I am officially dropping the “Day #” title from this point on! It has been a great one hundred days of blogging but I am relieved it’s over. I learned a lot about myself while sharing little pieces of my life with all of you. When I started blogging back in June it was only supposed to last seven days. I was doing it to help inspire me to write for my music journalism project but I ended falling in love with it and turned it into a full-time project. I am extremely happy with my decision to dedicate all my time to this blog and I want to reflect on these past one hundred days.
Reflection:
During these past one hundred days, I have come to a realization, that for the longest time I wanted to ignore. The realization was that people were genuinely interested in learning about what it is like to live with a “terminal disease”. I use terminal very lightly here because times have changed this fact. This is no longer a disease that has a ticking clock.
To be completely honest with all of you, I never wanted to share any of my struggles, especially ones pertaining to Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Throughout my entire life, I have kept quiet about them, only sharing my struggles with my mother and recently my significant other. I have always had the mentality that everyone has their problems and mine are not any thing special.
This all changed after I released an article titled “SMA and Frustration“. I could not believe how popular that post became because I wrote it with so much anger in my blood. It made me feel sick and disgusted with myself to hit the publish button that day. I was not looking forward to all the pity and sympathy that was going to be in the comments but to my surprise, there was not much at all. The messages I received reassured me that people were actually interested in hearing that side of my life. This is when my mentality towards writing about SMA and my struggles started to shift.
Focus:
Now my blog is heavily focused on living with a disability and the struggles that come with it. I have made it very clear that I do not want to be an ambassador for SMA or any charity organizations that are related to it. A charity organization that involves SMA has already reached out to me and I politely turned down working with them.
I do promote a lot of charities and have donated some of the money I have attained from blogging. I am going to continue to do this but it will always be on my own accord. This is just a personal thing and I have nothing against any of the SMA related charity organizations.
Please remember this, I am NOT an ambassador for my disease or anything disability related. There are better people out there for that and I am definitely not one of them.
I will continue to have the random artsy or interest post but I will be focusing mostly on disability related topics.
Monetization:
As of right now, I have made a little over $200 from blogging for one hundred days. I have decided to not place ads on my website because I dislike ads in general. Most of the money I have made has been from the merchandise sale and people donating me crypto currency. I plan on continuing down this path of monetization because I feel like it is the least intrusive way possible.
Patreon is something I would like to focus on more in the future. It is an excellent way for content creators to make money while staying genuine to the work without selling themselves to sponsorships. I need your help with creating ways I could reward my patrons via their tiered reward system. I will leave a link below to ways you can support blog, you can find my Patreon there.
What’s Next:
I will be taking all of next week off because I need to give my arm a rest and work on a letter I have been putting off for awhile now. When I return, my publishing schedule will be Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the occasional random day. This will give my arm the opportunity to rest and I can work on more thought out articles.
In October, I will be taking off the entire month because a special visitor will be staying with me. You will find out more about that at a later date. It is a secret for the time being.
When I return in November, I will be launching a brand new line of merchandise. This time around, I have someone designing a few awesome looking logos. I will be donating a much larger portion of the proceeds to a charity we choose. I saved the best part for last, the selection of merchandise you can buy will be quite a bit larger. Different designs, styles, and choices of merchandise! I want to turn this into a holiday extravaganza!
Wrap Up:
This isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of a wild and crazy journey. I feel extremely fortunate to have an awesome group of readers. I would have never ever thought there would be people who were interested in following and reading my writing. Thank you so very much, from the bottom of my heart. You are making my dreams come true with every article I publish. See all of you next Monday and make sure to spread the word if you enjoyed.
This month’s book:
Support the blog here
Support the victims of Hurricane Harvey here
Here’s a photograph a good friend sent me today and I thought it was appropriate for this post:
