A Blogger’s Journey: Storytelling (alternately titled: Finally Wrapping Up A Blogger’s Journey Series!)

Since we have arrived in Scotland, I have been writing between two and ten pitches every week to random companies trying to get them help us tell the story of our life here, while also promoting their hotel, hostel, tour guide or tour.

My pitches have improved since my first emails to the sunscreen company, but I still get mostly “nos” or “no reply.” For every fun trip I have written about on my blog, you can bet there are twenty trips I did not get to take.

(Remember how I said last time that things are not ever exactly as they seem.)

For me, all the pitching + sealing deals with people = EXHAUSTING.

Sometimes, I would rather just go on a free hike with my family on Saturday than beg, beg, beg for you to let me come stay in your hotel for a night so I can take/edit photos and spend hours writing copy that ends up reading like: Look At This Great Hotel We Got To Stay In For Free.

Because, hello BORING.

But even when I would publish (or just Instagram) pictures from hikes I would find that people often would say “Jealous!” or “I wish” or not anything. And that just made me sad.

My readers/followers and even my friends and family seem to somehow have a threshold for the number of pretty Scotland photos they care to see. (Go figure.)

So there I was, telling a story that I had worked hard to define and felt was true (Outdoorsy Mama Lives A Dreamy Life in Scotland) but that I was afraid was getting boring. Plus still not getting paid for blogging and having to work very hard for free things in blogging.

Enter Mike Sowden’s Storytelling Course for Bloggers.

After taking this free email course, which by the way I HIGHLY recommend, I decided to do an experiment.

(Existential Blogging Experiment Stage 3 Resurrected!)

In December, I told Twelve Days of Stories.

They had nothing to do with my Definitions or Purposes in blogging.

They were just stories from my life.

But y’all, I loved writing them.

After my Christmas storytelling project, I decided that I would continue to tell stories on my blog.

I thought I had been telling stories all along, but these were different. They stood out from the blog posts I had been doing lately in that they were mostly text instead of photos.

(Wait a minute! Text Heavy Blog Posts Only With Punctuation This Time? Stage 1 Resurrected!)

Mike suggested I tell stories once a week along a monthly theme. 12 Themes for 12 Months of Stories to follow up my 12 Days of Stories.

I began to play with this idea, but I wanted all the stories to tie together somehow. In fact, what I loved about Outdoorsy Mama + A Dreamy Life In Scotland was how it tied everything on my blog together. I still wanted an overarching theme.

But I wanted it to be something that was truly me.

And I wanted it to be something that I would not easily become bored with.

When I thought of it, I knew I had stumbled on exactly what I wanted my blog to be about in the next stage of my Blogger’s Journey.

Walking.

I was walking everywhere since I had moved to Scotland. I was loving going for walks on the weekends in the woods and I knew I wanted to walk a lot of new cities this year. I love that in the UK, they refer to hiking as walking or hillwalking.

And I love that the idea of walking is so easily transferable to figurative journeys.

I started to write my introductory post about walking + storytelling. I already knew that I wanted to go on some really long walks in 2014 and that I was going to try to come up with a way to tag them all together. (I settled on #48Walks)

While I was writing, I realized that it would be so simple to invite others to do it with me!

I was so excited about this possibility that I just said, Join in! If you can think of a way to be a part of walking with me this year, then come on!

Honestly the idea was so new to me that I did not have time to create any rules or guidelines.

And here’s what really surprised me. People said yes. People started to tag their pictures with #48Walks. I set up a Facebook group and people joined it. I encouraged people to make a list of 48 walks they want to take this year, literal walks or figurative walks.

I started to write blog posts about the walks I am taking. And I started to write stories about walks of life. In January I told stories about Walking Towards the Unexpected. In February, I told stories about Walking in the Dark.  This month I told stories about Walking in the Light.

Maybe when I look back on 2014, I will call it the stage of Walking + Storytelling.

Who knows? But for now, I have found a journey that I am loving and that others can share in, which just makes me giddy. Instead of seeing my picture of a walk I am taking and wishing you were there, I hope it encourages you to find a great walk of your own and show it to me. When someone snaps a picture of a walk they are taking in life and tags it for me to find, it brightens up my day.

As I have shared the story of my blog, you might have noticed that I kept a little bit of each phase along the way. Blogging (and the internet) is always changing, so it is great to experiment! In each phase, I try to keep what is helpful and leave behind what is not.

And even though I have made fun of some of the things I have done in blogging, I want you to know that when I see you trying something new on your blog, I think you are brave.

It’s important to me that you know that. Because there is a lot of comparison and meanness on the internet, you might think I am criticizing you. I promise that there is no question you could ask me about blogging that I would say was dumb. And after seven years of blogging, I know that if you have something special happening on your blog (or in your life) that you worked very hard for it. And that there are probably ten more opportunities you did not get.

Ultimately, I do not think there is any right or wrong way to go about blogging.

Which is the wonderful freedom about blogging, is it not?

I like to remember that my blog is my own creation and ultimately, I can do whatever I like with my little corner of the internet. I can try on lots of hats in that space until I find the one that fits me best. Some days I think the dashboard of my blog will continue to be a virtual costume changing room many years to come. And you know what, I am okay with that.

This post is the fourth in a series about my journey as a blogger. I just want to stop for a minute to thank you so much for coming along with me, for letting me tell the story of my blog and for your comments and encouragements! 

A Blogger’s Journey: Definition and Purpose

Somewhere in the Show Me The Money phase of blogging, our family moved to Scotland. I immediately signed up to attend a travel blogging conference in order to learn where I could start getting Pounds Sterling for blogging instead of the dollars I was currently swimming in (sarcasm).

In order to get ready to go to this conference, I invested my blog savings of $150 and some money I earned from catering on a session with a blogger who is very open and honest about how she makes money on the internet. She details it all out and if you want to learn how to make money from blogging, you should read Sarah Von Bargen regularly and then do what she says. For me, the best thing I got out of doing the session with her was that she made me write down my dreams and plans for my blog. I had to answer lots of hard questions in order to sit down with her about where I was going.

Like, I had to actually say where I wanted to go.

I know that sounds simple, but I still cannot answer some of Sarah’s questions definitively. Let’s pretend I am a creative maker of jewelry and I would really love to sell it online. Then the purpose of my blog would be easy: Promote/Sell Jewelry. Then you add in all the other things around that purpose. Cute Outfit Of The Day posts that feature jewelery. Hello-I-am-a Real-Person-but-I-Like-To-Make-Jewelry posts.

I actually considered finding something to sell in order to have more “purpose” for my blog. (Note: I think this is a great way to make money as a blogger, but unfortunately, I did not want to sell anything.)

In my session with Sarah, she told me that she thought I should emphasize the details about my blog (and myself) that made me different. She recommended I push the Outdoorsy Mama, because there are lots of family blogs and lots of outdoor blogs but not necessarily that many people who are combining the two. She also gave me some suggestions for identifying myself in this way. (Release a Camping Menus eBook.) And she told me how to increase my presence on social media. (Be consistent. Be generous.)

So off to the travel conference I went as:

Stage 6: Outdoor Adventure + Family Travel Mama

Y’all, I even had cards printed.

One of the reasons I chose this particular conference was that a writer whose blog I really enjoy was speaking at two different sessions.

Somewhere in the middle of one of his talks, he confessed that he was not really making a living from blogging. In fact, he was barely scraping by with freelance jobs that were completely separate from his blog.

Let’s just revel in the irony of this for a minute, shall we?

I went to a conference to learn how to make money from blogging and to hear someone speak who was not making money blogging.

I still loved the conference. I enjoyed meeting people in the travel blogging industry. I love to travel and so did everyone I met. So that was fun. Also, I got to go on a free trip to the Northwest of Ireland as part of the conference. (Mesmerized By Free Stuff Stage 4: Resurrected!) I had the opportunity to pitch a room full of people in the travel industry who sponsor travel bloggers in which I learned that I never want to do that again. I attended talks on writing and pitching and storytelling and social media. I crammed my brain full and came back to Scotland completely overwhelmed.

I had lists of goals and plans. I made schedules and actually (kinda sorta) stuck to them. I started following all the rules I had learned from Sarah Von Bargen and from conferences.

I was blogging consistently (3-5 times per week) and promoting my blog on all the social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram).  I was looking for guest posting opportunities to increase my Internet Presence.

Our family really does love hiking and the outdoors, so I was able to generate lots of content organically from how we spend our time.

I consistently posted pictures of our hiking and exploring in Scotland. Because we are living A Dreamy Life In Scotland and the world should want to know all about that, right? I no longer needed to chase the money. Soon I would be famous Outdoorsy Mama, and the money would chase me.

The funny thing about all the different clichés I bought (am currently buying) in to about blogging and success is that there are threads of truth in each of them. When I started trying to get free stuff for blogging, I really did get some free stuff. When I started trying to make some money blogging, I got a little money. When I started trying to increase my followers on social media, I was able to slowly but surely get those numbers to go up.

But threads of truth eventually unravel when you tug on them.

If you hear me say nothing else about blogging success, hear this:

Nothing is ever exactly as it seems.

Here’s an example.

I am a Huffington Post Blogger.

I will pause for you to Be Amazed.

Now I will tell you everything I know about how to be a HuffPo Blogger. I will tell you that in order to blog for the Huffington Post, all you have to do is email Arianna Huffington. She is the only big name in the blogging world that I have encountered who actually answers Every Single Email She Receives. Which I think is very kind, by the way. She is bestowing mad amounts of dignity upon those of us who are sending eleventy million emails into the universe. Thank you, Arianna!

If she likes your blog, she will send you off to one of her reps depending on the topic you would like to blog about and they will set you up with a log in and Voila! You are now a Huffington Post Blogger. You can write something and submit it. And if it is not total crap (grammatical errors and such) and you have followed their clear guidelines (size of pictures and such), it will be published on their site. And maybe some people will read it. But mostly do you know who will read it? The people that you send there when you put the link on your Facebook page.

I’ll pause while you take back your amazement.

But still, I am doing some very fun things for free this spring because in an email I said, I am a Huffington Post Blogger.

Almost everything in blogging is like this in that in some way, things are not exactly as they seem.

Y’all I try to be a really honest blogger. I want to be authentic. I really do.

But in blogging, as in life, we are telling a story (whether we define it or not) and for the past year or so, my story has been Outdoorsy Mama who is living A Dreamy Life in Scotland. If this is the story I am wrapping my blog around, I am not going to tell you that last week after four days of rain, I could not get out of bed. Or that I stayed awake all night from anxiety about something that was going on with one of my children.

Instead, I am going to keep on telling the (photo heavy) story of A Dreamy Life in Scotland.

And if that is the purpose of my blog, as defined by myself in previous planning sessions, then I am not being untrue to myself by continuing to tell that part of the story.

Because I am Outdoorsy. And lots of things about life in Scotland are pretty dang amazing.

However in November, I began to notice that my blog readership and (more importantly) blog engagement (commenting + sharing) was going down instead of up.

I began to wonder if people were becoming bored with Hey, Look at This Cool Castle!

More importantly, I started to feel like maybe I was bored with it.

I was very excited about defining myself as Outdoorsy Mama who Moves To Scotland, and it was helpful for pitching my story to others to have given my blog a general theme. Or niche.

But I think maybe I concentrated on fitting this niche so much that I lost the story.

So next week I am going to tell you how I found a new stage of blogging that I am really excited about: Storytelling.

Do you have questions about any of the stages of blogging I’ve mentioned as I’ve shared my journey of blogging? I would LOVE to hear them and I’ll do my very best to answer!

If you’re feeling super brave, I would love to hear your experience of how something about your blogging is “not exactly as it seems?”

So last week I talked all about how I was Mesmerized By Free Stuff in Stage 4 of Blogging, but then I started thinking that maybe in addition to candles, people should give me Cold Hard Cash.

 Stage 5: Show Me The Money

And y’all, let me just be honest: here’s where it gets ugly.

I hear you asking, By ugly, do you mean all those ads that were on the sides of your blog?

Well, yes, because those can be ugly, but actually no, because what happened inside of me was far uglier than Adsense.

Because here’s the thing.

Somehow, when I was just blogging for Free Stuff, I actually liked what I was blogging about. I really did LOVE Moss Mountain Farm. I would go there again tomorrow if Mimi would just fly me over from Scotland.

And I actually like Petit Jean Bacon. (Please send some over.)

But when I started chasing the money in blogging, I was haphazard and ridiculous, and the lack of financial success in blogging caused me to have a lot of self-loathing.

At first I joined lots of affiliate programs (like this one) where you put company ads on your sidebar and if people buy stuff by clicking on them you get like ten cents. Well, as you can imagine, that did not make me very much money. In fact, I could be totally wrong about this, but I finally decided that the main purpose these ads serve is to make others think that your blog is professional.

Oh, I saw you had ads on your blog now!

You must be big time!

Yes, thank you very much. I made two dollars this month and only because when I saw my mother was ordering something from Amazon anyway, I asked her to please click through from my website first.

Next, I found some other sites that are dedicated to helping you make money as a blogger. The first one was Collective Bias. Opportunities would pop up on the home page of the program (or you could have them emailed directly to you) where you could apply to be a blogger for a product. In the space of about six months, I probably applied for about fifty of these opportunities and I was accepted for two of them. In both cases, I was sent to buy a product, which I blogged about and then I was reimbursed for the cost of the product and paid a fee for having blogged about it. I think I made $50 for blogging about Colgate and $100 for blogging about a camera. Plus of course I got the toothpaste (long gone) and the camera (collecting dust). Let’s not dwell on all the time I spent putting together those posts + applying to the other 48 opportunities that I did not get, because we will probably discover that $150 comes out to about forty cents an hour. Yikes.

I know this is a hideously tedious amount of detail, but it is this kind of information that I was searching for from others in my Show Me The Money blogging phase. And honestly, it just was not out there.

I combed other blogs (including many of yours) looking for how people were making money in blogging. And people do not really say. In fact, if you visit my blog today, you might come away thinking that I am trying to give the impression of a blog that is making money but I just need to tell you that it is not really making money. I think I have still bought in to the idea that having a blog that looks like it is making money is the key to having one that actually does make money. I call it Fake It ‘Til You Make It. But friends, come back in six months and I may not have all that jazz on there anymore.

I might be in a different stage by then.

The good news is that even though I would still very much appreciate making money from blogging, and I can still be very haphazard, I have, for the most part, left behind the self-loathing.

But again, I am getting ahead of myself. Come back next week and I will tell you all about learning To Define Myself As A Blogger.

Do you have questions or helpful info about making money from blogging? Please share in the comments!

Photos this week are from photo shoots with one of my fav Arkansas Bloggers, Whitney Loibner. The top one is an old What I Wore Wednesday photo featuring Country Outfitter Boots and the second pictures is my mama and me enjoying some Petit Jean Hot Dogs! LOVE!

And by Superstar, of course I mean, A Blogger who gets Free Stuff.

Like I said last week, I was just plugging away, writing my little heart out about why we should all eat more green vegetables (or whatever) and one day I got an email inviting me to an event as a Blogger.

It was from Mimi San Pedro representing P. Allen Smith. I immediately sent it to my friend Sarabeth with a big IS THIS IMPORTANT? in the subject line and she told me she was not sure but that I should just go. Soon, Jerusalem and I realized we were both invited and we heaved big sighs of relief and made plans to go along together to Moss Mountain Farm.

This next part is important, y’all:

I had absolutely no idea what I was going to.

Seriously.

I had never been invited to an event as a blogger before and I did not have any clue that bloggers were sometimes Given Nice Things For Free.

I need you to know that it was by ignorance, friends, and not audacity that I found myself at the gorgeous magazine spread that is P. Allen Smith’s house armed with nothing but a point and shoot camera and a flip phone. 

Gals, I did not even have a Smart phone. It was 2012, but I was resisting. What can I say? However, I was nothing if not resourceful. I joined in with everyone else on Twitter because I had learned to tweet via text message on my Razor.

I’ll pause for you to Be Very Impressed.

I loved every minute of my time at Moss Mountain Farm, and not just because it was a blogging event. That place is amazing. The food, the décor, the chickens! P. Allen Smith gave us a personal tour and I could have listened to him talk all day long. He told stories while Mimi kept us on schedule with her clipboard.

At one point, we were interviewed by cameramen while we had drinks on the lawn with live music. I was star struck. Jerusalem and I both felt like we had hit the jackpot.

On the way home, with my goodie bag full of loot in my lap, I decided that I was now a blogging star. Jerusalem told me she would lend me some pictures so that I could properly write up my day.

I could not wait to get started on my post about Moss Mountain Farm, alternately titled: Look What I Got To Do Because I Am Such A Fabulous Blogger.

Upon writing it, I decided I had officially moved into a new phase of blogging.

Stage 4: Mesmerized By Free Stuff

I blogged about all the parts of going to P. Allen Smith’s house that I enjoyed, which was, of course, EVERYTHING.

Then my brain quickly moved on to this brilliant line of thought:

If someone gave me a candle and some boots because I am a blogger, I bet I can get some more stuff because I have a blog. Wait a minute! I have already blogged about my favorite sunscreen. I should get that sunscreen for free!

Dear Sunscreen Company,

I am a blogger and I love your sunscreen. I will blog about it some more if you send it to me for free. Here is my address.

Signed,

A Very Important Blogger

I wish that I could tell you that I did not send about eleventy million emails that looked almost exactly like this. If you went through the Sent Messages folder in my inbox from the last two or three years, I can tell you exactly what you would say,

Bless her heart.

I did get a few free things this way, which just added fuel to the fire of my ludicrously bad pitching habits.

It was around this time that I joined Arkansas Women Bloggers. And I went to a conference where I got More Free Stuff, also sometimes called Swag.

I embraced the writing about free stuff with abandon, partly because I am just a writer. Give me something to write about and I will go for it.

Tea?

Candles?

Boots?

Bacon?

Bring it on, y’all!

After about a year I started to wonder if instead of just Free Stuff, I could actually get something even more valuable for blogging.

Like actual money.

Hot diggity. I’m all out of time for this week folks, but come back again next time to learn how to Become Rich And Famous* Like Me.

*Disclaimer: Rich and Famous might be a slight exaggeration.

Go on and tell me. What’s the best FREE thing you ever got for blogging? You’re among friends here. Brag away.

Hi y’all! My name is Alison, but that’s not really important. If this post is not interesting, you will have forgotten my name and everything else about me before you get to the end. So let’s just cut to the ending, shall we?

I am hoping that by the end of our time together you will have learned something new about blogging.

Because really, is that not why you joined ARWB in the first place? I am not ashamed to say that I joined up to learn from other bloggers, even if it was just by watching all of your blogs to see what new blogging trends you were up to. Also, let’s be honest. I wondered if I would get a few hits from adding my name to the directory, because when I joined ARWB in the summer of 2012, I was all about Self Promotion. 

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I did not start blogging to promote myself. Self Promotion was just a stage.

If you have blogged for any length of time, you can probably mark your blog with stages. I know that everyone’s stages are not the same but I thought it would be fun to tell you the story of my blog in stages and see if you recognize some of the same phases in your own blogging.

I get to hang out here all month so I am going to take my time and have some fun with telling the story of my blog. If I do not manage to teach you anything, at least we will have a laugh or two along the way at my expense. Let me say up front that in taking a mocking tone about my own blogging journey, I do not mean to offend or poke fun at anyone’s blog but my own. I actually think that all the different and crazy things I have tried in blogging have served me in the long run. I have learned by experimenting, so no post has been wasted. Well, maybe just that one about yoga.

Also, let it be known that I do not in any way purpose to set myself up as some sort of expert blogger. As you will see over the next few weeks, my road through the internet has been (and continues to be) very experimental. 

But I believe that starting a personal weblog is an experiment worth doing, so let’s begin at the beginning.

My blog, like many others, began as an online journal in 2007.

I have filled notebooks with my melodramatic musings since I was an angst-filled child of 11, so my friend Jerusalem assured me that I could start a blog.

One winter’s night I stared into the screen at WordPress.com and followed the prompts until it came into existence.

My blog.

I called it Chino House, because Chino is my last name and I was going to record what happened in my house. I am creative like that.

Stage 1: i am too cool for punctuation

Hello stream-of consciousness-nonsense with which I bored my 8 readers.

Hello lack-of-grammar-punctuation-or-editing.

Hello all-text-and-no-photos.

Hello girl-without-a-filter.

Hello ranting-that-would-better-be-kept-to-myself (now deleted).

Let me just say that I loved this stage of blogging. As a stay-at-home-mom, I felt like I had been given a lifeline to the world, and I wrote my little heart out. I exploded with joy when someone commented back, Girl I feel you! or Hang in there! or my very favorite comment, This really touched me!

However, after I had a few more readers, I decided that some ranting should be reserved for drinks with the girls and long weepy emails to my friends. (Hello Sarabeth & Whitney.)

Then I moved to on to Stage 2.

Stage 2: I Have A Cute Toddler

This stage of blogging could also be filed under, I Lost My Mind and Starting Homeschooling or Mommyblogger Wannabe.

During this phase of blogging I tried on all the possible genres of mommybloggers.

I wanted to be funny, but not too crass. Positive, but raw and authentic. I wanted to be a photographer and a maker of graphics. A reviewer of books. Informative and inspiring.

Dear Lord, I am tired just from reading all those descriptions.

It was like the adolescent stage of blogging.

Who am I?

At some point during this phase I decided to post my very first recipe.

Yes! Now I was also a Food Blogger!

Wearing all these hats was a lot of fun, but when my daughter’s birthday or Father’s Day rolled around again and I typed the exact same words as the year before, I started to get bored. I wanted more meaning. I wanted to dig deeper.

So I moved on to being a more serious blogger. And by serious, I mean I took myself too seriously.

Stage 3: Existential Blogging Experiments

NaNoBloMo, Blogging every day for the month of August, or Blogging For Lent.

I sporadically played with schedules. And by sporadically, I mean that I kept a schedule for about two weeks before trying a new one.

A recipe a week?

How about a book review a week?

Oh wait a minute, will that mean I have to read a book every week?

Wordless Wednesday, Fashion Friday, Thoughtless Thursday. (I just made that last one up.)

Link Ups!

Honestly, I re-discovered through blogging how much I really love writing and so I invented all sorts of ways to keep doing it. Often they were utterly meaningless and complete rubbish. But somehow I felt the point was to just keep plugging away.

I would read websites like ProBlogger or CopyBlogger now and then and I realized that there were people out there who were professionally blogging. I figured I had just not yet been discovered. Sooner or later, whoever found The Pioneer Woman would come knocking on my door and give me a prize for making granola and raising children at the same time.

You clever girl, you.

I did not understand that most of the opportunities for professional blogging were actually sought after by bloggers. Sure there are some writers who are discovered through blogging. But they are more often the exception than the rule and even they will tell you that staying in the pro-blog world has involved lots of asks. Or pitches. But I am getting ahead of myself. In Stage 3, I would never have known to use the word pitch. I was still waiting for Oprah to call.

And one day I did receive a call, but you will have to wait until next time for me to tell you who it was.

I know you are riveted.

Tune in next week for Stage 4, in which I become Mesmerized By Free Stuff For Blogging.

PS. I would love for you to share in the comments about your own early stages of blogging! When and why did you start blogging?