography, and more.
I also credit Tiffany Romano of The SITS Girls, who are now know as Massive Sway for their affordable day conference that I attended in 2010. These were invaluable to becoming a successful blogger.
If you are a new blogger or are thinking of starting one, attending a blog conference will help you in many ways. There is so much to learn as the online world changes constantly. Attending blogger conferences is money well spent.
My ideas on how to decorate a home are sometimes not the “conventional way” of doing things.
As I discovered in college, the nature of our particular genius happens when we stop trying to conform to other people’s model, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open and go forth confidently with our way of doing things, whatever it may be.
In the early days of the blog, I wrote that I used hot glue to keep a door handle in a fixed position. Almost immediately I received a comment saying…“You did what? You can’t do that.” Well… yes I can!
It was a defining moment for me. My way worked just fine. The conventional way of doing something is not always the only way to do something well. This knowledge came from years of working in retail display where we had to make a display in a few hours using nothing but the supplies we had in the store’s prop room. I became very resourceful and creative using odds and ends and zero budget.
For the first year and a half of the blog, I continued my full-time job in display since I wasn’t making any money from blogging. Advertising revenue had just started to pick up, but was not enough to pay the bills.
I stayed up late and survived on 4 hours’ sleep on weeknights so I could blog and work 9-5. At this time, I also started to write a weekly post for another site, called Momtastic. Soon after this, Glidden Paint called asking me to be one of their bloggers to write for their blog, My Colortopia.
This was a big turning point for me in how I could make a living writing about what I know best. I was now not only writing for my blog, but getting paid by others to write for their sites. On my lunch breaks at work, I went out to my car to write and read without getting interrupted. I read every “Dummies Guide” to Blogging, Photoshop, Photography, Twitter and more.
At this point, I started making more money from my blog than my 9-5 display job. I decided to take a chance and quit my job to begin life as a full-time blogger. This was a tough decision since it also meant we would have to give up the health care benefits that came with my job. Out-of-pocket health insurance as you know is expensive, but Ed was on board and I left my job to start blogging full-time….
… stay tuned for Part Two. Click here to go to it: My Blogging Journey Part 2