Smart Solutions for Busy Moms!
Grow your blog – Monetize, find new leads and blogging opportunities, and get the best tips too… Hi all! Welcome to another weekly Bloggertunities post, a round-up of the best blogging tips, tools, leads, opps, and events of the week. I hope you’ll find some helpful stuff – and if you do, be sure to share it! And if you have something awesome to share – event sign ups, linkys, tips posts, etc – post ‘em in the comments! I do my best to tweet those links out all week too.
Grow your blog – Monetize, find new leads and blogging opportunities, and get the best tips too… Hi all! Welcome to another weekly Bloggertunities post, a round-up of the best blogging tips, tools, leads, opps, and events of the week. I hope you’ll find some helpful stuff – and if you do, be sure to share it! And if you have something awesome to share – event sign ups, linkys, tips posts, etc – post ‘em in the comments! I do my best to tweet those links out all week too.
Ok, I don’t claim to be a fashion blogger – at all… But, I do love fashion. I worked for 10 years in fashion merchandising, management, and visual displays, and loved it. I’m much better at dressing others than I am at dressing myself most days, lol. But – this is another category that I want to get into more this year. Not high fashion craziness – but totally attainable, real-mom fashion. You know – how to still look hot after 4 hours sleep, while chasing a wild toddler. Those type of tips.
So, as I have been gathering some tips, ideas, and tools to help me be more successful in this new area of blogging, I thought I’d share some with you ladies too. These are my current Top 10 Resources to check out, for Fashion Bloggers. Stay tuned for more fashion posts – and let me know what kind of things you’d like to see featured in this category too!
What about you – Are you already a fashion blogger? If so, you probably have some great tips and resources to share. I’d love to hear them – leave me some comments! Are you interested in branching out into more fashion blogging in 2013? If so – what are the challenges in your way? I love hearing from you ladies…
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” - Lawrence J. Peter… This quote is so true, and is part of what is helping guide my blogging and business goals for the new year. Last year, I felt like I was often just “trying to keep up” – instead of really taking steps towards my goals. {Although as I reviewed my post, 10 Blogging Goals for 2012: Starting with Be More Awesome – I realized I was lucky to accomplish most of what I set out to. This year, I’m working on setting big goals, and really getting things organized and planned out. And since you really can’t know where you’re going, until you can see where you’re been, I decided to analyze last year’s traffic to get a better idea of what worked, and what didn’t.
Sharing blogging stats: I’ve joined a group of bloggers who are all taking some time today to take a look back at 2012, and share their own traffic stats too – you can find the linky down at the bottom of this post, if you’d like to take a look and get a big picture on what’s working for other bloggers too. And – first things first, here’s my total traffic for all of last year, January to Decemeber of 2012:
Traffic was lower than expected: Last year when my blog got hacked, I lost almost two weeks of access to my account, and then another full week of mess once I could get back in. That was a big set back. Then, over the last few months, my little one started having seizures. It started with what we hoped at the time was a febrile seizure, but was then followed my months of more of them. Since October I really lost a lot of my blogging focus, due to traveling to Seattle Children’s Hospital for her appointments, testing and procedures, and dealing with each new episode when it happened. So what should have been my busiest time of the year – wasn’t. But that’s ok. I did my best, I made my family my priority, and she’s doing much better now. So it’s time to ROCK in 2013! Very excited to start fresh.
This list shows you where my traffic came from – my top 10 blog traffic sources: StumbleUpon doesn’t bring me as much as it used to earlier in 2012 – no more BIG traffic explosions. But it does bring steady visitors, and hopefully they’ll like what they see once stumbling onto my site, and come back again. The Weekend.tend is one of Glam Media’s sites – they picked up a few posts of mine during the year, which is always really appreciated. Towards the end of the year, Facebook has moved down to my #8 or #9 referrer, and Google and Pinterest have both moved up quite a bit. I’m working on SEO in the new year, so hopefully that will continue to increase.
What I learned here – One, that linking up some great posts on some good linkys can be a really effective way to bring in traffic. That’s where most of this traffic came from – from linking up to photo challenges, recipe linkys, or my personal favorite to find fun new stuff – the Mommy Club linky on Crystal & Co, where everyone links up their best “mom solution” posts each week.
What I learned here – It’s very obvious here that while sponsored posts and reviews pay the bills, it’s the real content that I write that is what brings people to my site. Whether it’s just something funny I think will entertain people, a personal experience I think can help educate people, or a fun recipe or craft idea – those are the things that people like to read. Which is awesome, since that’s my goal in the new year, to write more real content again. Another thing I noticed is that many of these are posts that I link to within posts often, encouraging readers to discover more of my favorite older posts.
Check out the other bloggers who have put together their own stats posts – See how you compare, what you can learn, what best practices you can adopt. And if you’d like to share your post – leave me a comment below, so I can learn from you, too!
So, once again – I’m a day late getting this post up. *Sigh* I’m late on just about everything these days. Including Christmas shopping. I’m drowning in emails, I have boxes of supplies waiting to be crafted into cool gifty creations. Cupboards full of ingredients waiting to be whipped into creative holiday goodies. And a spare room full of boxes waiting to be opened and [Read more...]
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” - Oscar Wilde… When it comes to blogging, that’s some of the best advice that you’ll ever get. Perfect grammar, a beautiful design, and good connections to PR are only going to take you so far… It’s the personal connection you make with readers, when you write from the heart, that is what brings success. Plus, when you write “real” – you’ll enjoy what you do MUCH more! I hope you find something helpful in this week’s post – and you have anything awesome to share too, please feel free to add it to the comments!
“In at least one way we are atypical bloggers. That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people who go on diets and budgets, quits after a few months, weeks, or in many cases, days.” – Stephen J. Dubner… This quote is so true. Blogging, in my experience, is one of those things that a lot of people pick up as a hobby, or as a way to get free stuff, or because it’s something that they think will be a get rich quick type of thing. But those of us who have been blogging for awhile now know – it is hard work, and you have to be passionate about what you do, to keep with it long enough to be successful. 
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"The phrase "working mother" is redundant." I'm Meagan - a Momma, a Blogger, a Freelance Writer, and a total Social Media Junkie. I love sparkles and … [Read More...]
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