Hi everyone! Would you believe that I’ve been nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award ? The most amazing Elsie nominated me nearly a month ago (on April 12)! Thank you so much Elsie!

I’m so glad I get to continue my Tag Me Tuesday posts. Any tags/awards/etc. that I am nominated for I write on Tuesdays so my usual posts don’t get pushed back. I’m so fortunate that I have been nominated for quite a few things so I have been trying to catch up on my awards. For a few weeks I’m also adding Thursday tags but let’s save that message for Thursday.

This is also part of my #BirthMay posts! I am blogging all of May as my celebration for my birthday on May 12th! I may be a tad obsessed with my birthday.

Back to the tag!

Rules:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
• Write a post to show your award.
• Give a brief story of how your blog started. 
• Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.
• Select 15 other bloggers you want to give this award too.
• Comment on each blog and let them know you have nominated them. 

History of my blog:

I had wanted to start a YouTube channel for the longest time actually. But I didn’t feel like I wanted to be on camera. However I still had so many ideas and at the time I felt so starved of creative outlets that I was looking for something to try and channel it through. I came across several YouTubers’ blogs and then realized that was something people could do! It was very much like my YouTube channel realization. So I started thinking about it and late November I finally did it.

I started Starring Pamela and instantly loved blogging. I was writing one post a week but that wasn’t enough so I quickly upped it to two. Then I still had too many ideas so I finally settled for three. Still, it took me about six months to become really serious about it. I mean, it took me about that long to finally stick to my goal of writing three posts a week consistently. Some weeks I would skip a day, some weeks I’d post on different days, etc. Now I plan posts in advance, take more photos for my blog, and though sometimes I post late in the day I never miss a day.

Advice to new bloggers:

I don’t think I’ve been asked for advice before but I’m excited to give it.

1. Just go for it! If it’s something you think you would like just start a blog! I mean, do some research first. Make sure you like reading what you’re writing about and see what platform works best for you. For me, lifestyle blogs were my favorite and I decided WordPress was better for me after starting on Blogger, trying to set up the page, and deciding I didn’t like it. I still love blogging so clearly this worked for me 🙂
2. Be yourself and be kind! Is this cheating? I feel like these two things combine in a way. This is so important to get a good thing going. I know when I follow some blogs for awhile but I feel like I don’t know the blogger I start questioning why I’m following. I want to connect with people!
   Also readers can tell when you’re not being honest and if you’re not nice those two factors will drive people away. Once I was following a blogger that I actually really liked. The blogger had great content and was nice enough when I commented but the blogger didn’t really engage with the community after a while. We had been blogging for about the same amount of time and about three months in this blogger wrote a post about their blog follower numbers. They were much higher than mine but I wasn’t surprised, it was good and exciting content! I was happy for the blogger. Then I was looking up their blog in the reader and realized it shows the followers the blog has. This blogger had reported numbers about 4 times higher than mine and actually had less than I did. I was so surprised the blogger would lie about something like that. Their posts had changed recently as well and were kind of snarky. I had to unfollow after that.
   Long story short, just be nice and be yourself!

My nominees:

Since I’ve been doing so many tags I don’t always single people out. I do want to give people the option to opt in for some awards and this is one of them!

If you haven’t been nominated for this award yet (or even if you have, but special shout out to those who haven’t), just comment “Tag Me!” below and you’re nominated!

So my fellow bloggers, what’s the one piece of advice you would have liked to have when you started your blog?

Thanks for reading!