Happy First Birthday HUM!

To celebrate our 1 year blogiversary, we thought it would be fun to share the biggest lessons we learned during the first year of blogging, as well as give some tips and advice for other bloggers!

Lesson #1: Blogging is not 100% of your content creation

In our short experience, blogging has been only about 20% about content creation. The other 80% of the time is spent promoting, networking, marketing, and figuring out tech stuff (there’s A LOT). This is probably the biggest lesson we’ve learned since launching HOW U MOMMIN a year ago. Obviously, we knew there was behind the scenes tech stuff involved, but we thought most of my time would be spent coming up with new post ideas and doing actual projects for blog posts….NOPE! We spent hours trying to make sure everything was properly working behind the scenes. We still don’t have it all down, but it’s getting there.

Lesson #2: Get a Pinterest strategy

This is a lesson that we still haven’t learned! LOL! When we first started the HOW U MOMMIN blog, we figured it was good enough to pin a few images here and there on Pinterest and hope that people would repin them. Big mistake! Because, pinning and hoping isn’t a very good strategy. Shit, it’s not a strategy at all! So, let’s just say that this will be a goal for the second year blogiversary. We’ll keep you posted.

Lesson #3: You can earn money WITHOUT huge numbers or site traffic.

A lot of bloggers talk about how it can take a few years to get big enough to work with brands and earn affiliate sales. While that may be true for some, it wasn’t the case for us. We’ve been able to land quite a few big partnerships, both paid partnerships (the clear favorite) and product exchange with affiliate links, for first year bloggers. We believe the key to our success has been a combination of a few things:

1) Having a professional looking theme. There are great options that are user friendly for newbies.

2) Posting good content that is relatable and easy to read.

3) Learning how to effectively pitch our blog to brands.

Lesson #4: Social media is a full time job!

Oh social media…It’s safe to say everyone has a love/hate relationship with it these days. The pandemic has made it more of a thing to do which is how we got started and pulled the trigger on starting HOW U MOMMIN. Once you start blogging and using your social media for business, it turns into a whole other thing. After obsessing over having the perfect Instagram feed or what you think is perfect and spending wayyyy too much time liking/commenting on all the hashtags to try to grow follower numbers – you get BURNT OUT quickly. It took some time to realize it, but you have to set some boundaries when it comes to social media.

Lesson #5: Some People Won’t Get It

Ever heard the saying “you are not for everybody?” Well, that’s blogging in a nutshell. It isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t really get how blogging works. And why would they? Unless they have a blog (or have in the past), they’re probably not going to be able to chit chat about the day-to-day aspects of blogging. Guess what? That’s ok! Because there’s a whole blogging community out there just waiting to connect! We have met so many amazing bloggers and have made genuine connections. Some are newbies like us and we’ve been growing and learning together, while others have been blogging for years and are quick to offer help (such a blessing). Finding others to connect with in the blogging/social media world has been such an amazing thing!

Lesson #6: Just finishing is how you start

This lesson was a hard one for us. When we first started, we were SO worried about having the website perfect! The perfect “About” page, the perfect layout, the perfect photographs, the perfect brand colors! Goodness! We were quickly (maybe not so quick) reminded that perfection doesn’t exist and that there will always be room for improvement. All of this is perfectly ok! Focusing on writing content that helps others and putting it out in the world (imperfections and all) is so much more important.

~ Momager & Fit Mom