2 years, 9 months, and 21 days.
It’s been almost 3 years since we started our blog, Adventure á la Mode. We knew what we envisioned. We knew what we wanted it to be, but at the very beginning, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t have a few setbacks.
It seems everyone wants to start a blog. Many of them don’t last beyond a few months… and we get why now. It’s hard. It’s really difficult to work full-time jobs and build/run a fully-functioning website, along with updating all of its social media platforms. It’s hard to meet deadlines and criteria set for collaborations. It’s hard to keep up with e-mails. It’s hard to create affiliate links 24/7. And it’s sometimes even hard to find time to take photos and write articles. But we love it. And that’s why we’ve been willing to put the time in for 3 years.
Within a few months of starting ALM, we noticed all of the big bloggers (we’re talking the famous ones who don’t have to work a job in addition to their blog lol) were on RewardStyle’s LIKEtoKNOW.it. LTK is a way to monetize your links. When people shop and make a purchase via your link, you get commission! Well, we decided we had to apply! We excitedly filled our our application in March of 2017 for the exclusive LTK, but a week later, our smiles turned to frowns as we received an e-mail saying we weren’t accepted and would need to wait 6 months to apply again. Oh.
It’s fine, we thought. We just need to put more work in. We need to get our website looking more professional, get more content up, and tag more outfits so our posts are more shoppable. In the meantime, we signed up for ShopStyle Collective, a less exclusive affiliate-linking program, and were accepted promptly. We used this to link our products and monetize until the 6-month mark rolled around again. And on that day, we excitedly resubmitted our application.
A week later, an e-mail from LTK arrived! Denied. WHAT!? Again? But how? No explanation given, no way of contacting LTK. We were crushed. Our website was looking great. Our Instagram had an aesthetic. We had everything all the other bloggers wrote that we needed in their How to Get Accepted blog posts. So, we got mad. And we wrote off LTK. If they didn’t like all of our traveling posts and our daily clever quotes, that was too bad; we weren’t about to change who we were. We would do our thing and we’d do it without LTK.
In the meantime, we created an Amazon Affiliate account. Both of us do a good bit of shopping via Amazon Prime and have a lot of good products to share. Our Amazon links seemed to do really well and our ShopStyle account was doing great too! We were traveling and seeing new places, but also sharing our best fashion and beauty finds! We had evolved into our own category of blog and we were happy with that. We weren’t like all the blogs we had been reading for years.. and that was OK. People began following and reading and collaborations were rolling in. What made us different also made us marketable.
We continued to be us and our blog continued to grow, gaining more readers and followers. We shared real stories and we opened our hearts. We were happy with where we were. One evening, we were talking as we worked on a collaboration. We decided to try to apply for LIKEtoKNOW.it once more. After all, it had been over a year. We had integrated more fashion through the years and our blog website was looking great. We nervously hit the submit button. Within a few hours, we received an e-mail with our response… Welcome to the RewardStyle team! WE WERE IN.
The same week, we got invited to become influencers for Amazon. This allowed us to go beyond creating affiliate links (like we had been doing for a few years) and create a storefront, where we can share our favorite products, along with shoppable posts right on Amazon’s website.
The moral of the story… well, there’s two. Good things take time. And good things come to those who work hard. ♡
We’re still the same. We’re Ashley & Erin, who love to travel the world, try new things, and post funny quotes for you every day. But now, we have better tools for showcasing, sharing, and linking all of the clothes, shoes, beauty items, technology, and home items we love so much– and more freedom when it comes to linking exact items. That’s a major plus!
So, how does this all work? Well, if you’re not signed up for LIKEtoKNOW.it, we highly recommend it. We use it to follow all of our favorite bloggers too! It allows you to shop posts via screenshot! When you screenshot an LTK post on Instagram, you receive an e-mail with links to the items in the photo or you can view the items in the LTK app. Our LIKEtoKNOW.it page is linked here (follow us!) and all of our shoppable posts are also uploaded to our social media accounts (FB, Insta, & Twitter).
Being Amazon Influencers, we now have our own storefront on Amazon.com that allows you to see what we recommend and how we’ve styled items we’ve purchased. You can check out our Amazon Store here.
In addition to this exciting news, we have some awesome collaborations coming up too– but we will let those be a surprise. 😉
2019 has been an amazing year for Adventure á la Mode, but we have a feeling 2020 is going to be our best yet.
Thank YOU for reading what we have to say. We are working every day to make this blog even better. ♡
xo,
Ash & Er
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