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!