#i get to be soooooo self-obsessed however and whenever i want. hope this helps <3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kbbeautyblog · 7 years

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I have to say, I have been going through some blog, review, writing and beauty transformations this month. It has just turned Spring in Australia, and the weather is warming up and you can feel it in the air. I am a Sagittarius, and I prosper around this time of the year, so I honestly didn’t find it surprising at all that September was a productive month for me with lots of changes. It can be VERY HARD to change your patterns and ways because personally, for me, I get anxious I am going to mess thing’s up, and somehow, not be able to go back (I know, weird). However, this month everything has just gone the way it has, and once I let go of that control, fear and sense of normalcy and routine, I started to try different things, and different ways of doing things, which just lead to more and more changes. I feel like I now have a completely new outlook, and in the future, I am going to be more open to change.

First thing’s first… I upgraded my plan to wordpress business class, and my god, it’s SOOOOOO GOOD. I can get any plug-ins or themes I want, which was my main reason for wanting to change. I wanted more flexibility and freedom, and the ability to present my content in a neater, informative way. The best part about upgrading to business is that I am still on the wordpress.com platform, meaning I don’t have to self host and can stay on the platform that I have came to know, and love. I am used to navigating wordpress.com, and the thing I have adored about it from the start is how simple and easy it is. The whole concept of wordpress.org and self hosting has confused the absolute hell out of me ever since I knew it existed, and when I looked into it for the fifth time, I was still as confused as the first time I researched it. I was JUST ABOUT to pay someone to help me migrate, when I decided to check out information on the wordpress.com Business Plan that I have had my eyes on for a while. After reading about it, and analysing and deciding if I wanted to pay the price, I made the decision to choose to stick to wordpress.com and to pay to upgrade, and let me tell you, I AM SOOOO GLAD I did!! If I chose to migrate, I know I would of regretted it, and would of probably then had to migrate back here, which would of cost me a lot of money in the end. When it comes to website technology, I am really bad. I don’t want the fuss, I don’t want to do everything myself, and quite frankly, I don’t want to mess with anything too complex when it comes to IT. It is a nightmare to me. Another thing that made me hesitant to move to self hosting is the fact that when you move to wordpress.org and self host, it’s all on you. Sure, you do have the support of whatever hosting site you choose, but you still have to manually update stuff, manually protect your site, etc. I have enough trouble getting content out in time, and this coupled with my difficulties with IT, I knew I just didn’t have the capacity, or patience, to do it alone.

The plan does cost extra, around $350.00 AUD a year, but to me it’s so worth it. I have a whole year to save up $350.00 AUD to pay the plan, and it’s amazing. WordPress Business Class is pretty much the equivalent of wordpress.org, except you get to stay on this platform. Anything that you can do when you self-host, you can do with wordpress.com business, meaning you get all the benefits of self hosting but still have the ease of having everything done for you, and support at your fingertips. I have been premium for a long time, and whenever I have had trouble all I do is instant message an engineer on here, and I have a response within a minute. It’s just so easy, so convenient and as I said, I am just so in-love with wordpress.com . I am still learning about plugins, etc, but I am finally starting to get the hang of it. One of my favourite plug-ins are table plug-ins. I have one by Supsystic, and I can create beautiful tables with data content which allows me to present everything more neatly. There are a million other plug-in’s too, but I am taking it one step at a time and focusing on content at the same time.

Here are some screenshots of the differences in admin/dashboard with the WordPress.com Business Plan

A big motivation for all the changes I have made is that I have FINALLY…. FINALLY……. GOT A PHOTOGRAPHY SET-UP that works for me! Let me tell you, It has been a massive, journey that has taken me years. The thing is, you can get advice from others, watch youtubers who show you their set up and how they do it, but everyone has a different house, different space and it’s a learning process. Everything in the beauty world in terms of blogging and photography is a journey that you have to do alone. No one is going to tell you exactly what they do, which is why I always failed when it came to trying to copy other people’s set up. This and I wasn’t taking into consideration my personal space and the room I have to dedicate to this space. I have also started to use a magnification mirror, which before I would of been scared petrified off (yeah, they go right into an inch of your face and show every pore), but they show you what’s going on. I can’t do my makeup without one now, and my review’s are way more accurate because I look in multiple mirrors from different lighting, including through a magnification mirror (these cost $10.00 off ebay btw). My Cannon Powershot SX510 HS is soooo old, and doesn’t have a view finder, so I use my magnification mirror to see what my camera is focusing on. If anyone want’s to know more about my set-up, let me know.

I have obviously slightly changed my method of writing, I am reviewing and testing products for longer periods of time to produce more thorough, informative reviews. I am not going to lie that in the past, I have got a product, tried it for a day and then made up my opinions on it. This doesn’t mean that I have ever not been honest, it just means that I have rushed through things in order to get post’s published and out on time. I’m having a hard time getting post’s out now, and I do feel anxiety and pressure, but I am no longer rushing the process. I am now treating products like I would treat a science project. I want to analyse every aspect of it. As a result, I have started doing products individually. For example, if a collection comes with 2 liquid lipstick’s and 2 highlighters, I am most likely going to do the highlighters and liquid lipstick’s in seperate posts, whereas before I would of put the whole collection in one post. I do have products backed up, and I am so slow now that some products I had planned on doing, I am no longer going to do (aka, I got the Kylie Cosmetics Birthday Collection Lip Products, but I have had so much to do, and so many other products to do, that I have decided to pass on it now as it’s not relevant when half the collection is sold out). I hope soon that I find a perfect balance and can get posts out quicker, but I am not going to skip over anything in order to do that.

As a result of all these changes, I have stopped obsessing over every SINGLE new release that comes out, which will be relevant when I post my newest anti-haul post, which is in the works. I have hardly been checking Trendmood’s instagram lately, and I will probably miss out on something I do want soon, lol! I have to say…. I used to just buy so much new stuff all the time… Even if I hated it, because I thought, oh-well, if I don’t like it, at least I can talk about it on my blog. At this point, I am sick of acquiring products that I never even touch after the first go, and my work-load is so big now and I have such a back-load of products to work on, that I simply dont have the time to buy stuff I know I hate!

There isn’t going to be many disruptions or changes in the type of content I post, just how I do it. One thing I do know is that I am probably not going to be able to get as many Beauty News Posts out anymore. I just have so many actual products to work on that it’s getting hard for me to keep up with beauty news, and as you probably know, Trendmood on Instagram is literally the queen of updates, and is the only one you need to follow to get updated!!!

That’s about it for this post babes, I usually don’t write personally posts like this because I don’t want to bore ya’ll, but I was in the middle of writing my Anti-Haul Post for September 2017, and I got on a massive tangent about all the changes I have made that it just made sense to make this it’s own post so I didn’t hijack that post completely lol!!

Thing’s that I am in the process of doing/ Ideas I have include……

I am going to make a seperate page for all types of products – highlighters, liquid lipstick’s, etc- that will compare prices, formula’s etc, in a more simple, informative way. I have to actually create a page template to have it formatted the way I want, which I can do through a million Plug-In’s, but this takes time to do and I am trying to do it in between of everything else. I also have to manually plug everything in, but once I get it up, it will be up so I am just trotting along at the pace I am.

A Lip Swatch Page that will contain all my lip swatches formatted in a way that you can compare more easily.

I would also like to create a better, more interactive community. I can actually get a plug-in that allows me to have members, and I am thinking of doing product give-away’s like this.

A massive thing I want to do is make a page where I can write about cosmetic chemistry and compare formula’s of different products. If you have tuned in to my previous posts, you will know that I like to chemically analyse products, and I want to create a page where you can click to formula’s and a comparison of the list will come up, with shared ingredients highlighted, etc. This will take me a while to get together, but it will come.

Normal posts- Fenty Beauty (Trophy Wife + Metal Moon Highlighters + one of the duo’s and 3 shimmer sticks) , Tarte Blush Book Swatches (and a review to follow), Kylie Cosmetic’s Matte Lip Kit Review + Re-Swatch , MAC X Nicki Minaj Lipstick’s, Spectrum X Mean Girls Collection + September 2017 Anti Haul, Nars Powermatte Liquid Lipstick First Impressions + More).

+ Other thing’s like that to make my site better to navigate for you all. I might eventually change my theme, but as I mentioned above, change can be scary and it’s one thing that I am a bit on the fence about because I like how everything is lol!!

P.S, I just want to show you how many DRAFTS I have. I work on soooooo many post’s 24/7 and it get’s a little crazy!!

Updates on My Blog, WordPress Business Plan, Photography Set Up + New Writing Style!!! (Personal) I have to say, I have been going through some blog, review, writing and beauty transformations this month.

#bblogger #bbloggers #beauty #cosmetics #makeup

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