Blogging

I got my first hate comment on my @sparklesofjoy IG account! Have I made it, maa? I’ll tell you about it in a sec and how to deal with hate comments But first, in the last week, I’ve been working hard on my snail mail for September This month’s theme is all about saving and investing- basically, how to grow your money safely I’ve decided to stop trying to be like all the other arty mail clubs and lean into real topics that my community has always been interested in. Topics I am personally…

I write this after one of the most intense 2 weeks of my year. My lovely Irish family came to visit, and I wanted to give them the best experience as it was the first time my husband’s family had visited Malaysia. This meant I dedicated 2 weeks to playing tour guide while also pulling my little girl out of nursery so they could spend as much time with her as possible. I was more than happy to do so, of course! Unfortunately, halfway through their visit, my beloved grandfather passed away. It…

Hey there! A lot has happened since my last email. You can read it here to catch up on me giving advice to a friend when we were both finding life and our new snail mail businesses difficult to grow I shared some of the things I was telling myself to keep going when something isn’t growing as quickly as you’d hoped. Well, I thought I’d give you a little update. Things are better. Not “I woke up to 10,000 customers and retired” better 😂 But quietly, steadily better. I wanted to share some…

I got this email from a new friend today, shes also just started a snail mail subscription She responded to this reel I posted and sent me this message : ”Girl, you must be in my brain, lol…SO incredibly disheartened by this whole social media algorithm situation. TikTok has been miscategorizing my content this past 2 months and I’m guessing insta has as well. TikTok has labeled my stuff with Amazon kdp, some artists name, label printing, post office, you name it. It’s exasperating because…

I write this email at 5 am on a Friday- why? Well, my baby is asleep, and I want to knock some work out before she wakes O_O It feels great to want to wake up so early to steal precious time to work! Anyway, I am in month 2 of running my side hustle: a monthly paid snail mail subscription! You can check it out here; I updated the sale page. Let me know what you think 🙂 It’s been a wild learning curve. When I launched, it was crickets O_O But now I have 33 paying subscribers! It’s my birthday…

Hey there, Quick question: what’s stopped you from selling anything online so far? If you’re like most people who reply to these emails, the answer is some version of “I don’t have an audience yet.” You don’t have an email list, and maybe you only have a handful of Instagram followers, mostly friends. So the plan becomes: grow the audience first, sell… someday. …which becomes never because you get overwhelmed and demotivated. Now, back to that first sale. Here’s the thing nobody tells you…

So this week, an email subscriber asked me this exact question. And I’ll be honest with you – after everything Google has pulled with these updates, I caught myself asking the same thing. Late at night, staring at my traffic graphs, wondering if I’d been wasting my time all these years. O_O Should I jack it all in and go back to corporate? Is it even worth the effort anymore? But here’s where I landed, and I mean this: absolutely, blogging is still worth it. What’s changed is the definition…

Hi there, If you are like me when I started, trying to figure out all the ‘admin’ you need to do before you actually start your business might actually put you off starting entirely! Bank accounts, tax, legal compliance! O_OMost online business owners think about legal compliance the same way they think about going to the dentist. They know they should, they keep meaning to, and they assume they’ll deal with it before anything goes wrong.The problem is that legal blind spots don’t announce…

I recently talked about how 3 months after having a baby, I was allergic to the word ‘hustle’ and bros living in tree houses in Costa Rica’s microdosing on magic mushrooms… You can read about it here if you missed it I realize now, I was burnt out and I lost all motivation for work (and life actually, not to sound dramatic) I would wake up, tired, and have no desire to do anything. Nothing seemed to bring me excitement anymore. It felt pretty bleak 🙁 I started to question if I should burn…