Hey, fellow pet lovers!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter weekend and you and your four-legged friends are all enjoying the lovely Spring sunshine. Today is a bonus post since this exact day, 1 year ago I went live with epoch.pet and I wanted to write a post talking all about the crazy blogging journey I’ve had so far.
Let’s jump straight in and talk about epoch.pet’s one year journey!
Happy Birthday epoch.pet!
I actually cannot believe I’m writing this post already, the last year has flown by as I’ve mentioned many times in a few of my previous posts. Today I want to take you back to this exact day last year and talk about how I got into blogging, the first few months and finally the last few months which have personally felt the hardest of all. I’m an avid journaler and write in my diary daily, so that’s how I’m going to go about writing today’s post, like a big diary entry summing up the highs and lows of my blogging journey that all started with epoch.pet.
How did I get into blogging?
If you’ve been following epoch.pet from the get-go then you will already know that this blog started due to me being fairly confused about my future career options after leaving my BSc Real Estate Degree back in the Summer of 2016. After college, I thought I wanted to become an RICS accredited Charted Surveyor so went on to start a degree at Northumbria University. However, after the first year of learning about valuation, properly law and construction technology I soon realised that this wasn’t the career path for me.
So I talked to my other half who kindly said why don’t you take a year out, have some time to relax and really think about what career option is right for you. So I did, in the Summer of 2016 after completing the first year I choose to take a year out and finally decided to withdraw fully from my course in 2017.
A lot happened in that year off, I travelled to Australia with my best friend and had the trip of a lifetime! I also found out about blogging by coming across an amazing site called Create and Go, it’s a website that helps you create a blog by providing you with quality tools and tips, paid courses to boost your knowledge and allows you to join a community of bloggers to help you on your journey.
In their first three years of blogging, they managed to make $100,000 a month!! Crazy right and having no clue what career path I wanted to take, I thought maybe I should start a blog, rationally realising that the potential of earning that much is probably never going to happen, but it’s not all about the money. I had a good few months to plan and started really looking into the world of blogging. I joined countless Facebook groups which made the whole process a lot easier, I watched plenty of YouTube videos, if your a blogger and haven’t checked out Create and Go’s Youtube Channel then I would definitely suggest doing so as it’s helped me a lot.
After a few months of reading up on blogging and choosing what platform I wanted to build my blog on, WordPress of course, I was pretty much all set to start creating my first ever blog. I just had to decide on what I was going to blog about? Thankfully, this decision was pretty easy as I love all my girls Nia, Lily and the Pooss, I regularly made them homemade pet treats and fed them an all natural diet, each week my partner and I always took them on lovely walks and we’ve always tried to be the best pet parents possible.
Which meant I realised pretty quickly that blogging about pet wellness and nutrition was the smartest move forward. Choosing the name was actually the hardest part of all but I thought epoch.pet sounded catchy, memorable and the domain was available which sealed the deal. After I purchased the domain I needed a logo, so went on Fiver which is a super handy freelance website and started hunting for a designer, I came across a great guy who helped me create the perfect logo for epoch.pet.
It took me quite a while to actually go live with epoch.pet for a few reasons, one I’m a bit of a perfectionist and wanted everything to be perfect before going live but that never happens as I’ve learned and actually held me back quite a bit. Two, my mum wasn’t well during 2017 and the start of 2018, which meant I was going over her house almost every day to take care of her. This meant it was very hard to find the time to go live with epoch.pet and maintain a blog. However, for Christmas 2017 I got given money off my mum and this was when I first purchased my WordPress Premium site and set a deadline for going live, that deadline passed just like the second one but finally when the 20th of April came I forced myself to go live and I’m so glad I did.
2oth April 2018
This time last year I was incredibly stressed, I had already missed my first two initial deadlines for going live and really wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make my newly set deadline of the 20th also. Regardless, I stayed up super late the night before to get as much sorted as possible, until my tired mind couldn’t take anymore.
I woke up the next morning with plenty of nerves and that anxious feeling which we’ve all felt at some point, my brain was thinking am I actually going to go live with this? I had been thinking about epoch.pet for months beforehand, researching blogging and trying to work out how to set up a site with no prior knowledge which proved a bit of a challenge. However I wasn’t turning away because of a few reasons, one I hoped epoch.pet would help inspire a positive change in relation to many things such as Breed Specific Legislation, improved diet choices for our companion animals and lots more…
But one of the most important reasons I wanted to go live on that specific day was due to it having a special meaning. The 20th of April was my dads birthday and knowing how important epoch.pet was going to be to me, I thought it would be lovely to go live with the site that exact day. So I did, I frantically posted my almost complete WordPress blog to the world despite the fact it was far from perfect, but I thought that come later.
I think I’ve talked about the big disaster on my first day in another post but I’ll recap for those that don’t know it already. As I mentioned above my mum was pretty ill when I first went live with epoch.pet and this time last year I published the blog then rode my little BMX over to her flat to take care of her for the day. Then I thought I would search for epoch.pet to show her but quickly realised I had only published the homepage and my first post, all of my other pages were still set to private. I actually had a bit of a mental breakdown and that day only got worse from there but when I got home, later on, I resolved the issue and looking back it’s a funny story now but at the time I certainly didn’t see it that way.
I’m so glad I just forced myself to go live with epoch.pet on what would have been my dads 73rd birthday. It’s the little personal things that really make a brand special and this is one of epoch.pet’s personal touches.
The First Six Months
The first six months of blogging were insane, I was just getting used to everything and trying to grow our social following as much as possible. Every time someone liked a post or followed the blog I got such a little dopamine hit that I frankly miss. It’s odd how the little things start to become normal, one of the hardest things in the first few months was posting a blog post.
I remember the first time I posted a post and how odd it felt, thankfully that feeling is long gone and I now feel so much more confident in my blogging abilities. For those of you that haven’t read my previous post, epoch.pet six months on, I would definitely suggest you check it out after today’s to see how far the blog has come.
Also, If you’ve read one of last months posts called epoch.pet, March Monthly Overview. Then you will already know what I’m about to talk about but if not, I’ll fill you in. So as I mentioned above during my planning and preparation stage for epoch.pet my mum really wasn’t too well and just over a month after going live with the epoch.pet, on the 24th of May she passed away.
I feel like I’ve talked a good amount about this in my previous posts so head over there to learn more but this was a challenge to keep up to date with my weekly posting schedule and maintain my motivation during the funeral planning and the few months that followed. Looking back though I really think epoch.pet gave me something else to focus on and helped me deal with the situation a lot better. There have been many setbacks and challenges along the way but I’ve managed to maintain our weekly posts and we now have a diverse range of content on the site which I’m super happy about.
June 2018, Registered as a Self Employed Blogger!
Some of you may have realised that I have various affiliate links on the blog, as I have done many pet product reviews of products that I use for my girls or that I think are great, which meant I registered as self-employed last year. This was an exciting milestone for epoch.pet and myself!
20th April 2019
So here I am today, with a wonderful blog on which I get to talk about my awesome adventures with Nia and little Lily and my girl Pooss. Looking back I’ve loved every second of my blogging journey and now have such an amazing story to tell, I am incredibly grateful to our frequent visitors and followers of epoch.pet, so thank you all!
I have some things I want to get sorted in next few months such as going live with our facebook group which I’ll be doing in the next week or two and updating the site as I feel like it could do with a bit of a restyle. Next Tuesday’s post is going to follow on from today’s and will recap on some of epoch.pet’s top milestones over the last year, and talk more in depth on my plans for the rest of the year so make sure you stick around for that.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed today’s post and I know I’ve said it a million times but thank you all so much for choosing to read and interact with our weekly content. Without epoch.pet’s amazing followers and ever-growing community we wouldn’t be where we are today and I really hope you stick along to see whereabouts we end up?
If you liked today’s post then hit that like button so I know, or share so other pet parents and lovers can join epoch.pet, have a wonderful Easter weekend and remember to keep all chocolate and sweet treats away from your pets!
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