Blog Thoughts, Year One

via Tumblr

Now that I'm at my new apartment with considerably more space and natural light, I'm hoping to start taking more outfit photos and do more fashion reviews. (Bloggers' reviews of items I'm thinking of buying are always exceedingly helpful to me as a shopper.) Any photos I take will likely still be those headless mirror selfies I tend to do, though.

I'm almost a month shy of my one-year "blogiversary," and I'm having fun with tending this small creative outlet of mine. I'm so thrilled to have people reading along and engaging with me in the comments. Thank you so much to everyone who reads here!

I greatly enjoy having this space to talk freely about shopping, spending, and my forays into being a more conscious shopper and budget-conscious adult. The "aspiring minimalist" focus I started with has faded somewhat because I've internalized the things that are important to me about that lifestyle as best I can or am ready to (avoiding fast fashion when possible, doing my best to buy things with the intention of keeping them for a long time, etc.). 

You might have noticed that I've started using Shopstyle affiliate links despite being one of the many people who raise their eyebrows at some aspects of affiliate link usage. While I strongly dislike the Rewardstyle business model of giving a blogger a percentage of reader purchases at particular retailers (and for a several-weeks long period, at that), I don't mind Shopstyle's up to a few cents per click model. Also, full disclosure: there's no way my blog will ever be big enough or publish the right type of content frequently enough to even be accepted to Rewardstyle. I played around with where I put my "Disclosure" box in my sidebar: I actually think it is easiest to find and read at the bottom where it is now, rather than directly under my "About Me" box closer to the top, where it gets buried in the rest of the sidebar. 

I don't actually anticipate making income from this in the forseeable future, by the way: I've barely made 50 cents total since I started last week, and I don't think I post often enough or have appealing-enough photos for this to be a real thing. At the rate I'm going, it'll be a decade before I even have the $100 minimum required to cash out for the first time. I'll do my best to be detailed and specific about the items I wear or feature in a budget post, so that you can still find the items easily on your own without clicking, if you prefer. I strongly dislike when blogs try to "force" a reader to click through by being absurdly vague about where they bought what they're wearing and linking, and I will strive to not do that. With some items that I'm linking just to illustrate a point, however, I might not be quite as specific because I'm not specifically encouraging a purchase. If you're curious about how affiliate programs and other forms of income from blogging work, this GOMI thread was extremely informative. I've since stopped reading GOMI, but that thread remains an eye-opening favorite.

EDIT: There's now another GOMI thread that further breaks down some of the differences between the Rewardstyle and Shopstyle model.