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As I sat down today to preschedule blog posts for my big trip to Japan this week, a wave of anxiety overcame me.

I love my job. I’ve been blogging for 13 years but over time it has increasingly become more and more daunting. About 6 years ago I redesigned my website (for the third or so time ever) which cost me a pretty penny. At the time, blogs were taking a much more editorial feel so I designed mine to mirror the trend of having it read more like an online magazine and less like a personal diary.

Over the past decade, blogs have taken so many different shapes. Year to year the trends will shift from glossy, editorial images to mirror selfies, videos, carousels, etc. There are years where collage posts perform better and then years where a fully dedicated post to one piece of product does best.

As a content creator and blogger, it’s my job to ebb and flow with these changes while also working to maintain consistent and high quality content for you all.

So, why did I stop? The truth is my product uploads. If you click over to my “shop page” you will see a nice assortment of products that I have manually uploaded to this blog from various retailers across the web. After I upload these products to my shop page, I can then insert them into my blog posts. Finding each products can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 50 minutes depending on the post I’m working on. On an average, I like to have at least 20 pieces of product per blog post to offer you a nice selection that varies in brand, price point and style. Each product takes me about 5 minutes to upload on the back end of my website. (P.S. I do not have an assistant that does this for me)

This post took me about 20 minutes to write and upload, but for an average post the product uploads take me: 600 minutes for product research + 5 minutes per upload x 20 products per post = 100. That is 700 minutes just for a post like this one here.

That is 11 hours per post.

That is a full day, plus some, of work on a piece of content. Mind you, this blog is not the top generating source of my income. It is quite tedious to maintain and if I’m looking at it from an investment standpoint, it is not the best use of my time for business.

But I do love it and I will continue to do it. However, you may or may not start to see some slight changes around here such as text links to products or collages that I make (which are half the amount of time).

I hope you continue to enjoy reading this blog as I have loved working on it over the past decade. As I will continue updating my shop page and writing at least one post per week, please let me know if you are enjoying them or what you would like to see more of in the comments!

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