How I Started Blogging
My first blog was called Cheap and Chic Style Blog. It was something I created on wordpress.com to procrastinate studying for a final exam my junior year of college. One of my friends at the time had started a blog of her own as a way to build her resume to break into the fashion industry. I was studying Biology, but the idea seemed exciting to me at the time. A place to write freely about what I wanted to, when I wanted to, and not have to meet a length requirement or be edited by a professor who would complain about my run-on sentences? That sounds like something “productive” I can do whilst studying for my linear algebra final… Despite being a biology major, I had always loved fashion, so having an outlet to talk about it felt fun and exciting.
I never deleted the blog, and I will haphazardly link to it here. Don’t judge me. I was fully embracing my best “Devil Wears Prada Runway reporter” impression while also staying true to my “why say something in 500 words when you can summarize in 3 sentences” personal brand. If I’m remembering correctly, the content didn’t have all that much thought behind it. I would just feel like writing something, pick whatever popped into my head (or vice versa), type out a few paragraphs, and hit publish. Looking back now, I think the initial appeal of writing a blog was that I was able to publish my thoughts for others to consume, without necessarily having to seek and successfully gain their attention first; something I am notoriously bad at. I must be really soft spoken in person, because there is even a running joke in my family that any time I try to say something, someone else starts talking over me mid-sentence ????
Finding my “Personal Brand”
Seven months later, being a general consumer of the news and media in the fashion industry, I had started to discover major fashion bloggers: Sea of Shoes, The Blonde Salad, Style Scrapbook, Man Repeller, etc. They were mostly my age(ish), but they seemed so much older. They knew what their personal style was, they had successful fashion blogs, they had personal brands when personal branding was something you only heard about in a public relations office. As I read their blogs more and more, I started to become less and less happy with my own blog. Cheap and Chic didn’t feel very on brand for me. Yes, I was on a student budget and loved fashion. But “Cheap and Chic” felt so… generic? I felt like the name, and the content, could be better, and I wanted to push myself to improve it accordingly.
Of course I felt the need to nail the name before trying to up my content game. That felt like the easier of the two tasks, and if I was going to start putting more effort into my posts, then I wanted them to live under a worthwhile header.
Side note: I would not recommend this to anyone just starting out in blogging. Just do what you love and focus on your content instead of giving yourself a trivial excuse to not get started.
I thought and thought… I continuously rolled words around in my brain, and eventually came up with: Lochical. The combination of the words “chic” and “logical”; to be fashionable on a budget.
Needless to say, I’m not very good at coming up with names for things. I was really proud of myself at the time because when pronounced, “lochical” sounded kind of like a french pronunciation of the word “logical”. And of course, being an American girl, I want nothing more than to be French. My family laughed, because only I could manage to come up with a “personal brand” that could not be easily understood, pronounced, spelled, or, more importantly, found in the vast sea of fashion blogs on the internet.
It lasted for 14 posts.
At that time, I was starting my last semester at college and was so busy finishing up my classes and enjoying the company of friends that I stopped blogging. But as soon as I graduated, I felt the need to dive into something more creative in my free time. But of course, “Lochical” didn’t feel very on brand any more. I wanted to write about more than just fashion. I had all kinds of interests, why not come up with a blog where I could write about all of them? Again, I thought and thought about what to name my blog… and came up with Fashion Food Fotos. Three things I was (and am) interested in.
Really went hard with that F alliteration. So great for SEO ????????
If you’re reading this blog right when it launches, then you probably already know about Fashion Food Fotos. FFF is the blog that I’ve been using the longest, and have even had some success with. The only problem is that the success didn’t feel as great as I thought it would.
Too Much of a Good Thing
If you had told me back in my junior year of college that blogging would become one of my major hobbies for almost a decade, I don’t know that I would have believed you. But with my friends for the most part dispersed into different states and even different countries, I began to spend more and more free time on blogging after graduation. I thought that eventually I may even be able to do it full time, allowing me more freedom to go visit my friends and soak up experiences that were previously unavailable to me. Plus, the lives of full time bloggers on social media look like a lot of fun, and who wouldn’t want to take a shot at that?
I started researching how to increase my audience, get more traffic, and get more followers so that I could start charging for sponsored content. If you are unfamiliar with blogging, that is how most full time bloggers make the majority of their income. But the income doesn’t come without an audience, so that was step one.
Using my research, I was actually able to increase the size of my audience and get some more traffic to my site. It was cool to see the work I put in yield tangible results, but over time I started to see those results as more of a problem than a benefit.
As I started to pick up traction and gain followers/readers, I would get an influx of emails from companies wanting to send me free stuff. Anything from a teeth whitening light, to a customizable greeting card, to orthopedic socks. Some of these things didn’t exactly go with what I was writing about, and it was easy enough to politely decline. But there was a certain category in between things I definitely would buy and definitely wouldn’t buy that became particularly difficult and somewhat exhausting to navigate.
Take the teeth whitening light for example. Would I buy a teeth whitening light normally of my own fruition? Honestly, I really can’t say. I am interested in having white teeth, but I’m not sure how I would go about getting them once I decided they needed whitening. But here was an opportunity to get them for free sitting in my inbox. It seemed like a match made in heaven just by virtue of the fact that this particular brand had thought to email me before any others. Plus, working with brands helps build your blogging “resume” to land you larger opportunities in the future. At the time it seemed like a no brainer to participate.
However, the whole thing left me with a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Had I just compromised my integrity in an attempt to advance my blogging career? The grey-ness of the whole situation was a source of anxiety, and that anxiety started to grow along with my follower count and the number of opportunities rolling in. The more people were asking of me, the more blogging started to feel overwhelming, ingenuine, and not fun. I started going on random hiatuses of weeks, sometimes months at a time, which in turn, decreased my engagement rates and made me feel like I was a bad blogger. It was a vicious cycle that I didn’t know how to get out of, because I hadn’t even fully recognized its existence yet.
The culmination of this trend was when I was offered a huge gifting campaign with Estee Lauder. At the time I had about 15,000 Instagram followers (I think), and they wanted to send me 130 different shades of lipstick, in various finishes, in exchange for a post on Instagram. The retail value of the lipsticks was over $4,000. My car at the time was worth about $1,500.
Obviously I was over the moon about the opportunity and thought that it may be the beginning of some real traction in the blogging community. I spent hours looking at the product, testing it, swatching it, styling and photographing it. I wanted the photo to look professional and high quality, so I asked my mom to be my photographer while I hand modeled lipsticks meticulously placed on a marble cutting board on the floor of her living room where the natural light was best. I posted the photo on Instagram when the time was right (brands usually request a certain date window for publishing), and sat and waited, refreshing the post constantly to see how people would like my photo and react to my first “big break”.
Unfortunately, after publishing I didn’t feel a sense of pride or excitement anymore, but a sense of anxiety and dread that I hadn’t done well enough. That I hadn’t provided enough value for the company to justify such a large gift. That I was undeserving of the gift in the first place. What if the Estee Lauder team thought that picking me was a mistake? What if they suspected my low engagement audience was actually full of fake profiles? What if it actually was?
If this seems like a totally random and unwarranted freak out, then you’re probably right. I’ve never purchased followers or done anything dubious to get followers/pageviews/traction for my blog in any way, but this was right around the time that I was dealing with a bout of depression (which I wrote about briefly here), and my confidence was at an all time low. Due to the faceless, often anonymous nature of the internet and social media, I couldn’t believe my own successes, no matter how small.
Blogging, something that was once a fun pastime and creative expression, had turned into what felt like a should-be part-time job that I was absolutely miserable at. The fun had been totally sucked out of it, and so, along my road to recovery, I decided to stop. Firstly, I wanted to get back to me, and work on getting out of the depression that I was in. Then, I wanted to spend my free time on something that was fun, that I felt made an impact on people for the better, and that was purely run by me. What I eventually came up with was le SECT; a skin care review website that identifies and analyzes skin care products that are free of fragrance, irritants, and sensitizers.
That was almost a year ago, and I haven’t touched Fashion Food Fotos since about February, because I was (and am) having a great time getting back to what made blogging fun for me in the first place: sharing worthwhile information or opinions with others. But with some time off to rest and recharge (if you can call it that), I’ve decided that I do genuinely like blogging and want to get back to it.
It turns out I have one last rebrand in me. Welcome to Sundays With Me.
One Last Fresh Start
So what’s different this time? Well, this time I’m establishing my blog as purely a hobby. I won’t be spending hours sweating over whether or not I’m posting enough, or attracting enough readers, or growing, or making money, or delivering enough ROI for brands. Sometimes I might post twice a week, sometimes I might take 2 months off, and both are okay. I’ll be approaching monetization a lot more carefully than before, if at all. And I’ll be writing about a wider array of topics than just fashion, beauty, and food. The name “Sundays With Me” is meant to be indicative of the content being driven by what I do on Sundays (or when I am not at my 9-5 in general) for fun or to improve myself. That could mean styling a new outfit, getting back into shape, giving a beauty tutorial, planning a trip to Europe, trying a new recipe, setting a new monthly budget, working on a side income opportunity, or just sharing something that has been on my mind lately.
I hope you enjoy it =)