Welcome to the first post of a new series I’m starting here on the blog! My intention is to make this a bi-monthly Friday post for at least the next few months – gauging on y’alls interest! I’ve had it on my heart over the past while to start sharing and documenting some of the growth that’s happening for this little business of mine. Partly to help stay on track, but also so that if any of you need help, guidance or direction on your own blogging journey, these posts can serve as that.

Want to be able to find this series later? Pin the image above!

As a quick little backstory for those of you who don’t know, I’m currently on my 6^th year of blogging. I started in 2014 shortly after G and I got married and, in terms of growth, its been a bit of a slow process. Throughout almost all of 2017, my blog, content and social accounts were pretty stagnant. We had recently moved from Tallahassee to Atlanta, bought a house, moved twice and in April we found out we were pregnant with our little boy. It was a LOT and it was a huge factor in my lack of growth for a while to be sure. Not only that, but I’ve rebranded my blog twice since its inception.. I know – not exactly helping myself out lol! But more on that later.

If you were to look at my rise and fall over the past 6 years (growth-wise) on a chart, it would definitely be a bell curve, but now it’s starting to rise again and I want to share with you some of the things I’m learning and some of the things that are working/not working!

I hope you’ll find this series as useful, or more so, as I intend it to be!

The Numbers.

So, let’s talk about the numbers. The image below depicts my blog’s traffic year over year (YoY) from 2018 to 2019. Sharing this is a little nerve-racking for me because some of you will see my overall numbers and think they’re small. But one thing you can’t deny is that 632% growth in page views isn’t very small at all.

When you take a look at the orange and blue graph – the blue is last year and the orange is the year before that – the year Fischer was born. He was born halfway through January and, as you can see, I didn’t really get back into blogging until around April. I remember that time. I remember feeling like I was starting all over again. So, I decided to rebrand and embrace a new beginning. That’s when Amanda Fontenot – the blog – formed (previously A Glimpse of Glam) and, from there, I really started to work at putting my nose to the ground. I was working part time from home as a contractor for my previous company while raising a newborn as a first-time mom. I remember it being a lot, but I powered through.

In early 2019 I quit my contract gig and decided to go all-in with my blog (and raising a toddler – haha). With the ability to focus more on my business, it started to grow and I didn’t shy away from blogging as we sold our home, bought a new one and started doing some minor renovations and heavy decorating. I started to thrive and started to learn so much!

So, that’s where this series comes in. I plan for my next post to be about the actual steps I took to attain the numbers I did – so I hope you’ll stay tuned!