Welcome back to the latest installment of our Wise Words Wednesday feature. Today we are handing the blog over to Lee who blogs at Homely Economics.
Her blog is full of useful advice and inspiring posts on all things money! I’m going to hand you over to her now to talk you through her experience as a blogger.
Tell us a little bit about you & your blog:
I’m Lee, and my blog is called Homely Economics. I wanted to combine finance with domesticity, because so much of the language surrounding money seems exclusive and not accessible to the average person.
I think that my blog is fairly unique amongst the personal finance blogging community because I write a lot about child maintenance. Unpaid child maintenance is a serious problem in the UK, and as it affects so many separated parents’ finances, writing about it can improve a lot of people’s lives.
What inspired you to start blogging?
I’ve been blogging on and off for years, but only to support a project – never as an endeavour in its own right.
It occurred to me that I could start a blog of my own to write honest reviews of local businesses, as I realised that when I had to choose a service, I was, more or less, picking at random based on how their websites looked. I chose a name on blogspot.com and quickly realised that I had made a major mistake, and my real interest lay in saving money.
I had to do a U-turn but it was a good idea!
What has been your highlight of blogging?
Some of the comments I’ve received on my child maintenance posts have made me feel as though I’m genuinely made a difference to readers’ lives: that’s an incredible feeling, to know that someone has recognised a voice like theirs online and feels represented, and less alone.
Is there anything you have learnt about blogging which you wish you knew when you started out?
Wow, where should I start? I knew next to nothing about blogging when I began – I really was just writing a personal diary and throwing it into the air.
It would be so hard to compress it all into one sentence, but I wish I had started off by writing more for readers and less for myself. My first posts were written with witty titles that played on words, but gave very little clue as to what I was actually talking about in the post! When I learned to view my blog as an online magazine instead of a literary work, things started to fall into place.
Bloggers sometimes get a lot of stick however many work really hard and are reaping the rewards, what has been the most rewarding part of blogging for you?
My blog has connected me to Gingerbread, the single parents’ charity. I’ve written a guest post for them about my experience as a single parent and had contributed to their report Children deserve more: Challenging child maintenance avoidance.
I do approach my blog as a business, but this part of it brings me a lot of personal satisfaction as well.
What would be your 1 tip you would give all new bloggers starting out?
You can’t reverse-engineer success, so don’t go crazy trying to copy everything that an established blogger has done to get where they are now. It’s simply not possible. What you can do is to find a supportive group of bloggers in your niche and learn from what they do and don’t do, and apply those lessons to yourself.
Who do you find inspiring to read/watch in the blogging world?
I’m going to nominate my old friend Coleen Stanley, who co-hosts a fantastic podcast called This Miserable Job alongside her husband Craig.
I may be biased, as I’ve known Coleen since we were teenagers, but I’ve learned so much from her blog and podcast in the last few months that I’m proud to recommend her to any blogger who wants to step up their entrepreneurial game.
Lastly – do you have any big plans/dreams for your blog in the next 12 months?
Oh, I have plenty of big plans! One of them is to leave my paid employment and replace that income with several different income streams, one of which I want to be generated by my blogs (I actually have three!). Still, I have some medium-sized plans as well to work through on the way to the bigger ones… but all of the progress I’ve made in the last twelve months makes me think it’s not so far away!
You can find Lee over on her social media below.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/HomelyEconomics
Instagram: https://instagram.com/homely_economics
Twitter: https://twitter.com/homelyeconomics
Don’t forget you can catch up with our other great Wise Words Wednesday posts here.