So it’s that time of the year, where we are all looking back and making changes/assessments for the New Year and hopefully not regretting too much of the past year. So, as a light-hearted post and also because we’re all busy with the holiday season. Earlier this year, we posted some of our goals for this little blog of ours and we wanted to check in and see just how far we’ve come and what we need to work on for this new decade! This coming year is a year of personal change and undoubtedly this will reflect on our blog, but change is always a good thing, right? Read along to see how we did with our goals!
Collaborate with 2-3 aligned brands:
Ok, so…this is a hard one to swallow. We were contacted by brands and we did find ones in which we “collaborated” with, but made a decision that as we’re a small blog, we couldn’t be footing the shipping bill from all of the potential brands. This obvs had an impact on the ones we followed through with, but we’re not mad about that. If we’re going to be putting in time, creativity and effort into looks and shots, then it should be balanced and we also shouldn’t have to be dipping into our pockets, especially if we’re not being paid for the work. On the other hand, we did find ones which connected with our brand’s vision, but the next part is on us…because we then didn’t share it…gulp. So if there’s one thing we NEED to do better with next year, is sharing and posting our colabs, because well…we put work into it- lol. I think we just have to get away from the fact that it feels a little cringy, but needs must.
Be a source for change/good:
Gulp, so this one is a bit hard to actually quantify, but I would like to think we have been a source of some good, especially within the little community we have created. We have been very open and candid about our journey with mental health and how it has impacted our lives. We have written guest posts on the subject and I do feel people know this is one aspect of our blog. We also feel that this year, more so than previously, we have been very candid about our journey of self-discovery, being honest, open and frank about the process. We don’t see that stopping any time soon and hopefully it means people haven’t gotten tired of us.
Post More Selfies:
I feel like out of all of our goals, this is the one we fully met and in some ways I’d say we surpassed! R2 has been taking a selfie every day and sending them to R1 and R1 has pushed herself out of her comfort zone and either asked people to take her shot, or she’s done it herself on self-timer. So all in all, we definitely have much more images of ourselves on our blog than we did a year ago! Looking back, maybe we should have taken more time to stage photo seshs on our holiday, but we were far too busy having fun! But, now that R1 has moved back to Montreal, we can ensure we change that and we can have many more blogging photo seshs.
Stop Second Guessing: One thing we know for sure is that we are aligned in our intention for our blog, we have a very open relationship and take nothing personally when it comes to giving each other feedback regarding posts; we both want the same thing. Sometimes when looking at other blogs, with bigger followings, you can get swallowed up into an envy wormhole and you start to think of all the things you might want to change about your blog in order to be like the others. But! We’re not the others. The proof is in the pudding, we wrote a blog post that has been viewed over a 1000 times?!!? That is madness. To think of the fact that it is all our work, we don’t copy, we don’t duplicate, the content is solely ours and our thoughts- that’s mind blowing. We are so so proud, so simply put we need to trust our gut much, much more and just go with the flow.
Reach 1000+ Instagram follows: The Instagram game was a tough one this year, with two algorithm changes in a year- it has become a little bit tougher to get as much visibility on Insta without shelling out money into ads or finding the right hashtags, but nonetheless, though we haven’t reached this target as of yet, we’re closer to 1000 than away from it, and that has to be a good thing, right? So although it doesn’t look like we’ll meet this target this year, we’re steadily creeping up and I believe as long as we keep consistent and “clean up” the look of the blog more we’ll get there, we just need to be true to who we are and not make our blog look too clinical. But also, it’ll come when it comes…
If you want to check out our original post about our goals, click the link to read: Our Blogging Goals
My Sister's Keeper: All things Life & Photography 