I launched Charlotte Shares on May 15th; the day after my 25th birthday! So I’ve now been blogging for pretty much 4 months. I’ve wanting to start a blog for years, but I was always too scared I would be judged. When I turned 25 I sat and thought to myself, “I’m an adult – why do I care if people judge me?” If they want to judge me, then they can quite honestly just f*ck off!
So here I am 4 months later and Charlotte Shares is still going strong. I’ve posted regularly since my launch and am actually really proud of myself and what I’ve achieved. My blog is by no means successful or big … I don’t get hundreds of views a day. In fact the most views I’ve ever achieved in a day is 70 **I fangirled at this slightly haha**. To most people this is rubbish, but we all have to start somewhere.
During the past 4 months I’ve learnt a lot and thought I would share this with you.
1 – Being organised is really really hard!
I’m actually a really organised person in my day to day life, but trying to maintain my usual life and organise my blog is hard. I always think to myself ‘I’ll write a blog post tonight’; but then I get home and life gets in the way and it doesn’t happen. I see some people totally stressing over this … Personally I’m not going to have a meltdown over it, but I will openly admit I hugely fail at having lots of posts scheduled and ready to go live.
2 – Scheduling tweets is really important
On a Sunday night I’ll sit down and schedule all of my tweets for the week to promote my posts. I use Tweetdeck and it honestly makes my life so much easier. I keep a word document with all of my blog posts in categories where I write a title, have the link to the post and have the relevant hash tags. This means all I need to do is copy and paste into Tweetdeck and select when I want to schedule it for. It’s so simple and saves me so much time during the day.
3 – Pinterest is confusing as hell!
I’ve been doing a lot of research into Pinterest and how you can use it to help with blog traffic. I’m still a bit baffled by the whole thing to be honest. I’ve upgraded my Pinterest account to a business one, I’ve slowly started joining Pinterest groups (trying to find ones to join is a mare), and I’ve also started making posts with hidden Pinterest images in … Fancy right?! … Well it is for me haha. The link to my Pinterest is here and I’ll always follow back 🙂
4 – The community is awesome
I have to say the blogging community is awesome. I’ve built up a nice little group of lovely people who always respond to my tweets and comment on my blog posts. A big shout out to Hayley and Brooke who have been so kind and welcoming to me from the start.
Their links are here: Brooke & Hayley
I find it so interesting and exciting to be able to talk to like minded people and be able to share our interests and passions.
5 – Time is a big problem
Having a full time job, making cards to sell to family and friends, writing blog posts, taking photos, scheduling tweets, promoting content, interacting with others and trying to maintain a social life is a massive challenge. I’m trying to come up with ways to make the most out of my time, if anyone has any tips please leave them below!
It’s been a pretty incredible 4 months and I feel like I’ve learnt a lot and had a lot of fun along the way. I’m always thinking of ways that I can expand Charlotte Shares and I’m excited to see what the future holds for my little space on the internet.
Charlotte xx
