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It seems to me like blogging has gotten harder and harder these days. The addition of a second kid into our family has taken some getting used to. I used to have a good 4 hours a day to do design work and blog and now I'm lucky if I get 2. To be honest, there is just no feasible way I can get it all done.
I also feel like blogging takes a much bigger time commitment than it used to. I remember a couple of years ago I would spend an average of 1 hour on a post. I'd find a cute interior I liked, post the picture, talk about what I liked about it and boom, 20 comments. But now Pinterest has changed everything. You can't get away with just posting pretty pictures. Pinterest is giving us pretty images in a much more convenient way. So it comes down to creating amazing original content, which takes time. For me to come up with a really great post it takes me well over 2 hours. And considering I have about 2 hours in my day to get my blog posts done and work on design work you can see that it's just not adding up. Not only that but I have mountains of unread emails in my inbox each day.
I am drowning in stress right now.
So here is what I plan to do about it...
First of all, if I'm going to sacrifice anything it's not going to be my kids so I need to make whatever I do work around them. So something has to give and I've decided I can't be wearing the blogging hat and the designer hat anymore. For an indefinite amount of time I will not be taking new design clients. I will keep the clients I currently have and occasionally in special circumstances I might take on more but I can't do e-design, take new local clients or do consults at the moment. I truly truly truly love blogging and I want to focus more of my efforts and time on my blog. I want to spend more time coming up with great content for my readers. Blogging has never been very stressful for me. I actually find it somewhat therapeutic. I also love that it seldom takes me away from my home.
The other thing I'm going to be doing to lighten some of my load is to introduce contributors to the blog. I have hand-picked each contributor because I feel their content and voice are a good match with mine. Of course the majority of blog posts will still be my own but this will give me a chance to make my own posts better. I'll slowly be introducing my contributors over the course of this month. Please give them lots and lots of love. They are offering up their own ideas and talents for my readers and I am so grateful.
Lastly I'm going to try really hard this year to monetize my blog better. I make very little from my blog currently. All the money that I get to do projects in my home has come from doing design work. So to make the jump from designer to solely blogger is a little scary. I have a few plans in the works to monetize my blog better and I'll be sharing them with you as I implement them.
I am so grateful to each and every person who takes time out of their day to read my blog. Hopefully some exciting things are to come!
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