One of the best part of my “job” is when I get to encourage and mentor aspiring creative entreprenuers.  I don’t have all of the answers, but I can share my experience and give them the benefit of learning from my successes and failures. I’m asked a lot of questions about starting and running a business like mine, but the most common one is how to start a blog. The technical landscape has changed a lot since I hit the publish button for the first time, so if I had to start all over again, from scratch, as a brand-spanking-new blogger without a budget for a designer or a tech team…  What would I do?  When I first started, it was important for me to keep things simple and low pressure.  That meant doing a lot of it on my own and that is exactly how I would do it again.

Welcome to part 5 of my series “The Business of Blogging“.  In this installment, as advertised, we’re talking about social media. I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago and I realized I sounded really hostile towards social media in general, so I decided to set it aside and write about it when I was feeling a bit warmer to that whole aspect of having a web-based business! Okay.  I’m good now. Let’s proceed. Social media has changed sooooo much since I first started blogging.  Twitter was perhaps the biggest “it” thing back in the day.   Facebook was big, but growth and engagement was organic (no paid boosted posts), so it was entirely different than it is now.  Instagram and Pinterest weren’t even around, yet. I know there are dozens of social media platforms, but I’m going to focus on the ones I use the most – Facebook, Instagram,

This is part four of the overall series “The Business of Blogging“, but it’s part three in the more specific topic of monetization (making money off of a blog).  In this post, I’ll be sharing about affiliate links and how they work. First of all, what are affiliate links? They are special links from a blog post (or social media post) to a specific company, product, or service.  The blogger makes a commission if an item is purchased when a reader/follower clicks through one of those links. Simple enough, right? So, how do affiliate links work for the blog reader? In my opinion, affiliate links are a kind of monetization that are a win-win in most cases.  A blogger is sharing a product or service that you might be interested in and, if you are interested, and make a purchase based on their recommendation, they earn a small bonus for referring