My Creative Story: Part 5 Blogging

Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here. Ok, so I am now working a full-time job, living in a house where I have a whole craft room to myself and making the tiniest amount of money, but still the most we’ve ever made. Needless to say: I am dropping ALL my monies at the craft store. I'm totally obsessed. Pinterest and blogs have come into the world in full force and people are making a living from blogging and crafting. I have this HUGE town home to decorate and we’re pretty settled in here as we know Terrell has a few years to go on his doctorate. I’m over the top crazy about decorating this place to where it gets to a point where Terrell tells me I have to stop because there is no wall space left and we have so many throw pillows you can’t actually sit on the couch….My mom, my greatest cheerleader, over these years keeps telling me “keep going with the blog! I know you can do this and be a famous blogger”. Mom's are the best, and also the most unrealistic, but mostly the best and I'm so glad I listened to mine. I have found Elise’s blog and A Beautiful Mess at this point and I actually can see how this is possible career option. Still illusive, far-fetched and far away, but still doable. At first, the only blogger I knew of who was actually making money from this was Young House Love and we had no ability to remodel our rental house with our 4$. So finding the craft world online just blew my mind. Now I have found Studio Calico and Project Life. I’m so hooked and foaming at the mouth with jealousy at all the pretty projects and the ridiculously expensive craft supplies. I knew that my excitement was over the top when I got my first Project Life kit, but now I know it was totally justified.Terrell buys me my first Project Life kit and I get started making. To this day those first pages are still my absolute favorite. I am making Project Life pages, crafts, home DIYS and sharing it all on the blog. I am starting to figure out the whole ‘how to have a successful blog’ thing and ‘rebrand’. I become This Handmade Circus. Because our life is so fun and colorful and exciting like a circus! I even have a little branding logo that I created in Paint (!) to have little bunting flags and choose purple as my blog color (remember my carpet color choice). My blogging goal is to make cute things for cheap-cheap and show people how to do it. I was inspired to do this by my thinking about how my friends were always saying how "they didn’t want to spend so much money on things" and I knew you could do it on your own! So I set out to show them. I created this tutorial for my toilet paper wall art and it went viral. Like insane viral. Still to this day, years later, still a most popular post regardless of the terrible photo quality. But that absolutely meant nothing to my future success as a blogger. I was not immediately picked up by toilet paper and spray paint sponsors. My following posts were just my one friend commenting on it, again.I spend the next 2 years evolving and growing as a maker and a blogger in insane leaps and bounds in my skills and knowledge. I have fully dived headfirst back into scrapbooking at this point but in a new and fun modern world. But, I have taken what I learned from that Etsy shop experience and only made things for myself. I made things that I actually wanted and needed, no fake for the blog projects. My photography got better, my projects got better, my writing got better. But that’s too far, too fast. Let me tell you how.Online education gets its boost at this point. The few people who have figured out how to make lots of money on Etsy and through their blogs have begun sharing their wisdom. I start following April and A Beautiful Mess and Laura Roder and Marie Forleo and eating up everything they are saying becuase I want my blog to grow, but don’t know how. I absolutely fall over on the edge of reading and learning and not doing. I'm posting! But not consistently. I'm using photos! But not good ones. I get a nice camera! But I have no idea what Photoshop and good editing is.Everyone keeps saying that you need to choose a focus, to have branding. I realize that This Handmade Circus doesn’t really make sense anymore and that if I want to take this seriously I need to make the leap and look professional if I want to be a professional. I AGONIZE over my blog title because I really don’t have a specific focus yet. Obviously my crafting is ruling all, but we are travelling a ton at this time and I am loving sharing travel guides and they are doing well on Pinterest too. We are getting ready to move overseas, so I know whatever I choose has to be versatile enough to encompass this but not limit us like ‘Hoopers in Seoul Blog’ would.I was reading a post by Ann-Marie about how she changed her blog title from annmarielovespaper to just annmarieloves because she loves more than just paper and wanted that broader title to allow for more options. This is when it all clicked. I thought I love lots of things too! But to my great dismay, LaurenLoves was already taken (and not even being used?!) so I was moaning about it and a friends husband says why not ‘Lauren-Likes’ and I was sold! But just plain LaurenLikes was taken (again but not used?!?!) and I was so torn between whether the dash would throw people off and I would lose traffic...what is wrong with me?!Therefore I made the plunge, paid my money and bought this little dot-com here! I worked on an editorial calendar and made my site look modern, yet still vibrant and fun. Still though, I was struggling with consistency and finding my niche. But I was committed to this little blog and was willing to figure it out and make it work because I loved it. Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here.