Friday, January 14, 2011

A year of blogging: How it began

As of January 12th I have officially been blogging for one year! I suppose I should have planned better to celebrate, but since it didn't do that I decided to share a few of the things I have learned in one year of blogging in a series of posts. First, I will tell my story of how my blog came to be.

I did have quite a bit of experience on the computer before I started blogging, but the majority of it was through video games, online shopping, forums, and coupon/freebie/sweepstakes hunting. The first blog that I subscribed to, without even realizing what blogs really were beyond personal journals, was Glimpse Reviews (also Winnipeggers). I won my first giveaway around 18 months ago from Glimpse and shortly after that, I won a DVD from another blog (that I also didn't know was a blog). I really can't remember the exact point in time that I realized what blogs were and that there were thousands of them out there posting reviews & giveaways on a daily basis but I believe it was around November or December of 2009.

At first I wasn't sure if starting my own blog was going to be "my thing" but after subscribing to a bunch of others and getting ideas of things to blog about I started thinking about a name for myself. The Momma part of my title should be easy enough to figure out, but I never did explain the Misfit part. Well, I used to be a 12 hr/ day gamer chick. Not typical for a Mom, but I have never been one to try and be like everyone else and I know I'm not the only one. The online gaming group I have played with for 10+ years has "Misfit" in our name, which is something that describes me quite well and it stuck!

It was slow going in the start. I posted a few things that I'm very tempted to delete (and I did delete a few a while ago), but in April I was contacted by CSN Stores, Smartipants Cloth Diapers, and Good Vibes all in the same week! It must have been a crazy coincidence that they all contacted me around the same time but I was excited to take my blog to the next level - product reviews! It was at that time that I started Misfit Momma... After Hours, partly because I didn't want to offend any of my current followers, and partly because I knew I would want to be able to post things that weren't really appropriate to be followed by something like a picture of one of my kids.

Up next: Advice for new bloggers. I'm no pro, but working on a list of things that I found around the web that helped me start out. If you have any specific questions for me please post here to let me know!

4 comments:

Amy said...

Congrats on your first year! I started my blog the same time last year!!

Amy Brown said...

Congrats on your anniversary! I enjoy reading your blog!

Unknown said...

Congrats on a year! It is crazy everything you can do with blogging! I'm like you and started out thinking it was just for myself and my family to see pictures. Then now I'm totally into and still learning more!

Ms D said...

Congratulations on your first year hun!!! Yeah :)