Remember last week when I talked about my AHA! moment? As soon as it hit me, I knew things needed to change. I needed to make this blog more like my home. Some place that directly reflected me and left a nice cozy, welcoming feeling every time I posted. So I finally made the move to do just that. I invested a lot more time, effort, and even a bit of money into making this more of me and am really pleased with how it turned out.

If you’re reading this post via email or in a reader, click over and check it out!
I’d love to hear your thoughts :)

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I’m looking for one crafty lady (or dude for that matter) who would be interested in joining the After Nine To Five contributor team as a Tutorial writer. We’re looking for a glue gun loving, glitter sprinkling writer that can produce between 1-4 original tutorials a month and wants to get paid to do it. Tutorials should be fit for women in their 20s and 30s without children as this is the bulk of the demographic for blog readers.

As mentioned above, you will be paid for each post written + other benefits are included with the role. Other benefits include:

• Free advertising every month on After Nine To Five
• Free inclusion every quarter in the Seasonal Gift Guide (if you are a shop owner)
• Spotlight features on After Nine To Five
• Acknowledgment at the top of each post written
• Sidebar feature
• and more!

For more information on the role + the payment information, please email me at afterninetofive@gmail.com no later than Friday and I’ll send over the details!

I tuned in to the Blog Trends chat for the first time this week and honestly? I am SO glad that I did. I’m going to take a moment and get really honest with you here, just like I did in the chat.

I haven’t paid for advertising for this blog in over 6 months.

Now that doesn’t mean I haven’t worked my butt off advertising the blog in other ways. Guest posts, interviews, ad swaps, social media, emails – I made sure to promote my blog in plenty of ways for those 6+ months. In my mind, plenty of the right ways for myself and my blog.

Sure, it would have been much quicker to hand over the money and send over the button, but it never really worked for me. The amount I’d pay for the views I received, and even more so the amount of true readers or customers I received, never made sense to me. So I stopped doing it. Yet I continued on with paid advertising on my blog.

And thinking about it now, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

How could I decide to not do something and yet still offer it to other people? If I didn’t believe in it enough to do it myself, am I really the right person to be asking someone else to do it? I don’t feel like I am. Not at all.

Even more so, remember when I talked about writing more like it’s a journal? I never rented space out in my journal. It was for my eyes only. And there was no price anyone could put on it. I know for a fact that I can’t write like it’s my journal if I’m focusing on who’s willing to hand over the cash for a spot on my sidebar.

So for now – and probably a long while – ad sales are completely non-existent.

Instead I’m going back to when I was a much smaller blogger, focusing on the relationships I can build with other people and focusing on the content I know I’m capable of writing. Focusing on rebuilding the fundamentals of why I started blogging.

Everyone that has paid for advertising will get what they paid for, but from this point forward – I’ll be focusing on ad swaps. If you’d like to see more information, you can check out the advertising page. Otherwise shoot me an email if you’re interested in swapping ads!

And for those of you that do charge for advertising – I’m not judging. This is purely a personal decision with no right or wrong answer. This is what works for me right now, nothing more.

Remember a while ago when I wrote the Monday’s Memos posts? Yeah, those haven’t happened for a while.

Maybe it was just the whole “I need to break my own rules for a while” thing or maybe it was the fact that I usually forgot all of my memos by the time the post came around. Whatever it was, I wanted to find a way to re-introduce those mini-ramblings back into the blog. Just because I seem to have a ton of thoughts that aren’t big enough to form complete posts that go beyond 3-4 sentences doesn’t mean that they can’t be posted here.

So I thought why not add them to all of my posts?

Why not add a mini-post at the end of my posts with those random thoughts that flood my mind in the shower, at the grocery store, and right before I go to sleep? They may not have anything to do with the post or any relevance to my writing/blog/business at all, but I want to get them out there. I want to be real. Even if real is weird, odd, random, and just downright crazy.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do just that. And hopefully you guys will make me feel like I’m not crazy for thinking these things.

If you’re viewing this from a reader, click over!

After Nine To Five has an all new look to go with the changes coming next week! Starting on Monday, we’ll have:

• multiple weekly link-ups
• regularly featured contributors
• more tips on helping you grow your business + blog
• more inspiration
• more shop + features
• more ways for you to get traffic to your shop

Essentially more of everything A9T5 has been known for in the past and then some. Be sure to stop by each day next week because we’ll be adding some new each day!

Happy weekend everyone!

This has been a year of change for me.

A decision to move to Florida.

A leap from jewelry to home decor in our shop.

The decision to take portions of this blog and create another.

Essentially all of these decisions have lead to one thing: starting over. Whether it be where I live, or what I do for a living, this year has taken me back to square one in a lot of areas of my life.

Maybe square one isn’t entirely correct because I have so much more knowledge now. Maybe it’s square one version 2.0? Starting over, but with a better feel for what I’m doing, where I want to go and a much clearer idea of how I’m going to get there.

I don’t regret a single choice I’ve made, but I haven’t entirely adapted to my choices either. Maybe it goes back to the post from Tuesday on owning who I am (and not what I think others think I should be) or maybe it’s just me taking the slow road to total acceptance of my journey. Maybe I haven’t taken the time to step back and look what starting over really means to me. I’m not sure. But whatever the reason, it’s time I stop hiding behind what was and own what is.

Starting on Monday, this blog will changing over to what I had hoped it would be when I decided to split the blog in two.  A new look, new features, and some other new things that will be announced next week as I finish the details on them. I am looking for some assistance with some of the changes so if you’re interested in helping a girl out with some of the following, shoot me an email!

• Contributors that are self-employed (or soon to be), handmade business owners, dream followers, diy tutorial enthusiasts, creative/crafty types, or just generally inspired and motivated people
• Shop owners / bloggers that would be interested in doing interviews

This has been on my mind the past couple of days and while I’m loving Blog Positivity Week, I feel like it’s time for this to be said.

I was late in joining the Pinterest party.

I didn’t need another thing to kill time and honestly, I’m just not one to get into things right away. Eventually I signed up and would spend a few hours pinning things every week, never thinking twice about it. It was just a way to keep all the things I loved together and share things with others.

But then I started hearing about the Terms of Service. And let’s be honest - I never read them.

This post made the most sense of them all. It explained everything I was missing, yet everything that was insanely important at the same time. It showed me that the things I pinned were no longer just a part of my inspirational files. They had become things that Pinterest could sell. Things that they would hold me accountable for because I pinned them. Things that would cost me time and money because I’d have to face someone’s lawyer.

All of this left me so disheartened about Pinterest that I deleted my account immediately.

Yes I love the things I have pinned.

Yes I may have lost some beautiful photos, recipes, ideas, etc.

But it wasn’t worth it for me. I wasn’t going to wait to get sued. And I wasn’t willing to put someone else’s work (who had no choice in the matter) out there for Pinterest to use as they wished even if it did have credit given to them. I couldn’t justify it in any way. So I walked away.

Luckily for me, while I was reading through the endless amounts of information, I found another site that’s incredibly similar in nature. Clipix. However, there’s a key difference: you can set all of your boards to private. Which means anything I find inspiring, I can still keep in a centralized location. The images and resources I save just won’t be shared with the world and cause unnecessary harm to myself or the fellow artists I tried ot support via Pinterest.

While this does prevent me from spreading the word about handmade business I love as easily, I know that there’s got to be a better way than giving someone easy access to ripping them off. Be it through my Friday Favorite series or the Saturday Showcase (both back next week!), or through Twitter and Facebook, I’ll be making an effort to help support you in a way that gives you full credit and doesn’t result in negative backlash for anyone.

And for those of you that want a code that says “no pinning allowed from this website”: You can find out how to in the Pinterest help page by looking at “What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned?

However, it invalidates my feed when I do it so be sure to ensure that it doesn’t do it to your site, too. Until I square that issue away . . . I simply ask that you don’t pin images from here along with the rest of my don’t steal things and please ask for permission wording.

On the flip side: I know that many continue to use Pinterest and by all means, that is your choice. But please be considerate to those you choose to pin as they may not be okay with the terms and conditions that Pinterest has. In the end, you’ll be held liable so it’s kind of a lose-lose situation for everyone.

UPDATE: Pinterest actually updated their TOS today (you can read it on their blog) with new things going into effect on April 6th. I personally will not be returning to Pinterest, but it does look like they are going in the right direction.

With the changes I announced yesterday, I felt it was time to change things up around here, too!

So if you’re reading this in through a reader, click over and check out the changes I made!

While I loved the layout before, I felt like I outgrew it too quickly. I changed pretty much everything but the sidebar locations and column widths with the new layout and am absolutely in love with it. By far my favorite one yet. There are new buttons if you’d like to grab one as well. :)

What do you think?

If you didn’t notice today (or you’re reading through a reader of sorts) – I updated the blog look! I figured it would be a good time to freshen up around here since I’m trying to figure out my new direction. There is a lot more than the header that changed, plus yesterday I added a ton of new sponsors (and some fabulous returning ones) to the blog so click over and check it out!

Happy Weekend Everyone!