My Creative Story: Part 6 Blog Friends
Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here. You know how when you start blogging everyone says ‘The only way to be successful in blogging is to make blog friends’. Yeah ok. BUT HOW?!?!? I was so flipping confused. I would leave comments on blogs and we would not automatically be flying to each other’s homes and sipping adorable drinks and making the blog world jealous. #UGHThen one day, I found Caylee’s blog on Paislee Press and O. M. G. her Project Life pages were the dream of what I wanted my stuff to look like when it grew up! I left her one comment. She then responded to it. Then clicked to my blog and left me a comment. I responded. Then there was lots of clicking and commenting and responding. Then I realized that she was living overseas and we were getting ready to start planning on how we were going to move overseas. So I sent her an email. Then the next thing I know she has responded! And she is was nice! Then we just kept emailing because we had so much to talk about. And that's how I made a blog friend.Then I send her a really awkward (to me because it’s my first time) ‘pitch’. “Hey, I want to post a tutorial about using one of your products” (which I had bought and loved). She is so nice, but appropriately leery. She says of course you can. On your own blog. So I do. The tutorial was legit and I worked really hard on it and actually gave her a few (read like 1) sales from it. This is my first foray in the blog world of 1. Making a blog friend. 2. Using someone else’s (a real person, not a big box store) products to make tutorials. 3. Making a recommendation and having people follow it for purchasing something specific. (like an affiliate program! though I was not paid at all)Caylee and I become fast friends and really get to know each other well and become texting (Whatsapp) friends! We have a lot in common and are just really good friends, no strings attached about promoting or getting free stuff. We both love to travel, love crafting, were the exact same age and in the exact same life stage. We just clicked. We also had the same bad habits: buying craft/blog related ecourses and not actually using them. At this point I am working part time at the school and part time at the hospital. I was sitting at my computer station in the nurses station on the cardiology floor and texting Caylee about how I was tired of buying courses and not using them and that I had no consistency in my creating. She was in the same boat.She was already selling digital products in her Etsy shop and doing really well and was on multiple design teams. I was still really struggling to find my footing in the online world. I suggest, why don’t we work through the A Beautiful Mess art journal class together. The proposal was that we make it a habit to work weekly on our journals and we stay accountable by posting our pages on the same day and linking to each other’s blog. She was so keen! And because Caylee is a crazy overachiever, she suggests we make like 20 pages a week. I quickly reign her in and suggest we start with like 2. Aim low, shoot high kind of thing. So I take some ‘promo pics’ and send them to her. It is a photo of my art journal page with some supplies around it taken on my kitchen table. She LOVES it. She is a photoshop magician, so she adds some text to it and officially we have birthed “L & C Get Messy: An Art Journal Challenge”. We both post our art journal pages the next Thursday on our blogs. The response and what happened next was something neither of us ever expected....Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here.