Celebrating My 4 Year Blogiversary! with Q+A

Today, September 9th, 2019 is my 4 year blogiversary! To celebrate all that has happened in these four years of blogging, I will share some of this blog’s origin story, the obstacles I had to overcome in pursuing this dream, some of the major wins, connections I made along the way, and where I see this blog heading next. I tweeted asking if anyone had any questions about my blog and journey that they’d like answered, so you will see those throughout this post. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions! And thank you to everyone who has read my posts or shown support! It means SO much to me!

Andy of the YouTube channel, Andy’s Diary, asks…

What initially inspired you to start your blog? 

I wanted to start a blog for quite awhile but, at the time, I was busy with school and also doubted if anyone would be interested in what I had to say. My senior year of college I took a Writing for Publication course. My professor told me before the end of the previous semester that one of the requirements for the class would be to start a blog. Seeing this as an opportunity to finally accomplish this dream (and because I am incapable of half-hearting anything), I jumped in researching everything I possibly could about starting a blog over the summer before the class would start (nerd alert, am I right?). I spent countless hours reading articles and brainstorming my niche, target audience, topics to write about, and what my brand design would be.

This blog was called Annamotion—a play on words with my name, animation, and motion because a driving force behind my blog was that “there is no standstill in life; either you’re moving forward or moving back. I want to always be moving forward. And I want to help you move forward in your own journey of growth.”

My biggest motivation has always been to help people. At the time I was studying Counseling in school and realizing my own strengths in writing. I’m a much better writer than public speaker, so having a blog would allow me to play to my strengths and (hopefully) help a lot of people in their journeys of personal growth.

 

And what has continually inspired you to carry on?

This same drive is what keeps me motivated today: I want to help people learn more about who they are so that they 1. can realize the STRENGTHS they have and learn to love who they are, and 2. stop meeting so much resistance in trying to reach their goals. I believe a growing understanding of self is the key to personal growth and goal success.

As far as inspiration goes, I wrote a post in December about 25 Dream Chasers Who’ve Inspired Me. I’m also constantly inspired by the authors, researchers, bloggers, YouTubers, coaches, speakers, and creative weirdos who are trying to improve the lives of others.

And finally, the messages I’ve received from readers inspires me to carry on. Each person whose said they benefitted from something I wrote or did is HUGE motivation for me to keep going!

 

Alex Ryan, writer and musician, asks…

How did you find your niche?

Though I had played with the ideas of writing about creativity and some of my other passions (art, writing, music), the personal growth niche always won out for me because one of the deepest desires of my heart has always been for improvement and helping other people to grow and reach their full potential. I also had tried out that brain dumping activity where you write down all the broad topics you want to write about, draw branches out to break it up into more topics, and jot down as many blog post ideas as you can for it. I found that there was a LOT more I was interested in writing about for the personal growth niche than any other niche.

The harder part for me was figuring out how to narrow down that niche, how to use more than one of my creative interests (not that I had to use ALL of them for this, but I wanted to merge at least a couple of my passions and skills. It’s important to me as a multipotentialite.), and who I could best serve (my “target audience”).

I started off with a broader focus as I was first figuring out blogging, allowing myself to experiment a bit to find out what I enjoyed writing about the most because you only like something in theory until you actually TRY IT.

I realized I loved writing about the life lessons we can learn from movies and tv shows. It was a great starting place for having common ground with my readers. Also, stories are so much more powerful for showing a lesson rather than just telling. So I turned it into an ongoing series.

My advice for new bloggers is: experiment in the beginning. Find out what you most enjoy writing about—something sustainable that you’ll enjoy for many years to come. However, you need to eventually find your niche. People will never know what to expect from you if you’re writing about topics varying from self care to crochet to synchronized swimming.

Whenever someone says they’re a “lifestyle” blogger, I roll my eyes because many of them really just mean “I’m putting my private diary online.” I also rarely follow someone who says they’re a “nicheless blogger” or “I have a little something for everyone” because that really means you have very little for anyone. People think blogging “for everyone” means they’ll reach more people, but the opposite is true. Narrowing in on your target audience and niche will make people become loyal super fans who will say “it felt like you wrote this just for ME!” And having that deep connection with a few is better than having a ton of people only kinda-sorta like your content.

Now, an exception to this is if you’re really just blogging for you and you alone. Then do whatever you want! Write whatever makes you happy. BUT, if instead you’re actually wanting people to read it and love it and stick around, you need to stop focusing so much on yourself and find the sweet spot between YOUR wants and what your TARGET AUDIENCE wants. I’m tired of bloggers getting upset about not getting enough readers when their blog posts are all about them and don’t have any kind of point that’s helpful or matters to anyone else. Their posts are just rambling diary entries.

So figure out your priorities: am I writing for me alone or am I writing for others? What is the purpose of my blog? What am I hoping to accomplish? Is it just so I can express my thoughts, to work on this discipline of writing often to better my skills, or am I hoping to contribute to the world in some way—through education, laughter, creativity, inspiration, or helping people feel less alone? What topics am I most passionate about and could consistently be excited to write about? What do I value most?

Figure out the answer to these questions and you will find your purpose and your niche.

Also just wanted to note that you don’t have to be trapped there. Though you don’t want to totally throw off your readers by making too big of changes or pivoting too frequently (you’ll lose quite a few followers this way), you can make shifts as you discover more about yourself and enter different seasons of life. We change; therefore, our blogs may change.

 

Mel of Your Travel Handbook asks…

How has your blog changed over the last 4 years?

Let’s take a little trip down Memory Lane, shall we? Just hop on into the TARDIS with me and we’ll travel back in time to 2015. Let’s start with a progression of profile pictures, logos, and blog post image styles. Then we’ll move on to other aspects of my blog that have changed.

The picture on the left was my very first business profile picture! I took it with my own dslr camera while I was interning in Rhode Island for the summer. The middle picture was professionally taken for my updated photos when I relaunched my blog in 2017. And the one on the right is my current profile pic I took with my phone (since I needed to finally show off my new hair!…or, should I say, lack of hair?) until I can get some new professional photos taken. This lineup makes me giggle because in each picture my mouth closes more and more. My hair has also changed quite a lot!

Now let’s move on to see my very first blog header and logo…

I designed it myself. I drew the tree in Photoshop and added this, uh, font. Then I found a free stock photo of wood and edited it to turn it to the right gray tone I wanted. I very heavily leaned into this tree (symbolizing growth) theme, and I ended up using similar inspiration for the logo you see at the top of my website now. My blog quickly outgrew the quality of art I felt I could design myself, so for my relaunch I hired an artist to design my current logo, based off of my concept drawings and adding my own handwriting for the “AR.”

I also hired someone to help me choose my exact colors and fonts for my rebrand. Because, “funny” story, last time I tried to choose colors I was using a laptop that didn’t show the colors exactly, so I designed so much in this icky shade of purple you see in the tree logo. By the time I realized it by viewing it from a different computer I was like “ugh…oh well, it’ll be fine…” but I really grew to hate it and couldn’t wait for my rebrand to choose a better hue of purple. I was so afraid of accidentally screwing it up again that I decided to hire a professional.

With the exception of making the Movement Myths series images in Photoshop (SUPER CRINGE, I won’t even show you! You’ll have to go looking for it yourself if you’re that curious.), I started off taking my own pictures and using free stock photos interchangeably and then adding text in Canva. I remember using the “Permanent Marker” font and some other font I don’t remember the name of for a long time to be my consistent look. Thank goodness that period has passed. I tried my best, guys! You have to start somewhere and it’s a learning process.

Then with the relaunch of my blog in September 2017 I finally got all fancy by buying stock photos from 123rf. Here’s an example of my new fonts after the rebrand and new image style. I wasted so many hours trying to find pictures with a pink or purple element in them for all my posts but couldn’t always find images on 123rf that worked with what I wanted. And that’s even with their handy dandy color search!

Then…*drumroll*…I decided to be brave and try something out this summer that I had been wanting to do for awhile…I started drawing my own images! I’m still playing around with the style. Sketchy/doodley vs clean lines. In the Geek’s Guide to Life series I had fun going completely cartoony by drawing a chibi version of myself and the guest posters. I haven’t decided for sure if I’ll continue this for my blog post images, but I’m having a lot of fun and it gives me a good excuse to keep practicing my art so I can make better images in the future. And it gives me another fun creative outlet. Here are a couple examples of what I’ve created so far.

I already covered how my niche changed in the previous question, so let’s talk about how my target audience changed. I think I started off filling out a detailed profile for the person I wanted to keep in mind while writing. She was something like a 20 year old INFJ creative nerd who loved learning.

I know I definitely targeted female introverts in the beginning, which is very laughable to me now considering how I’m not a super girly girl and I’ve always clicked better with guys than girls. Heck, notice how 2/3 of these questions here were asked by guys? I would’ve missed out on so many friendships and neat collaboration opportunities if I had continued targeting only women. And this super feminine persona who focused on helping women just wasn’t me.

The problem was I tried to lean into only one major aspect of who I am—my gentle, kind spirit—rather than the whole package because I thought I had to. I thought, “Who would be encouraged by and want to listen about personal growth from a gothy nerd with a dorky and dark sense of humor?” You could say my blog shifted as I began to realize the ways I could more fully embrace who I am and USE that to help people in an even more powerful way.

Once I shifted to targeting both women and men, I found my people (mostly creatives and geeks) and started seeing a lot more growth.

Each year I’m finding my voice a little more. I’m excited as I keep getting closer and closer to a niche, target audience, and voice that feels more RIGHT to who I am and who I can best serve.

 

Hilson Wan of the YouTube channel, Emiya Shirou, asks…

What are some challenges you faced?

One challenge I had to face was what you go through with any new adventure: the learning curve. There’s more that goes into blogging than you’d think. It’s not just about writing but also branding, marketing, graphic design, website maintenance, and so much more. Click here to read my blog post from my 1 year blogiversary where I share some of the lessons I learned.

The biggest challenge I had to face was my own insecurities and doubts. Anytime you try something new and put yourself out there, you’ll often meet resistance within your own brain. Taking a step into the unknown is scary because it’s something you’ve never done before. You don’t know what to expect. Will you sink or swim? The best way to get over your fears is to jump in and DO IT.

You sometimes see those crazy success stories where someone launches a blog and it gets thousands of views in the first week, but that is not the norm. I remember being told from several trusted sources that it usually takes a good 3-4 years for a blog or business to gain traction and start to grow more exponentially. And now I can speak from experience that it’s true!

Those first first few years were rough. Sure, I got views and had some great responses and accomplishments, but it’s such a discouraging feeling when you release a blog post and it’s met with nothing but crickets. You may get some views, but no one is commenting or giving you feedback so you have no idea if people are liking your post and just not saying anything or not.

But by the time I hit that 3rd year, everything changed. Some of my posts made it to the first page of Google and each month the amount of views coming from Google kept doubling until it became a significant amount! One of my posts started getting a ton of shares on Facebook. And I had grown a bigger and loyal following on Twitter. All of this together created some massive growth in year 3-4. In August I DOUBLED the amount of views I had in all of 2018! And I’m finally getting more feedback on my posts and about my work.

I am so thankful for everyone who has encouraged me! It really helps me to keep going. But I had to make it through a few years of working hard with not much to show for my efforts to get to this point. So if you’re a blogger or starting a business or working towards some kind of big goal, my encouragement to you is this: keep working hard. Put in the effort even if it looks like nothing is coming from it. It takes time.

 

And what were some of the best moments?

I had a big epic month-long relaunch party in September 2017 when I switched over from Annamotion to this new name and website. It took me so many months of planning, writing blog posts for the first series to kick off my new site, creating my first eBook, and working on writing and art commissions, as well as offering VA services to save up money for my rebrand and all the awesome relaunch party giveaway and contest prizes. It was super stressful but oh so fun! And it paid off to get attention to my new site.

Some of the best moments for me was meeting all kinds of awesome people from around the world, as well as receiving so much encouragement and support (especially over this past year). I have an album on my phone where I store screenshots of kind messages from people that encouraged me. I like to remember those who made a positive difference in my life. Plus, the album is a great resource to go to whenever I’m starting to doubt myself again or feeling discouraged.

Another cool moment I should mention is when I launched my YouTube channel in November 2018. I tweeted about how I wanted to start one for awhile but fear was getting in my way. The response was incredible! So many people commented with advice and encouragement! It was just what I needed to convince me to go ahead and give it a try. I’m so glad I did! Though I still have a lot to learn, it’s been a fun adventure experimenting with YouTube. Another cool thing I didn’t expect: my video where I shaved my head got over 18,000 views! It gave a good boost to the views of my other videos and subscriber count too. Not sure how I’ll top that, but here’s to trying!

 

Hilson and Alex both asked about the connections I’ve made…

Tell us about the connections you’ve made. How have you found engaging with other creators? Have you done any collaborations? Do you find mutual support?

I’ve made a ton of awesome connections through this blogging journey! It’s been super fun getting to know so many talented and lovely people from all around the world and even being able to collaborate with some of them! I’ve guest posted on quite a few different sites over the years, contributed quotes for others’ posts, co-hosted a creative Instagram challenge my first year, teamed up with several groups to provide giveaways, invited to be a panelist for a Twitter chat, supported other small business owners, received discounts to provide giveaways and promote products I loved, and more!

I’ve also had quite a few people guest post on my website. I am so thankful for each and every one of them for taking the time to share their insights with my readers.

Ever since I started giving more focus to Twitter and engaging more personally with those I met, I started making connections and even became really good friends with some of them! I also started an accountability group with a few content creators who had a similar drive as me. It’s benefitted me greatly to finally have people I can talk to about blogging (I did so much alone for the first few years and it got pretty lonely), give feedback to each other, motivate and encourage each other to keep going, hold each other accountable, and give support. I’m so thankful for my group, as well as other content creators I’ve connected with.

I also just recently teamed up with a business whose mission I really resonated with and I fell in love with their product. They sent me one free to review, and I am so excited to share it with you soon! You’ll see a YouTube video about it this month!

 

Ivan of IvanSiladji.com asks…

Do you have monthly, yearly, long term blogging goals?

I’ve changed it up a bit each year as I’ve learned what works best for me. I sit down and think big picture about what I want to accomplish in a year, then I break it up into strict goals and looser aims. I’ll set monthly goals to help me accomplish the bigger picture goal. Then I plan everything else around that accordingly.

This year I tried out setting only project and time based goals rather than numbers goals. For example, I didn’t set a goal for reaching a certain number of Twitter followers but rather I set a goal for how much time I wanted to spend on engaging with people each week. And instead of setting a blog views goal, I set a goal for how much time I wanted to spend on marketing my content each week. This also shifted my focus to what I CAN control (myself and my time) rather than other people that I have no real control over.

You need to find what works best for you. Perhaps for you, you need to set numbers goals because it’s what motivates you to spend the time on marketing, etc. But for this season of life I was in, I found myself caring TOO much about numbers and it was stressing me out—causing more harm than good. So this slight shift in focus has been helpful for me right now, and my blog has only continued to grow since trying that.

 

How do you feel about the numbers?

As I said, I used to focus way too much on my numbers. I would obsessively check my views and stress over losing followers. Now I feel more at peace about whatever happens. Having less views than the month before is a helpful indication to change things up in the next month, but it doesn’t stress me out so much anymore because I’ve accomplished the goals I had to create a certain amount of content (often even more than my goal).

With that said, it’s also been exciting to see so much growth this year! I remember hardly getting any blog views when I first started and rarely anyone interacted with me on Twitter. Now I’m surprised and super happy by my blog views and have lovely conversations with people on Twitter pretty much every day.

It’s ok to set numbers goals BUT don’t let the numbers discourage you. It takes time to build. AND remember that each follower or view is A PERSON—a lovely individual with their own unique backstory that decided to click on your blog or follow you. Each one matters.

Also remember that just because people aren’t commenting on your post doesn’t mean they didn’t like it or weren’t positively impacted by it. It’s a high percentage of people that read blog posts and love them but just don’t even think to comment. I never commented on blogs until I became a blogger myself, and I remember there were articles I read that literally had me in tears and changed my life. So you may be making a difference and not even knowing it.

 

Justine Laismith, Children’s Author, asks…

If you go back to the beginning, what would you do differently?

If I had start from the beginning and do it all over again after knowing what I know now, I would…

Focus on one social media platform at a time. I spread myself too thin trying to maintain ALL the platforms well. I would have a presence on all of them but give almost all of my attention to one until I mastered it, and THEN take on another.

Engage with people more from the start and be more of myself. When I first started out on Twitter I thought I had to be super professional. No wonder I hated Twitter back then because that strategy was clearly not working. Once I started initiating conversation with people more by commenting on their tweets, showing more support, giving advice and encouragement, and tweeting tweets that informally showed more of my personality, that’s when I started suddenly getting a lot more followers and building deeper connections.

I would’ve reached out to people sooner. I made some acquaintances and even did some collaborations, but I never really had any blogger FRIENDS until like just a year or so ago after I started interacting with people more and taking that brave step in sending them a direct message. My first few years of blogging were incredibly lonely, and I am so thankful for the good blogging buddies I have now. If I could do it all again, I would’ve reached out to people much sooner so I could’ve potentially made some blogging friends much sooner and not feel as alone as I did.

Those are the major things I can think of that I would do differently. Most everything else ended up being a happy accident that taught me valuable lessons to get me to where I am now.

 

What’s to come?

• I’m still making some tweaks to my specific niche and target audience. Don’t worry, my mission will still be to help people understand more about themselves and how to apply that knowledge for personal growth and goal success (“know yourself, grow yourself”). There will just be some more focus behind how I go about that.
• More guest posts! I want to start submitting my work to larger sites.
• More collaborations! I love collaborating. I have my content and goals planned out pretty far in advance, but if you think we’d be a good match for some kind of collaboration, feel free to chat with me by emailing me at anna@thereelanna.com or DM me on Twitter (@thereelanna). Or if you’re interested in guest posting on my site, check out this page.
• I’ve been working on a secret project for quite some time now. I’m hoping to launch it before the end of the year, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m super excited and I can’t wait until I can finally announce it to you guys!
• More E.P.I.C. Stories! I’ve started my E.P.I.C. (Everyday People Inspiring Change) Stories back up, where I interview people whose story I think will encourage and inspire you in your journey of personal growth. Right now my plan is to have one per season. If you have someone in mind that you’d like to see featured, email me at anna@thereelanna.com
• Continuing to write beneficial content that will help you in your journey of growth!

 

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Thank You!

Thank you to those who’ve supported me already by contributing financially, reading my content, sharing my posts and videos, commenting, and sending me encouragement! Every dollar and every share really does help so much! And your encouragement means the world to me! Thank you for being a part of this with me!