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Blogging: A Technophobe’s Blogging Journey

I am a village girl.

Okay.

I am a third world technophobe village girl who doesn’t have any knowledge nor patience with the technical side of things.

I grew up playing mud and attending to my family’s household chores while trying to be on top of my class. What can you expect?

So why did I not just stick to my diaries and save myself from all the sleepless nights and countless hours of learning basic web designing, coding, graphic designing, social media strategies, endless writing, reading and editing and too much complaining?

Good question.

Because I quit my job to make finding myself my full time mission and now that I already found it, there is no turning back.

Self-education is the best form of education

There are so many times when I just wanted to hire a blogging coach or a web designer but I didn’t.

Not just because I am thinking about the money that I will save that I can just send it to my family back home but also because I didn’t want to save time by avoiding making mistakes.

I have grown so much in the past three years to know that failure is an essential part of the learning process.

Mistakes are needed to be made. This keeps me reflecting on what I did that didn’t work and what I can do to make it better.

I have discovered that I learn better by experiencing things instead of buying ready-made information just to feel the convenience.

I can’t rely on the instant-ness of everything when it comes to what I want to learn.

I might have mastered simplifying my life but when it comes to gaining knowledge, I am willing to take the longest route and choose the harder decisions because I know that wisdom is there.

So I rolled my sleeves up and dove into the ugly technical side of having a website.

I Google and Youtube everything.

I bought books and took time reading and mostly reading between the lines.

I learned to be extra careful to prevent my entire menu tab from disappearing again.

Eight months and a bucket of tears, blood and sweat later, I can sleep in peace with how my website looks like now.

Where is this going?

I grew up a brat and being patient isn’t always my best quality.

I can’t be the writer, the proofreader, the web designer, the graphic designer, the social media strategists, the PR Manager and the administrator all at the same time.

I can’t be all that when I need to make a living and send financial support back home.

I can’t be all that while trying to learn everything while doing them.

I can’t handle a serious relationship while at it.

I can’t finish writing my book.

I have so many “I can’t’s” and I honestly don’t know until when I can do this.

Little successes

On the fifth month, a company has offered sponsoring posts.

I nearly cried. Well, I might have cried but have forgotten about it. Maybe the hard-work and the sleepless nights are starting to pay off.

I felt like a wealthy relative from a far faraway land has died and left his fortune to me. I am that hopeless.

I was so happy to be making that kind progress even though my website still looked like a tornado paid a quick visit.

Somewhere between the conversation, I may have said something very amateur that made the officer say that they are an already established company and due to what I want to happen, they couldn’t proceed doing it.

How was I supposed to respond?

I never how to deal with offers like that.

I was just an employee who said yes to what my superiors told me to do and now everything is up to me?

It taught me one thing for sure, if one day I will be my kind of successful, I will never do that to anybody. I will never make someone feel that I am in a some kind of pedestal.

This made me step up and read more about working with brands while trying to grow my social media platforms, increase website page views and make sure to produce quality content. This made me more eager in equipping myself with information and professionalism only bosses have. I need to act like my own boss. I need to learn strategies.

One day I will tell you the painful steps I took to grow my Instagram to 10k in just 70 days which felt like forever.

One day I will also tell you how I grew my Pinterest views and followers in just three months.

On my seventh month, I received a deal to tour my city for free in exchange of writing about it. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

What have I gotten myself into?

On my sixth month, I started receiving books in exchange of an honest review.

My book addiction made me request for books non-stop.

I forgot that the more books I request, the more that I have to read.

It started to feel like a task.

Suddenly reading is not fun anymore. I feel overwhelmed all the time because at the back of my mind, I know that I should be reading to write reviews. Not just reviews but also for my book and blog. I am drowning with so much tasks.

I stopped requesting for books for the mean time.

Money and Blogging: Should I sell my soul?

Few days ago, I received my first free product as a Brand Ambassador but I am quite disappointed. I felt scammed. The product did not look like the ones they are offering on their website.

To my rage I sent the merchant a message that I want a refund only to be told that they can’t do a refund because the products were sent for free. This didn’t make me feel ashamed that I forgot that they sent the product for free. It didn’t also make me feel entitled in telling them directly how their products made me feel.

I sent my honest feedback about the whole experience.

I waited for their reaction but I was never worried that they would never want to work with me again.

They said they want to resend the products and I chose to give them a second chance because who doesn’t deserve second chances?

Who am I not to give the chance to redeem themselves and make it better? If they want me to become their lifetime partner, they would appreciate my honest feedback.

This made me think that they want my business and what I have said somehow brought them to their feet.

I have worked for customer service so I know. I am not just a brand ambassador. I am also a customer and a girl who appreciates nice things even if I have taken the minimalist road.

I received the reorder confirmation and they made me their VIP Brand Ambassador.

Instead of resending just one product, they sent three. I was not asking for more products.

I don’t want to promote products that I don’t believe in.

I don’t want my readers who will buy their products to think that I just did it for money.

I didn’t want my readers to experience what I did. Not just my readers but anybody who will buy their products.

Though this is not the first brand who approached, this is the first brand I said yes to. I firmly believe that minimalism that changed my life and talking about stuff I wouldn’t really buy for myself is just a pure waste of time.

Finding my why in blogging.

I owe sticking to blogging to all the self- improvement books that I have read.

I also would say that I am happy to have found a guy who understands my need to express myself and allows me to do what I need to do to grow as a person.

They helped me found myself, my purpose and stick to finding it during the times that I don’t see things clearly and just wanted to run away and start somewhere again.

Having a great support system makes a huge difference.

If money is the sole source of starting this journey, why did I even quit my stable job and the life that I thought that I wanted?

Blogging gives me enough motivation.

I always tell my boyfriend that even if things aren’t easy and I don’t get a lot of money in blogging, it makes me very happy when someone reaches out to tell me that they have read what I have written and was touched by it or learned something from it.

It makes me feel that somehow, I am paying forward.

Yesterday I got a message from a Filipina friend and colleague working in Malaysia. She has offered me an incentive she got from work to help me promote my page on Facebook.

She might not know how that simple act of showing me that she believes in me made me shed tears. This made me trust the universe more. I am connected to a limitless source of abundance.

And for this reason, I will still be happy to continue writing even if I will not be paid doing it.

My website’s first purpose is to document all the things that I have learned on the road that all my journals and photographs will not be able to contain and if someone benefits from it, my job is done.

I only became eager or maybe better to say that I got greedy for money when I have read other bloggers’ blog income reports who have been doing it for a long time and already know what they will do to get the money flowing. Some hired coaches just to shorten the learning process and make money on their first day of launching their blog. Nothing is wrong with that.

I am just enjoying the progress. I am enjoying every free information out there because I am enjoying living as slowly as possible. I also strongly believe that self-education is the best education.

My parents sent me to the most expensive schools in my country but they failed to teach me what I have learned after it.

Even the corporate world failed to teach me what I wanted to know.

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

One time maybe I sounded as if I didn’t know what I was doing with my life again and my 76-year old German host-mother told me that this break I am taking is important because I will have something to look back to when I am old.

Though she is a retired teacher, she is still in alignment with what her purpose in life is which is to teach.

I wouldn’t even call it teaching. She is always inviting me to think.

I just know now that my misery comes from the fact that I have been trying to compare my first blogging chapter to other bloggers’ fifth or even tenth.

While it is good to know that there will be money in blogging, I am more into writing for my healing. I might just have earned 12 Euros from ad networks and affiliate marketing combined but I am learning more important life lessons along the way. And this is priceless.

Read next

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