#FromBlog2Biz My journey from Blogger to Business Owner: Let's start at the very beginning
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Hi everyone!
In case you're new around these parts and have stumbled across this blog series, I thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself.
My name is Roxy and I am the blogger, photographer, planner, crafter, maker, designer and general busy-bee behind CityGirlSearching. I am South African, but have been living in South Korea with my husband and rescue pup (Shadow, who yes, has his own # and Instagram account and FB page because that's what you do these days) for the past 3/technically 4 years.
We are about to wrap up our final contract and will be heading home to South Africa at the end of June...yippeee!
In this series #FromBlog2Biz, I am going to be sharing with you my journey from blogger to business owner. In this post (Part 1) I want to share with you my blogging journey so far (it's been a good number of years) and to set the scene for you for where I am at right now and how I have been making money from my blog and how I plan to monetize moving forward from here.
I do hope you'll join me on this journey as I share with what I've done so far, what has worked and what hasn't. It's going to be an awesome adventure so let's get started right away.
The start of CityGirlSearching
I have been blogging for nearly 6 years, having first started out with a fun travel blog called Farmboy and CityGirl Hit Asia (yes, it's still up & running if you'd like to take a look and see the younger, rounder versions of us) which I turned into a Wordpress Site for 2 years and then turned back into the free blogger site after getting so frustrated with Wordpress.
CityGirlSearching was founded back in May 2011 after we finished up our first year of teaching in Korea. After leaving Korea in March 2011 I realised I couldn't very well carry on with Farmboy and CityGirl Hit Asia, seeing as we were no longer in Asia, but I loved blogging and I especially loved sharing useful information with people. I AM a city girl, having grown up in big cities my whole life (from Johannesburg to London where I lived for 5 of my schooling years and then to Daejeon in Korea) and the searching part because that's what summed up my life at that point.
Here is a little peek into my first business card (yup, I took myself seriously as a blogger, even if my mom and Farmboy were the only ones who actually read my blog) which a dear friend created for me. It was everything I hoped it would be at the time and I was ecstatic to throw these around everywhere I went:
I started CityGirlSearching on Blogger and had it hosted there for about 4 years (click here to go have a peek at the old version of this current site). I like that I can go back there every now and again to see how far I've come in my blogging journey. I blogged about everything from makeup & restaurant reviews, to travel guides and DIY's. Everything I still blog about today. People would often ask me why I continued to blog about things without being paid to do so and my answer was always the same. I love sharing information with people. I love helping people make their lives easier, and the best 'payment' was the emails I would get from my readers thanking me for sharing things on my blog.
Not much has changed.
Up until March this year, I had earned 0$ from 6 years of blogging. My blog hadn't made me any money, but what it had done was show me what I loved doing and introduced me to things like photography, graphic design & social media which is what I have gone onto make money from. These 6 years have also introduced me to so many amazing new people (many of whom are bloggers themselves who have go onto do great things with their lives) and whom I count as dear friends.
Now, blogging for pleasure is all very well, but it's an expensive hobby to have if you like nice thing. Blogging on a Mac laptop is not necessary, but it's nice. Using a fancy camera isn't necessary, but it's nice. Using Photoshop & Lightroom to create graphics and edit photographs isn't necessary, but they are nice. And all of these nice things also cost money not only to have, but they also cost money to maintain. As we are getting ready to leave Korea and the stability of our full time teaching job incomes, I have decided that I am going to turn this hobby of mine into a business from which I can draw a monthly salary, and one which will help support my family. That's the dream for many, if not all bloggers, and now I'm going to be sharing with you how I am going to do it.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will be sharing with you how blogging has allowed me to make some extra money on the side. I'll also go into detail about how much money I have made from various income streams and what those income streams were. I'm also going to be going into detail about the ups and downs of being paid for online content creation and how it isn't for everyone.
In the mean time, make sure you sign up below to join the #FromBlog2Biz mailing list. By joining, you'll also be able to gain access to the #CGScreative Resource library which is filled with loads of blogging resources, printables and what has made my list famous...beautiful stock photographs for you to use to grow your blog.
Simply pop your email in the box below to join us & click the little check box if you aren't already a CGScreative member and want to get access the resource library
Are you wanting to monetize your blog? Are you already making money from it? I'd love to hear from you in the comments and find out where you are in your blogging journey!
