How a Small Girl Made Her Way Into the Big Leagues

I’m writing this short autobiographical piece to introduce myself to my Self-Growth community.

I have found a niche writing on Medium and discovered a Medium group that meets on Slack, so I also have embraced and been embraced by a Slack Community as well as the Medium Community and the Self-Growth community.

I am not writing this piece to gush over my new friends but to introduce myself to them.

After discovering I have 1,087 followers on Medium, I figured my new audience might want to know a little bit about me.

If “little” is not the operative word, “average” is. With two short parents, I am 5'4" on a good day which is a day I don’t slump due to poor posture, so I am of average height.

I consider myself a good mom, a good teacher, a good writer, a good wife, a good sister, a good friend, and a good dog owner which I guess makes me an average person.

However, 13 years ago, while I did not grow in height, I grew in stature, the kind of growth one experiences in the mind.

I received my Master’s Degree in Education. Just a way to pass the time? No. I had an ambition I no longer hold to teach college.

Blogger By Night, Teacher By Day

After receiving confidence in my writing abilities at the university, and seeing a movie about a blogger, “Julie and Julia,” I decided to become a blogger by night while I stayed a teacher by day seven years ago.

My work ethic dictates I always try my best so I started studying blogging. Ironically, I even blogged about how the best I can do is… and the best that other people can do as well. Here is the article: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/best-i-can-do-meme/

Eventually, I studied SEO. When my traffic improved, and I experienced the subsequent adrenaline rush, I decided to become a blogging tips blogger. I taught others what I researched and learned about blogging, social media promotion, and SEO. Here is what I learned about social media promotion: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/free-social-networking-sites/
In fact, one of my earliest traffic generators was a post about the SEOMoz Bar. https://www.mostlyblogging.com/mozbar/

As my blog traffic improved and my blogging community grew, I experienced a new sensation. I no longer felt small or even average. To quote a title of a Tom Hanks movie, I felt “Big.”

This new sensation of success, a new kind of growth for me, was daunting. I felt like I had a secret. When I was at my teaching job, I didn’t dare share that I blogged with anyone. A closet blogger? That was me.

Surely, this blogging success I was experiencing was a dream from which I would soon wake up. I mean who gets that in their life? Who? Certainly not average me.

I started receiving communications from people from all walks of life sharing their backgrounds and the reasons they blog. I met people from prison, widows, stroke victims, and the impoverished just to name a few. All of us, while drastically different, were eerily the same.

We blog. We blog because we love helping. We blog because we love growing along with our readers. We blog because we love writing. We blog because we love the community.

I spent most of 2020 watching Google give search traffic to blogs with more longevity all the while yearning to learn how to boost search traffic and to share those tricks with my readers.

In November of 2020, I found my pot of gold at the end of my rainbow. Call it what you will, I found a topic through researching content ideas, and my post, “How to Escape From Facebook Jail” went viral. Here is the post: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/how-to-get-out-of-facebook-jail/ .

Today, nine months later, the article still accounts for 16% of my blog traffic. To date, the post has 136 comments.

That same month, November 2020, the U.S. Presidential Election occurred. Due to political toxicity, Facebook shut down certain extremist conservative accounts. Those Facebook members started reading reviews of other social media sites including my MeWe reviews which I coincidentally happened to rank for on Google’s Page 1. Here are the MeWe reviews: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/mewe-review-facebook-alternative/ .

Everything is relative, but between November 2020 and January 2021, I received 3,000 page views a day just to my MeWe post. I was still receiving massive page views to my Facebook Jail article too. The traffic peak was daunting and unlike one I’d ever known in the seven years that I have been blogging.

Today, like many pro-bloggers, I chase the traffic and the links. When I chase the traffic and the links, the money through the Medium Partner Program and other income sources seems to follow. Here is information on the Medium Partner Program: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/medium-partner-program/

I won two awards over the weekend. The Infinity Blog Awards awarded me Outstanding Blogger and the Best Internet Blogger of 2021.

Not too shabby for a person who always considered herself pretty darn average.

This post originally appeared at Medium: https://medium.com/illumination/how-a-small-girl-made-her-way-into-the-b...