An unconventional fashion blogger trying to find her place on the internet

I love this blog. Like, so much more than anyone could ever imagine – not in a weird, psychopath kind of way, but you get what I’m trying to say. And today I’m going to talk about the things I’d love to do to make this the most amazing (okay, maybe not the most amazing – I’m still learning and going to be realistic) god damn place you’ve ever visited on the internet and review some of the progress I’ve made since my post at the end of 2017 summarising how my year went.
I started to draft this post a while back and didn’t get around to finishing it until I was mindlessly doing my nails and catching up on some of my fave YouTube channels, one of which was a Q&A with Samantha Maria (who I’ve watched since about 2011/12). She was chatting about everything vegan, beauty and fashion until she got to the very last question – WHICH WAS FROM ME! I couldn’t believe it when she read out my name (pronounced correctly – not going to lie, hearing my name pronounced as Gabriel is the bane of my existence at times) and the question I’d asked!

I was buzzing my tits off and re-watched what she said a couple of times, feeling like I was chatting to her face to face which was insane – she’s been one of my blogging idols for years, so this was so bloody exciting for me! I felt so much more motivated after (not that I wasn’t already beforehand) and got straight back to today’s post! Make sure to check out her video below and make sure to watch until the end where she gives some great advice to newcomers in the blogging world!

Content is king – that’s something many a blogger will be aware of. There are so many blogs out there that I admire, but when I see multiple grammar errors, wording that doesn’t make any sense or spelling mistakes, I start to squirm and click off of the post. Yes they might have superb imagery and dandy little tools, widgets or plugins – but this can be overshadowed if your writing is shoddy.
So here’s a list of what I’d like to implement on my own site over the coming months;

• A “Shop the Look” section where you have slider sections for products featured instead of standard links embedded in the post
• A homepage which has a static suggested/latest post bar at the top
• A weekly newsletter giving my email subscribers an overview of what’s new on the blog and any other snippets of life that might give people a chuckle
• A page dedicated to my upcycled fashion line My Fashion Faux Pas – I started to do this, but given my current platform I can’t make it look the way I want to and it’s a bit meh!
• Migrate to a WordPress.org site from WordPress.com – I think this will give me a lot more freedom to implement

There’s a lot of work to get this place where I want it to be, but I’m dedicated to making this so much more than it is already. I’ve been so happy with the progress I’ve made in terms of growing my audience in the last year and have seen that in terms of traffic and followers on most platforms (fuck you Facebook), so here are some key stats to show progress made on my goals for 2018:

Instagram

My feed is looking a lot more “professional” but is still very me, I’m gaining over 150 likes on each photo (the last few have been 200+ or almost there, but I don’t want to jinx it!) and masses of comments – engagement has really helped me grow! As at today, I’m at 1,275 followers which is up from 1,050 when I last shared on here at the end of 2017 (an increase of 225 followers!). I’m aiming for 3,000 by the end of the year and am hoping this growth will continue!

WordPress

I’ve continued to see great growth again on this and have decided to share my traffic stats this month too (very scary!). In terms of followers, I’ve gone from 263 to 358, which is a gain of 95 INSANE!
Traffic has been higher than usual at this point in the month and I’m getting a lot more traffic from search engines which is pretty cool! Although, I will confess that I still don’t understand why people are coming across my Mac Velvet Teddy Dupe post – the picture of the lipstick has bloody fluff from the floor on it LOL.

Twitter

I made a decision at the beginning of the year to stop participating in follow trains – I was spending a lot of time participating, following people who’s content I wasn’t very interested in and not getting a lot of payback in terms of traffic to my blog (it’s at the bottom of my list for blog referrals), it seems like a lot of people use the follow trains as ways of gaining followers, whether they’re genuine or not. I haven’t gone on an unfollow spree and for some reason, still have an incessant need to follow back other bloggers to show my support of what they do, but it’s progress! Anyway, back to my progress on Twitter; I ended 2017 with 1,471 followers and today am at 1,752, that’s almost 300 more followers!

Final Thoughts

2018 has been a great year for The Fashion Faux Pas of Gabrielle so far, I’ve had my first fashion collaboration with Tobi, did my first ever sponsored post with Jewel on Fire  (someone paid me actual money to write something – WHAT?!) and am hoping to get some more opportunities as the year passes by.
Blogging is HARD WORK; if you’re a new blogger and wondering when you’re going to get “freebies” or paid to write/feature brands on your blog, let me tell you that it isn’t easy. I can’t tell you how to make money from it, or how to grow your platforms because I haven’t figured that out, nor do I think my journey will be the same as yours or anyone else’s. The best advice I can give is to continue going for it, be consistent and your audience will find you.
Let me know if you’d like to see posts like this (I’m thinking on a quarterly basis, monthly is a bit much) or if you have any of your own success stories you want to share in the comments below!

 
 

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