The Encouraging Blogger Award

I was nominated by Angela from Weird Louise for the Encouraging Blogger Award. Thanks a lot, girl! You can view her post here.

The Encouraging Blogger Award was created by Lisa from Fluxing Well. This award was created to recognize any blogger who encourages others with his or her posts. Bloggers may encourage others to travel, try new things, have a positive mindset, or overcome adversity, for example. An encouraging blog may encourage other bloggers or give business tips. Many blogs are encouraging and we don’t even realize it. Bloggers nominate fellow bloggers for this award, and nominees write a post answering a few questions. After that, the nominee nominates other bloggers.

 

Guidelines of the Encouraging Blogger Award

• Explain the Encouraging Blogger Award (You can quote Lisa’s first paragraph on her page about this award if you want to)
• Thank the blogger who nominated you and share a little about his or her blog
• Answer these five questions:
  • When and why did you start blogging?
  • What is your blog about?
  • What is one piece of advice you would give to encourage new bloggers?
  • Which is your favorite time-saving blogging tip or scheduling tool?
  • What are your future goals for your blog?
• Nominate up to 10 bloggers you think encourage others
• Direct the nominees to visit this page for instructions and information about the award.
• Once you have shared your Encouraging Blogger Award post, fill out this form to enter the contest (yeah, there’s a contest with a prize!).
• Deadline for submissions for consideration in the 2020 contest will be October 31, 2020.
  • If you miss the deadline, and still submit an entry form, you will be entered in the 2021 contest.

Who Nominated Me

Once again, the lovely gal who nominated me for this award is Angela, from the blog Weird Louise. She has a really neat blog where she gives you a lot of great vegan recipes, DIY crafting ideas, as well as motivation tips for getting up in the morning or working out! I really love visiting her blog, as she mixes up the topic frequently. I LOVE reading about food recipes too, and all the recipes she’s talked about thus far were all mouthwatering.

She’s a wonderful artist, a gamer, a cosplayer, a DIY crafter, cook, and so much more. She’s a great gal to get to know, and has been nothing but supportive to me since we met when I was blogging more actively. Angela has been my go-to person for when I also started my online sticker / art / stationery shop, Geraldine Draws. I couldn’t have done it without you girl, I’m super indebted to you and your wealth of knowledge! By the way, speaking of shop, she has an awesome online shop called Socially Awkward Club.

I’ve gotten cute stickers, a notebook and a shirt from there and they all were of really amazing quality. Shout out to all the introverts out there who would rather stay home!!!

 

1. When and Why Did You Start Blogging?

I started blogging in August 2018 after I finished my fourth year of college and graduated from Dental Hygiene school. In the beginning, I wanted to make this blog about sharing my dental hygiene school experience (since it was utter hell), but later I thought I’d want to start sharing my Bath & Body Works hauls and whatnot.

Later on, I figured that I’d just categorize myself as a “lifestyle blog” so that I can talk about anything I want, and not necessarily focus on one thing. I’m not really into beauty, I don’t travel a lot, I don’t have very good fashion sense, and I don’t buy a lot of stuff to be able to hone in on something specific, so that’s how I rationalized my blog.

Like I mentioned previously, I first wanted to only talk about dental hygiene, but it evolved into wanting to talk about various things that happen in my life. I also had the dream of being able to make money off of my blog and hopefully someday earning enough to make a living out of it. Sadly, I kind of fell away from the latter goal, but I haven’t cast it off entirely.

 

2. What Is Your Blog About?

Right now, I’d say the majority of my blog talks about just general lifestyle things – a public diary, so to speak! I’ve decided to go back to school to study Graphic Design / Illustration and have just completed my first year (3 more to go… ugh LOL). I talk occasionally about games and product reviews of either skincare products or some new tea. When my boyfriend Victor comes to visit (or vice versa), I talk more about traveling and new experiences.

I’ve been kind of on a writing hiatus since last November, but I’m hoping now that I’m done with school (and I’m still stuck at home), I’ll have more motivation to pick up my blog and continue writing about …. stuff.

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*Inserts a bunch of random photos from different posts*

 

3. What is one piece of advice you would give to encourage new bloggers?

This is probably one thing every other blogger will tell you and I TOO will join them in telling you: don’t compare yourself to other bloggers. It’s super easy to do that but they aren’t YOU and haven’t lived through what you lived through. They probably started at a different time, and even then, the date they started won’t matter either! Some people start off having a really successful blog and have a lot of engagement and views. Other blogs won’t be that successful and that’s okay!

Talk about what matters to you. It’s going to be a dang chore if you deviate and start talking about things you aren’t interested in. Blogging, in a sense, would feel like school, where you’re just writing some boring research paper!

That was two pieces of advice but I felt like they were connected so I take that as a loophole.

 

4. Which is your favorite time-saving blogging tip or scheduling tool?

Oh boy, I’m not the right person to ask about this! However, from what I see from other bloggers, is that writing posts ahead of time and scheduling them really helps. Using things like Hootsuite and Buffer can help too! I used to use Buffer a LOT for my blog and I’m looking to use it more often as soon as I can establish a posting schedule for myself.

Using a planner or calendar of some sort is always helpful too!

 

5. What are your future goals for your blog?

In the beginning, I had super ambitious goals to monetize my blog and blog constantly. I was posting articles twice a week back then which completely blows my mind right now! Realistically, I’d like to get back to having a normal blogging routine where I post once a week.

Another goal for my blog is to probably consolidate it a little more and narrow it to a fewer topics. I’ll be honest, I hate that I can’t find a niche I want to stick with, especially when I kind of don’t do anything (SMH). Instead of trying to go from 10 topics to 1, I’d like to slowly work my way down and probably first narrow it to 8, then maybe 6 and so forth. I think having such a broad scope can be nice sometimes, but also harmful in other ways.

 

Nominees

Sorry if you already got nominated, just ignore it then!

• Jackie from The Vibrant Dreamer
• Melissa from Castles and Hurricanes
• Jordan from My Flourishing Retrospect
• Daniella from Little Book Spy
• Julianne from Pints, Pounds & Pâté
• Nancy from Exquisitely Me
• Eena from Cabin Twenty-Four

 

Thanks for reading, until next time!

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