Um, oops, I accidentally didn’t update in a year??

My dudes and friends, I hope that I can return to the habit of
sharing cute things on this blog!

Before I write a big, regular blog post, here is a little bit
of what I have been up to in my life recently!

I have been continuing my art and creating lovely things~
I stream on Twitch sometimes, and save my streams onto Youtube!

Here is my most recent time-lapse drawing process video,
of a handsome mermaid fellow since #MerMay is very popular right now~

Most of my online activity is on Tumblr, where I make gifs
and sometimes, very silly audio posts.

As for what I am keeping myself busy with on the Internet,
hm, well, lately I love reading lifestyle blogs that showcase
lovely and exciting vacations & travel, pretty rooms and decor
& wardrobes and stuff~

For instance, here is a blog post about this artist’s incredible Vintage-infused
pastel art style – it is all of my most favorite colors,
and I yearn for this kind of space myself!

What an amazingly lovely space!

Also, this is completely unrelated to everything else,
but this month is Sanrio’s 32nd Character Ranking contest.

View the characters here and vote for your faves!

Do the right thing.  Vote for the OG bunny queen.

–

All right my friendos, although there is ever so much else to chit chat about,
I should perhaps save it for another day’s post,
so that I can keep this thing going.

I have loved checking in with you all,
and I hope that you will all stay aboard as I queue up some posts
for cute & lovely lifestyle & beauty/self-care write-ups,
perhaps even in addition to my regular cute shopping posts!

Line stickers used in this post: Rabbit ear girl Rosy & Little Cottingley

↑ Other places where I am ↑

Okay.

I have utterly failed at keeping this blog updated with posts.

I look back at previous things I’ve posted under Site Updates and they’re all like “This is what I’m gonna do next!” and then that thing never happened. 6_6

BUT THIS TIME FOR REAL

I’VE GOT IT DOWN THIS TIME

Daily blog posts.  They’re gonna happen.

Really, Bridget?  You might ask yourself this.  And my answer is, YES, REALLY.  Because the method for doing so is so simple, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it and implement it before now.

Since the beginning, I’ve wanted to use this site to blog about fashion and shopping finds.  I’ve been doing this successfully on my Kawaii Shopping Tumblr, and I just realized…

I can just post the same content here.

I’ve been posting daily to Kawaii Shopping since November of last year.  Sometimes I really like the things that I discover and post there.  I don’t know why I never thought of sharing them on this blog as well.

Guess when these daily cute shopping posts are going to start?  Answer: Tomorrow.

ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS I AM??

Probably not. ._.

–

So yeah, that’s thing the first.  Thing the second is that I’ve started a Storenvy shop and I am almost completely finished stocking it with all of the Boutique things I’m going to be selling.  That is the other thing that’s going to happen.  The Boutique.  The thing I’ve been talking about happening since January 2011.

ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS I AM?!?!

… Probably not. .___.

Whew…  Okay, so I piled a bit too much on my plate and almost burned myself out for a minute there. n_n

I jumped into the Hatoful Boyfriend guide without being finished with the other overhauls I had planned for the site, and those efforts in conjunction with the daily work I put towards my Kawaii Shopping and Finer Fashion Shopper blogs as well had me feeling so overwhelmed, I could barely accomplish anything at all!

So I’m slowing down for a bit.  Hatoful Boyfriend posts are going to be put on hold until I finish posting all of my completed pony plushes, which I’ve gotten reeeeeaaally far behind on.  There are THIRTEEN more ponies I’ve finished since I last updated!  So I’ll be spending the next day or so putting my photos of them together in neat little images and uploaded straight into the gallery that’s on this page (also on DeviantArt).

Then I’ll hurry along through Shuu’s path in Hatoful Boyfriend and get those posts up in the coming days after that!  Ideally, we’ll have the Hatoful Boyfriend posts finished with before this week is up.

And THENNNN I’ll get back to work on the other projects I’ve mentioned here and there in my posts.  The book about sewing cute plushes and things will be resumed, as well as the packages of downloadable items such as icons and wallpapers.  I still have a lot of irons in the fire, but I need to keep reminding myself not to try to accomplish them all at the same time!  Doing so leads only to exhaustion and disappointment when I inevitably don’t accomplish the far-too-many things that are on my to-do list.

So keep an eye on the Pony Plush Commissions page for the newest ponies!  After that will come all of the other fun stuff I just mentioned. c:

Hey everyone! 😀

I know I haven’t been blogging here as much as I keep saying I’d like to, but I have a reason! I have so many cool ideas planned for this site this year, and they’re all being worked on EVERY DAY! We’re still only just getting started in 2012 and I can’t wait to see what kinds of other developments occur through this year, besides the neat things I have planned~

Here’s something exciting: What with January ending and February beginning, payments and checks have all been sent out by all the online affiliate networks I’ve joined and made a secondary income out of. And while I first started getting tiny trickles of payments in November (I started affiliate marketing in October), this past January marks an important landmark: I made my first $100 entirely from commission-based revenue!!

Now, I read up a lot about affiliate marketing before and as I first started monetizing my Web site and blogs. And so many of them stated that your first goal to work toward is that first $100. That first $100 is your sign that you’ve done it – you’ve got a blog with traffic coming in to it, some regular readers, and now it’s just a matter of keeping it going with more products and promotions, and soon you’ll have another $100, then $500, and even $1000 is an eventual certainty as long as you keep at it – and those higher numbers are so much easier to attain now that that uphill climb towards your first $100 is reached.

If you’re a little confused and find yourself asking, “Wait, what’s affiliate marketing? What blogs are we talking about?” that’s okay! I’ll give you some quick background info. There are a toooooon of informative articles you can read about affiliate marketing itself so I won’t go hugely into it here, but basically affiliate marketing is advertising products and linking to them using a code that is unique to you. When someone else clicks that link and looks at that product, or any other products from that site you linked them to, there’s a cookie there that remembers that YOUR LINK is the one that led them there. If they purchase something, a percentage of that sale gets paid to you! You can basically think of affiliate marketing as getting paid by commission to advertise products. The two blogs I have monetized to specifically work as affiliate blogs are both on Tumblr – Kawaii Shopping and The Finer Fashion Shopper.

And here’s the very best part – my sales in January were so good, I actually reached WAY over $100! My total cumulative earnings from all of my affiliate programs across these few months actually totals to closer to $200! Remember how I mentioned I first started getting payments in November? My first paycheck (it was from my favorite affiliate program so far, LinkShare!) was for only $34. And I’d previously received a $50 payment for referring someone to use my Web hosting provider, Hostgator. I was already at $84! So close to $100 after only one month of affiliate marketing!

My sales seemed to decline in December, and I barely made any sales. I think I stayed teetering at that $80-90 range that month. But that was fine, as the holidays were very busy and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to my blogs. When January came around, I became aware of something I had seriously neglected to address – I hadn’t implemented any SEO techniques to my two Tumblr blogs! Was it even possible to optimize Tumblr blogs for search engines? All I had to do was Google “Tumblr SEO tips” and there were my answers! I’m thankful I’m already so familiar with HTML and a small bit of the SEO I’d worked on for my own personal site (the one you’re reading from right now!), because that knowledge made it easy to implement H1 headers and turn post tags into meta keywords, and those kinds of things.

Well, immediately after implementing those SEO techniques, I witnessed a significant spike in the traffic my blogs were getting, which in turn led to a DRASTIC increase in clicks through to all of the products I was promoting there. My sales through LinkShare jumped from $20 that month to nearly $40, and then finally reached $50 right before January ended. Holy cow! From that program alone, I’d MORE than reached my first $100 earned online!! 😯 And as if that weren’t enough, on the very last day of January, I received a surprise e-mail from Amazon Associates stating that my payment for the month had been processed. Since I haven’t promoted products from Amazon as much as I have from other sites, I’d nearly forgotten all about them! When I logged into my Amazon Associates panel, I was beyond ecstatic to find that I’d accumulated $55 in sales there – all from links I’d created back in November. The SEO techniques I’d only implemented in January had even brought traffic to some of my much older posts!

So those two payments from LinkShare and Amazon alone would have gotten me to my $100 goal, but don’t forget that I had nearly reached $100 beforehand! I absolutely owe this spike of success to search engine optimization. If this past month’s increase of traffic and sales are a reliable indicator, it isn’t unreasonable to anticipate making at least $100 a month from these blogs, regularly. And if traffic and sales continue to increase, well then… I am certainly incredibly hopeful for the future! And what’s even more – I also spent some time in January joining even more affiliate programs! I also have tricklings of earnings from Share-A-Sale and Google Affiliate Network, and I’m hopeful that those will blossom into larger earnings in the coming months, just like LinkShare and Amazon Associates did after only a few months. c:

I can’t complain at all about my experience with affiliate marketing and encourage others to use their blogs for the same. If you want to get started just like I did, join LinkShare and search through their categories of merchants to find some online retailers that fit your niche. Other programs to check out are Share-A-Sale, Amazon Associates, and Google Affiliate Network.

In the future I might post a bit about the techniques I use and precise strategies that I implement in each of my Tumblr blogs when I make posts about products. c:

Thanks for reading!