5 things I Learned My First Year as a Blogger

It’s been a hell of a year. 

I started building this blog in late June of 2019, and launched on July 11th, 2019.

I put in countless hours on web design, learned how to make my own t-shirts, bought tripods and bluetooth camera remotes to take pictures, spent days planning a promo shoot only to have it not be as perfect as I would have liked, spent a bunch money, and wrote wrote and wrote some more. 

And I wouldn’t change it for anything. 

Over the past year, I’ve not only learned a lot about being a blogger and having a brand, but also learned a lot about myself. 

So here are 5 things I’ve learned my first year as a blogger:

1. You have to be patient

I have a tendency, like many young people, to want things to happen instantaneously. Like I wanted to go to sleep on July 11th, and wake up on July 12th and have 30 thousand site views and just be an overnight sensation.

But it’s not like that. It’s never like that, unless you already have a huge following and lots of supporters.

This is where I went wrong in my blog in 2018, and I was very surprised to still have those feelings of despair when after the initial hype of my launch, my numbers started going down. 

But, I’ve realized that one, you have to put in the work. And two, you can’t get so caught up in the numbers that you lose sight of the  reason why you started. 

2. Everyone struggles with consistency

Like I said earlier, after the initial hype of the blog died down, and the numbers went down, so did my motivation and consistency with my posts. 

Life got busy, and while I tried to set aside time to work on my website, SEO, and content, I just didn’t feel motivated and inspired. I spent more time creating instagram content than content for my blog–even though they should’ve been equal. 

But, a lot of people actually have problems feeling inspired and being active on their platforms. If you actually looked up how many people have posts about lacking motivation and how to get yourself back in the groove of things, its way more common than not. 

The only way that has helped me figure this out, is to just remember what type of impact I want to make, and challenge myself to create, even when I don’t want to create. 

3. I am a very indecisive person

Baby, if you knew how many times I have rebranded my Instagram you would probably think something is wrong with me.

I always have a problem with my feed or with my highlight covers, or my profile picture and its honestly annoying, but something I just can’t bring myself to stop doing. 

As soon as 2 a.m. hits, boom, now I want to delete pictures and start reposting with a different theme or a different look, like Kennedy please SIT DOWN.

I haven’t exactly figured out how to help myself with this yet, but when I figure it out, I’ll share the secret. 

4. BE YOURSELF

Okay, so this one really hit me over the past year. 

I feel like as a society we have a tendency to copy others, and while that works for a lot of people, it doesn’t really help others because it makes it seem like there’s one way to do everything. 

When I first started looking into starting a fashion blog I definitely looked at other plus size blogs and instagram pages. For research purposes of course, and to see what others in the space were doing, what topics they were talking about, what their audiences cared about. 

But I also noticed that a lot of blogs were similar. The person might be different, and the name, but there were lots of similarities in the styling, in the voice used, and the web design, and I just thought that was really interesting. And these were some of my favorite bloggers and influencers who had these similarities. 

So when I started BGBW, I really just wanted to create something different, and my own, that didn’t fit into any one category or theme. 

And over the past year, I think thats something started to figure out  how to do, and still trying to bring to my platform, because I’m always left wanting more, and I wanted to be the more that I was looking for. 

5. Don’t give up.

I can’t stress this enough.

There have been days when I was so proud of myself and felt so good about BGBW and all that I’ve been able to accomplish with this blog. 

There have also been days where I really felt like nothing was going right, that I shouldn’t be a blogger because I can’t do something as simple as being consistent and scheduling time for my brand in my life. 

But as you can see, I’m still fighting. I’m still working. I’m still using my voice to be what I needed when I was growing up and not feeling accepted, loved, or heard. 

It would be too easy to just give up and say “yeah I used to have a blog” instead of “I have a blog that actually helps people.” 

I’ve thought it through, weighed all the pros and cons, and I can’t find a real reason why I should quit. So I can’t. I can’t give up because my platform could be something that saves someone’s life. It could inspire someone to start their journey towards self-love and self-acceptance. 

And this applies to not only this blog but everything. Don’t give up. If its not hard, its not worth it. Things that come easy to us, we don’t really appreciate them because how we got them didn’t require us to really do anything. 

Just. Don’t. Give. Up. 

Welcome to BGBW Year 2. Back and Better.