Ave and I launched our joint blog Home Life Abroad in 2013, but our blog friendship goes way back to 2009. We were both running separate blogs and we quickly became online blogger friends, eventually deciding to create a blog together.
Our life stories had one similar keynote: we had both moved to a foreign country. It was clear from the get-go that we should be writing about our adventures and experiences living abroad.
We are blogging puzzle pieces – everything I lack in talent, she makes up for and more. 🙂 While she’s a stunning photographer and baker, I can’t do either for the life of me, but I balance the scale with my technical and SEO background.
The blog has evolved to include anything and everything we like to talk about, from long-distance relationships to showing off new recipes and crafts. The best part is that we’ve become good friends as well as co-bloggers.
So what does being a blogging success mean to us?
First, that we are able to make a side income from it.
It’s not going to cover all our expenses or replace a full time job, but it sure helps pay the bills.
It’s exciting to create a site that is valuable to sponsors. We love the relationships we have built with companies who understand the value we can bring, even if we are a small blog.
In a way, it also provides us with a measure to evaluate our success: if our site is loved by readers, our posts are shared, and sponsors are interested, then it confirms to us that we’re doing a good job and people are enjoying our hard work.
Second, experiencing the wonderful engagement and friendships that come along with the blog.
There’s nothing like getting a notification from someone who has left a genuine, thoughtful comment on our post.
At times, we discuss heavier, personal subjects in our lives, and the fact that people across the world find our post and it helps them with confirmation of their feelings really touches our hearts. Sometimes you just need to see that you’re not alone in your thoughts.
Third, seeing our social shares skyrocket.
When we started, we had no readers. As we progressed, we learned how to ensure our posts are more successful at receiving social attention.
Now, we have articles with tens of thousands of shares, with higher success on Pinterest. We create our own images for Pinterest, which is no easy or quick task. But it’s well worth it – it’s incredibly exciting to see how thousands of people find our tips, ideas and recipes useful and save them to their boards.
Lastly, success to us means genuinely enjoying our blog. 
After all, our blog is a place for us to express ourselves. If we weren’t enjoying working on it, there would be no point in continuing. Sometimes it can feel like hard work – a lot of our ‘free time’ goes to writing content, creating images, promoting our posts and so on.
But at the end of the day, it’s incredibly gratifying because it’s a site that we grew with time and dedication.
To us, there is no one way to measure success, but as long as it’s something we love to do, we’ll always be blogging!
To read more from Ronnie & Ave head over to their Blog: http://www.homelifeabroad.com/
& Social Media – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homelifeabroad Twitter: https://twitter.com/HomeLifeAbroad
Instagram: http://instagram.com/homelifeabroad Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/homelifeabroad/
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1 Comment
Thank you so much for featuring us!!! <3