How I doubled my pageviews in 30 days

It was a little over a month ago when I wrote this post. I'd been struggling with finding a job after our move from Estonia to Germany, and was feeling like a total loser. I was defeated and lost. But, looking back at it now, that day turned out to be a turning point for me. It forced me to get myself together and make a conscious decision. I could either keep fervently looking for a job and feel like sh*t in the meantime, or finally start taking myself seriously and act like this, my blog, was a real business. 

After I'd had a good cry, a heart to heart with my husband, and some time to think, I decided to go for the latter. I started working for myself full time. For the past 6 weeks, I've been getting up at 7am every morning and working for 12-14 hours every day to turn this blog into a business. If you've ever started a business, or tried to monetize your hobby, you might know how hard that is at first. Sure, I've been blogging for years, and sure, I've had thoughts of monetizing my blog many times before, but I had never made a commitment. 

Ever since I started this blog, I've been going back and fort between keeping this a hobby, turning it into a side-job, or going for a full creative career, depending how the week's stats were, and wether or not I'd made any Etsy sales, or had been featured somewhere. I was feeling awesome and so ready to be all business when things were going uphill, but quickly started doubting myself when the blog wasn't growing as quickly as I'd hoped, or the post I'd worked on for hours got mere crickets instead of millions of comments and shares. Ok, maybe not millions, but you get the point. 

What I've realized over the past 6 weeks, though, is that building a business is so different from just hoping to monetize a hobby, or make a little extra money on the side. Building is a conscious action, usually requiring a plan, some knowledge, and the right tools. Very different from hoping to build something. You don't accidentally build a table, right? Well, you don't accidentally build a business neither. Hoping is wishing something happened despite you. Building is making sure it happens in spite of everything else.

Which is not to say that a hobby-blog couldn't grow to a point where monetizing would happen almost by accident. Or, that when you start taking your blog seriously, from a business perspective, you'll be an instant success, and money would start pouring in. You know from my recent income report that's not true. What I am saying is that how you view your goal, whether it be growing a blog, or pursuing a creative career, will determine the rate of your growth, and infinitely better your chances of making those dreams real. Look at it this way - when you start walking from Tallinn to Rome without a map, you might still get there, but the chances are way better when you start with a clear route in mind and a map to guide you.

When I started Pearls & Scissors, I had a very clear vision for my blog and an intention of turning it into a profitable side-business. I remember being very excited back then about the prospect of making money doing what I loved. I even had some initial success. I had over 44 000 pageviews in the first month alone, and an average of over 39 000 pageviews/month for the first 6 months. My blog kept slowly growing, but at some point I felt it wasn't growing quickly enough. I wasn't getting the opportunities I thought I would be, and slowly but surely, I started to lose hope. Why wasn't this happening already? The thing is, I entered this with no idea how to get to where I wanted to go. And to be honest, I don't even think I knew exactly where that was. All I had was this elusive dream of a paycheck that had something or everything to do with my blog. So, I was basically hoping for success.

At some point I got tired and confused. Somewhere along the way I went back to being a hobby-blogger. Which is totally fun and cool, but not at all what I set out to do. When I wasn't getting the results I wanted fast, like yesterday, I gave up and hoped that things would magically happen for me. Time and again, I'd get inspired to give it another go. And another. And another. I hoped to build a business, but I didn't have the tools or knowledge, nor a plan. 

What I realize now is that hoping isn't enough. If I want to see results, I need to have a plan of action. If you keep hoping for things to happen, they might never. But if you make a plan, get the tools, learn what you must, and do what you can every single day, eventually you will make it happen.

So, how did I grow my blog from 35 000 pageviews a month to 75 000 pageviews in just 30 days?

1) I got my sh*t together and made a conscious decision to build a business.

2) I set myself smart goals I could attain, and a clear plan to follow.

3) I showed up each and every day and did my best.

I hope this inspires you to make a conscious decision to do the thing you've been hoping for. To take matters into your own hands, and make it happen instead of waiting for it to happen to you. 

xo. Hanna

P.S! If you haven't already, go an check out my awesome new crafty e-book!

DIY Blog Design // Tips and Resources for Blogger blogs

Last week, I shared 5 lessons I learned while DIYing my new blog design. Today, I tought I'd share my top tips and resources for creating your own blog design on Blogger. A lot of these are applicable on other platforms, too, but since I don't have any first-hand experience with them, I can't really give my word for it. I'm going to talk about the preparation of your elements, and the installment on the blog itself. Of course, everyone's design is different, and you might not find all the answers here, but I've rounded up some of the most used features.

Also, this is not a guide for creating a whole template from scratch, but ways to modify an existing Blogger Template. Most Bloggers will use the Simple template as the base, and I really recommend it. It's the closest you can get to a clean slate on Blogger. My custom template is also built on the Simple template. 

My top tips for creating your own template:

1. Map out the layout. After you've done your design homework on colors, fonts, and the feel of the new site, start mapping out the layout. Where do you want the header to be? The top is the most common place, but I've also seen a lot of cool designs with the header on top of the sidebar. Where do you want your menu bar (or navigation bar) to go? One sidebar or two? Which elements to put into the sidebar and so on. Once you're happy with your vision, make a list of all the elements you need to design. 

Relevant resources:

How to add a custom image to your header

How to replace the template header with a custom header

How to add a custom navigation bar

Ideas for your footer

2. Size matters. Before designing your elements, you need to kno how wide your blog and columns need to be (mine are: total 1100px, sidebar 360px). One thing to know about blogger is that it has a lot of padding (space around elements) coded into the template, which you need to take into account when you create the custom images for your design elements (like header, sidebar dividers, etc.) This is something that really annoys me about Blogger templates, because you have to figure out how wide a sidebar really needs to be to fit a 300px wide element. My experience says you've got to add about 50 to 60px. So, my blog is 1100px wide, but my header is actually 1050px wide, and my sidebar images are all 300px. And, I now size all my images in the posts to be 650px wide. If you're thinking about offering sidebar ads, the most common size is 300px wide (by 250px), so that's also something to consider. 

Relevant resources:

How to remove padding from the header

How to reduce space between sidebar elements

3. Make templates for design elements. When you're working with Photoshop to create your design elements, save a .psd of each item with all the layers, so you can make modifications easily. You won't really get the big picture before you see the element in the whole design, so there might be times you want to change the font size, or color, or you need to make something smaller or bigger. This makes it so much easier. And, keep the psd-file current, meaning save tweaks. I have all my .psd files in a folder, so whenever I need to for example change my navigation bar, or add a sidebar divider, or change up the posts in the favorites category, I can do that easily.

Relevant resources:

4. Learn basic HTML and CSS. I know, you're probably rolling your eyes right now, and it seems super intimidating. But, think of it this way. When you're going to a foreign country, and you know no-one speaks English there, it makes sense to learn the basic phrases in their native language, right? It's the same thing with doing your own blog design. Unless you hire someone to actually install all the design elements, or get a friend to do it, you need to learn the basics of Internet language. All the things that you see in the internet are actually made up of code, called HTML, and a lot of the things are styled using CSS. Think of CSS (Cascading Styling Sheets) as the garnish on top of the HTML pie. First you need to bake the pie, and then you can add some garnish to style it if you'd like. 

Relevant resources:

The best place for all things HTML and CSS

5. Don't be intimidated to alter code. Once you and HTML know each other a little better, changing your template code won't seem like such a big deal anymore. However, always ALWAYS make back-up of your template before applying any changes, so that if anything goes wrong, you can easily fix it. When you add code, you can just delete what you just added and everything goes back to normal. 

Adding custom CSS is even easier. You can add all the CSS you need by going to Template -> Customize -> Advanced -> Add custom CSS.

6. Make a test blog. I briefly mentioned this in my previous post as well, but you really need to test all the code and the elements you want to create. And by testing, I mean creating a separate private blog and trying to install the whole template like you want it there. Since Blogger has it's own system of building code, it only makes sense to test your template on another Blogger blog. There is a problem however. So, the way Blogger works is that each sidebar element you create is a separate entity of HTML, and has it's own name in the blog template code (like HTML1, HTML2 and so on) based on the order you added them. The tricky thing is, you can't just download the template (from Template -> Back-up/Restore) and then up-load it to your real blog, since the widgets aka the sidebar elements are not embedded in that code. In the template code, those elements are only referenced with their name. So, when you would up-load the template to your blog which already has a bunch of widgets (like your archive, popular posts, follow buttons and so on) that are also named HTML1, HTML2 and so on, it would replace the element that was already named HTML1 on your blog with the HMTL1 from the test-blog. So, when the HTML1 on your original blog is not in the exact same spot as on your test blog, you're in trouble, because all your elements will be in random places. 

There are several options for addressing this issue. You could find out all the names of your blog widgets, and start adding them to the test blog in that order (so that if your archive is named HTML6, the archive would be the sixth element you add to your test-blog). Another way would be to manually overwrite the code in your widgets with the code in you test-blog widgets. This way, you wouldn't be up-loading a whole new template, but rather just updating the old template. This would also mean, you need to take note on which elements you added custom CSS and change those widget names according to the widget names on your original blog. You could also change the widget names manually in the code to correspond to the widget names from the original blog before you make the template switch. This should also eliminate the problem.

Most importantly, make a back-up of the old template before you make any changes.

Other resources:

How to remove "Powered by Blogger" attribution

How to remove "Posts (Atom)" from the footer

How to add a custom "Pin it" button to images on your blog

How to remove shadow and border from all images in Blogger posts

7. Take a course, if you can. If you have the funds for it, take an e-course about designing your own blog. I made my first custom design following the Blog(Design)Love e-course from A beautiful Mess. I learned all the basic coding from there and a lot of the stuff was already coded for me, so I didn't really have to know a lot, just copy and paste. They now have a new version of this course out called Blog (Design) Love 2.0. I haven't taken it, but I bet it's also very good, or even better than the old version. 

I hope some of this will be helpful to some of you. If you have any questions or would like to know more about any other aspects of creating a custom blog design, let me know in the comments. 

xo. Hanna

5 Things I Learned // DIY Blog Design

1. Inspiration is key. What I have learned from all 3 of my DIY blog designs so far is that it's all about inspiration. When I have enough inspiration, it's so much easier to start creating. And when I've created with lots of inspiration, I'm so much happier with the end result (versus, when I'm not, which was the case with my last layout). 

It really comes down to creating a clear vision for the design. What do you want it to feel like? What adjectives would you like others to use to describe it? I asked a lot of this kind of questions from myself before getting started and when I was looking at other designs, too. I collected logos, patterns, colors, fonts, and really tried to envision what I wanted the end result to be like. 

2. Take your time. This is always the most difficult step for me. I can be really inpatient when I'm working on something. I want it to be done yesterday. But, when I was designing, I realized I need to take it slow and let things sit for a while. Maybe that font I found so amazing today won't feel that great tomorrow. Or, that color-scheme I chose might need tweaking after I've "slept on it". 

3. Always test first. I created a new private test blog to test things out before I installed them to my real blog, and I'm so glad I did. I ran into so many troubles, it took me literally days to figure them all out. The designing part was a breeze compared to the coding aka getting things to look just right. 

Which brings me to my next point.

4. There are no unique problems. When it came down do putting the design into code, there were a lots of things to figure out. Why doesn't the header fit? How can I make the links underlined? How do I center this god damn header? Why the hell is the search bar not moving to the right? (Yep, the language kept getting better and better as days went by). 

Luckily, I realized, I was not the first one to run into those problems. Loads of other DIY web-designers had already ran into the same things. So, me and Google spent some quality time together, and figured it out together. 

5. Patience is more important than skill. Yes, it would be awesome if I was already a HTML and CSS wiz, but I'm not. I'm a lot better at it that I was a week ago, but I'm nowhere near good. But, as long as I have the patience, chances are, I'm going to make it work. Case in point - the Favorite Posts section. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why after applying all the appropriate CSS to the image links, they were not showing correctly on Chrome. Other browsers were fine. I spent hours trying to come up with a solution. And just as I was ready to throw in the towel, I figured it out. Everything can be done, even if you don't know how at the beginning. Just have patience (and google the life out of it). 

I'm going to share the best resources I found in a future post, so other DIY designers could maybe save themselves a few hours and grey hairs. 

As for my new design, I'd like to point out just a couple of things that are new. 

First, I'm starting a mailing list aka the lovelist. This is not the same as subscribing to posts via e-mail. If you subscribe to the list, you will receive e-mails from me that are not going to be published here on the blog. I'll send out early bird notices on new arrivals to the shop, special promotions, some behind the scenes action I won't share on the blog, and one exclusive DIY project a month. These are projects only the people on the mailing list will receive. You can subscribe on the sidebar, or by clicking the link below this post.

Secondly, you might have noticed the new "Blog Shop" link on the menu bar. I make a lot of things, and sometimes not all of those things are keepers. Sometimes I make something just because I love the idea, but I really don't need the result. Or, I love the process so much, I'd love to create more than one. And not all of them fit into my Etsy shop. So those will end up there. I will be adding the remainder of the Love Art there soon, and maybe a few other Creative10 projects will find their home there. 

Whew! That's a lot of talk for today. I hope you've had a wonderful weekend, and I wish you an energized start to a new week!

xo. Hanna

Pearls & Scissors turned 2 and thoughts on blogging

I spent the majority of this week organizing my blog archives (you can check them out from the navbar above). A tedious, yet very rewarding job. It was fun going through all the project I've done over the past 2 years, and seeing how many pretty things I've made. The official birthday of this little blog of mine was at the end on July, but I was too busy with the wedding to take note or celebrate. So, I thought I'd take a moment today to reflect back on these past 2 years.

I've talked about this before, but my blogging journey is much longer than the lifespan of Pearls & Scissors. I've gone through two blogs before launching this, and there have definitely been some growing pains for me as a blogger. But, the one thing that still rings true is that I love blogging. Even if I get too busy sometimes and don't post as often as I'd like, I couldn't imagine my life without it. I love connecting with you, I love sharing my creative ventures, projects, ideas, inspiration, and the curveballs life keeps throwing at me. And, I love being a part of the bigger blogging community of amazingly talented and inspirational people.

As I go into this new year of blogging, I'm facing some really tough questions. Like, where do I go from here? What do I want this place to be? How do I see my blog in a year/5 years/10 years? Those are all really important questions, and not all of them are easy to answer at this point. At the same time, I'm so excited to think about all the routes this venture could take, to dream up the perfect picture of Pearls & Scissors, and where it might lead me.

So, I thought I'd throw some of those questions at you, my dear readers. I always appreciate all your insight and thoughts, so I'd like to hear from you: What would you like to see more of on Pearls & Scissors?
And a really fun one: How would you imagine the future of Pearls & Scissors?

I'd love to chat with you on the comments, so do say Hi and leave me your thoughts.

Thank you so much for being a part of this blog, for visiting, and for all your incredibly kind words you've sent me over these past 2 years! Without you blogging wouldn't be fun at all :)

xo Hanna

Sunday Spirit: Blog news and some delicious chocolate rolls

This is one of those odd posts with a bunch of things thrown together. I just have a few things I wanted to share with you.

First things first. When you're ever in Tallinn, you have to try out these chocolate rolls from the local Narva cafe. They are to die for! I'm serious. For some odd reason they only have them once in a blue moon (I haven't figured out their torturous scheme yet), but they are so worth the wait.

Now that that's out of my system, we can move on to other news. I've been taking the Blog Life e-course from A Beautiful Mess, and loving every lesson. I highly recommend it to everyone thinking about starting a blog (for fun or with a career in mind) and to seasoned bloggers as well. I'm learning so much and feeling so inspired. The biggest noticeable change I've made since starting the course is joining Google Adsense and serving ads on my sidebar. So, I know that advertising on blogs is a very controversial topic. Some people don't mind sponsors and sponsored content, but for some it spoils the fun, and it can look a little tacky.

So, it thought I'd share some of my thought on this topic. At this point, I feel I need to start monetizing my blog more to be able to keep up with the quality of the content I want to share with you. I'd love to share more original DIYs and refashions (we all love a good DIY, right), but that takes a lot of time. As a student with a small income, that time should be spent on making a living. So, if I want to keep blogging, I need to make it a part-time job. And I really want to continue blogging.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Why do I blog?

It seems that Elsie's post about blogging sparked a discussion in the blogosphere. For me, it couldn't have come at a better time. I've been asking myself some hard questions lately, one of them being "Why do I blog?". Not an easy question to answer as it turns out. Elsie and Melissa both wrote about some interesting points that made me dig deeper into the question of why. So, to organize my thoughts, and maybe spark yours, I thought I'd write about my own blogging journey and the reasons behind it.

the design of my first blog is still a little embarrassing

I started my very first blog back in February 2008. I shared my craft projects on a very popular Estonian crafting site that brought together a community of like-minded people, and I really wanted to be a part of it. I remember the anxiety and excitement before hitting the publish button for the very first time. Will people like what I do? Will anybody comment? Will I be accepted into the community? I couldn't check my comment form often enough to see whether someone had noticed me.

Fast forward to 2009. I got some attention, but I wasn't really happy with my blog. It just wasn't inspiring me anymore. I craved change, a wider audience, and a fresh start. So, I created my second blog Hapa's Eco Renewals (not the best name, unfortunately) and started blogging in English instead of my native Estonian. That's when I really dove into the blogging world. I started following other creative bloggers and blogging more and more. A year into my second blog I first started to think about maybe someday turning my blog into some sort of business venture. At that time I wasn't really sure about my university studies and I couldn't seem to find my true passion. I loved making things, so why not make that my career?

Then, in 2011 I decided to go for my childhood dream of becoming a singer. From the first lessons I was hooked and I felt I'd found my true passion. That feeling has not changed. All the while I kept blogging and even with my passion for singing, my multi-passionate mind couldn't let go of the idea of creating a successful blog. So, in 2012 I created Pearls & Scissors.

Finally, after all these years of trial and error I created something I was proud of. I worked very hard on this blog, at the same time getting my Master's degree in psychology, and studying singing full-time. It was a crazy year, but I managed to juggle it all. Then life happened and I had to put the blog on the back-burner. Now, I finally feel settled again and I find myself at the cross-roads, again - do I continue blogging as just a hobby, or do I turn it into a side business?

I still haven't made up my mind. There are pros and cons to both ways of blogging. But, no matter what road I (or you) take, the most important thing is to remember why I started in the first place, and why I keep on blogging. Here's my top 3 reasons:

1. It's fun! For me, this has always been the point that brings me back to blogging, even if I've lost the drive for awhile. I think it should always be fun. Even if you're monetizing your blog, blogging should still bring you joy. Without the fun factor, it can feel like just a lot of hard work (which it is). That's also the biggest concern for me when it comes to monetizing my blog. I wonder if I'm still going to feel the excitement when I know I have to create posts to keep my promise to my sponsors? Will I have enough creative energy to keep this blog thriving? And, above all else, do I really have the time to give it my best? I wouldn't want to compromise my dream of becoming an operatic singer, because that is my ultimate goal. But, that is a longer discussion for another post.

2. I love to share and interact! Connection is the second key concept in blogging for me. I wouldn't be blogging if I just wanted to document my creative endeavors. I wouldn't be creating tutorials, if I didn't want to share my knowledge. I wouldn't be commenting if I didn't want to connect. Without you to share my thoughts, inspiration, ideas, and projects with, this blog would be worthless to me. So, thank you for sticking with me for a shorter or longer period! I value every single comment and e-mail you've sent. And I'd love to connect even more in the future.

3. I want to inspire! Seeing that somebody is inspired by my tutorial or has used it to make something for themselves is like a high for me. I love helping people, so it's such a thrill to see that my knowledge and ideas have helped someone bring more creativity into their lives. Because, creativity is the best therapy, right? I truly believe in that, and I hope I can keep on inspiring.

Now, I'd love to hear from you - Why do you blog? 

Thank you for reading!