Goodbye and Welcome

Okay, I'm doing this.  First off, this is not really good-bye at all, it's just the end of the first act. For the past 3 years I have been burning my fingers with hot glue, camera hanging around my neck, cobbling together what is now an archive of over 450 posts, many of which capture my children in sweet, well-lit moments, growing older before my eyes. Poppy Haus was the project I created to help stay engaged with the outside world while getting them through their early years at home, a period of time for me to consider my next professional step. What began as Make-Do, a little blogspot journal, quickly grew into the Poppy Haus before you today. It's become so much more than I imagined it could ever be, and I've become more of a blogger than I ever originally intended, going to conferences, leveraging social media, working with brands. In the end, it's the writing, photography and working on composition, color, styling that are the true joys of my day. I will continue to do them, but this little spot on the interwebs is moving forward.  

For the past year and a half I have been training in interior design, taking courses, volunteering my services, interning, and working with small project clients. I kept plugging away with Poppy Haus while I figured out my next move. And now here we are. 

Today I am so very proud to announce that I have started Make+Haus.
This will be the new online home for the blog, a portal for my interior design and styling services as well as the future bulletin for camps and classes which will be offered starting 2015. Over the weekend Poppy Haus will disappear into the ether, but you will find the full archive including this post and a fresh offering at my new home www.make-haus.com which will go live by the time you wake up for Monday morning coffee. Thank you as always for reading.

Okay, gotta go do so much work.  Goodbye and Welcome. xo, Heather 

Hello, Friend

Everyday Reading . Trouve Magazine . Emily Jeffords . Swoon . Frock Files . Solly Baby . Flax and Twine . Abby M Interiors . Random Nicole . Summer Wick . LuLu The Baker . House*Tweaking . Design Improvised . Handmade Charlotte

I've been thinking long and hard on how I want to write this post.  I'm back from another Alt Summit in frozen Salt Lake City. For those of you who don't write a blog, this is a conference like no other, designed specifically for creative/craft bloggers like myself. Topics range from "The Business Of Blogging", "Personal Branding", "Pinterest Strategies", and "Growing Your Community", and keynote speakers included Mr.Pinterest himself, Ben Silbermann. Last year I threw caution to the wind and I bought a ticket. I only knew one attendee, and I had no idea what it would be like other than that the dress code would be strictly awesome and I needed to have knock out business cards.  While I was there I spent a lot of time assessing how I fit into the big picture, feeling a little afraid that I would never really stand out, worrying a little that I might be medicore at the thing that I think I do best.  Have you ever felt like that before? I can have a lot of self-doubt. Those inspirational typography posters that say things like:

Art print by Whitney Bengal

...these are meant for me. I try to live with blinders on so that I don't get caught up in what everyone else is working on. When I lose focus, I inevitably start to question my own work. This brings me to the point of this post (finally). When I walked into the opening keynote speech at Alt Summit I was once again all alone, worrying a little about the things that do not matter like my outfit, and then there was Garance Dore, the charming and totally prolific French illustrator and blogger sitting at a lectern wearing all black.  She said a couple of things that completely changed the way I approached the rest of my time at Alt, and got me thinking about why I am blogging in the first place. Here it is (I paraphrase):

• I write about what I am interested in. If I lose some people along the way, that's okay, there will be new people, and they are there because they are interested in what I have to say.
• When I write, I write to a singular person.  This person is my "best friend". She is smarter than me, and she loves me for who I am. She completely supports me, but she will tell me when she disagrees with me. I write UP not down to her. 
• In french, "Niche" means "dog house".  I don't want to live in a dog house. 

I was so liberated (and uplifted) by what she said. In that moment, I took her approach to blogging and applied it to my time at Alt. I decided right then and there that my time would be best spent not worrying about what everyone else was doing, or wearing, or who they were. I would just plop myself down next to sweet looking strangers at lunch or in seminars and make friends. I ditched my elevator speech. I really talked to people, and I met some folks that I KNOW I will collaborate with; talented, interesting women whom I would never have really known that about had I not given the conversation time and attention. Most of the time, when I gave out my card, it was because I wanted to keep the conversation going! I decided against approaching any ill-fitting brands just because they were there, and I didn't stand in line for too long after a panel to meet the queens of blogging. I got something so very different out of Alt this time. 

Because of my collaboration with Blurb, I was lucky enough to have a little corner of a party dedicated to my blog, and all sorts of people came over to talk to me. We talked about making books, their work, my work, and life outside of blogging. I met artists, architects, interior designers, foodies... my people. I got something so much more out of it this time, and it wasn't because of any panel discussion or singular piece of advice(except for Garance). I left feeling confident that great things are on my horizon, and that the measure of success is very different to different people, and that for me, making and writing is what I am good at and trying to be like anyone else, or selling myself short is the thief of my success.

Being Julia

As I can't imagine I will ever have a film crew in my home again, unless I win Publisher's Clearing House, if that's still a thing, I'm sharing some pictures from the day that Blurb came to Petaluma and taped an interview and cooking segment with me. It was a real life Julia Child moment. The video is part of a marketing piece for their recent Food Fair in San Francisco to promote their cookbook authors. I snapped a few photos in between filming...

And here it is, my "speaking on camera" debut, about my book. Oh boy...

How I'm Slowly Growing My Blog

My strategy: Create and share unique, original content.

A little over two years ago I kind of stumbled.  I found myself living my days at home, with my very young children, and I began to feel the walls closing in on me. I couldn't really contribute much of my time to anything but childcare and house maintenance, something that I did because I really wanted to be home with my boys, but not because I felt all that satisfied by it; I think it's okay to admit that. I started writing this blog during nap time. Originally called "Make-Do", it was my creative outlet. I snapped warm, fuzzy pictures with Hipstamatic and wrote about my life, using projects and recipes as the take-away. It gave me something more to focus on, and a few of my friends read it, so I felt like I was connecting with the outside world a little more. I didn't have a plan for where it would go, because I didn't need one.

For Dani, My first post

Things changed about 6 months in when I decided to blog more often, with more focus, re-branding to Poppy Haus. I scaled back on some of my family content, and concentrated on what seemed to be really working for me- designing projects and cooking. I had found a way to take the monotony out of my day by turning it on it's head, filling my life with creative work and self-imposed deadlines. I now had projects building up around me. In March of 2011 I submitted one of these projects, my paper lanterns, to Design*Sponge, and they ran them.  That's when people other than my good friends started to see my work, and when my readership started to grow from a handful to maybe a bucketful. I began to to dream about running a blog with a real following, and I thought about how I might do it for profit. Over the next year I watched my readership ebb and flow. I increased my social media efforts, I tried to pay more attention to how I wrote things so that people could find my work on search engines, and I worked harder to create content that was both original and consistent, presented in a more concise and thoughtful way with stronger photography. It's this last bit that I think has benefited me the most. 

 The net of exposure from just a handful of my posts drives my traffic.

At the end of the day I am doing this, because I really like to work on creative projects. I create original content, and that's what works best for me. I think that original content is something that I have uniquely constructed, photographed, and written about.  If I am the first person to do what I've done in the way I've done it, all the better. This is what matters most to me, and it's why I keep this blog. I gave myself permission to be small, to enjoy my time, and I've grown as a blogger both in numbers of readers and with quality of content, because of it.  While Poppy Haus is still on the smaller side, I think it's a better blog that it used to be, maybe better than a some of the more well-read blogs in my genre, and it's growing in a way that makes me proud. Because there are so many smaller bloggers out there who do the kind of thing that I do, and a few of them read this blog, I thought I'd share some of what has had the most positive effect on my readership and exposure in the last year.

1. Attending Alt Summit

Me and Becky, braving a photo-op at the Method Party

Alt Summit 2013 was an eye opener for me.  I met so many people who do what I do, which is crazy, because it often seems like I am all alone in this strange world.  Alt is a conference for bloggers who are inspired by the Emily Henderson's of the world, and are looking to find opportunities to work with a very specific type of brand (Serena and Lily, Land of Nod, Minted, Method The Honest Company, Blurb). I made a few good friends at Alt, and we have become cheerleaders for each other's work. I also learned that I really can't do it all when it comes to blogging, and that's okay, I just need to do a few things well.  It was at a seminar at Alt that I developed my schedule, which has proved to be very good at keeping me on task while adding consistency to the blog.

2. Adding Video Content

I'd been flirting with the idea of adding video posts to Poppy Haus for a while before I finally sat down and learned how to use iMovie and made my first video post about our family pizza night.  I got such a positive response from readers that I have gone on to make a few more, including this one about how to make those paper lanterns (viewed over 3000 times).

3. Pinterest

Pinterest drives a lot of my traffic. I pin a picture from every post I do, and I've built up a modest but growing following, which has brought more traffic my way because of re-pins and direct pins from my blog by people with a larger following.  Occasionally pins from my blog go a little viral, as in the case of the macro bowl post. I also see better traffic from Pinterest because of this next thing... 

4. Craftgawker

I credit my friend Tiffanie Turner from Corner Blog for telling me about Craftgawker.  I submit my projects 3-4 times per month and doing so not only reaches individuals specifically looking for my type of work, but catches the attention of editors of larger blogs who link back to my work in round-ups. Pins of my work have also increased because of Craftgawker.  The net exposure of just a handful of my posts keeps traffic coming in.

5. Joining a social media network

I joined the Clever Girls Collective earlier this year. From here I can apply for paid opportunities to participate in brand campaigns.  I like this system, because I can really pick and choose what seems right for my blog. Participation in a campaign requires me to write a post, and engage on Twitter and Instagram, interacting with my followers, participating bloggers, and the client. So far I've done a campaign for Wyndham about my family vacation, and for Ford which took me on a little road trip to review their new compact Hybrid. I space this type of thing out, and try to keep the content relevant to my audience (people like me).     

6. Building relationships with brands I admire.

This is what has me most excited.  I've had the opportunity to participate in projects with a few brands that I really like this year. They found me, because they saw my work and liked what I was doing. I'm most excited about working with Blurb.  I made a Blurb book of my blog last year before Alt and as it turns out, Blurb really, really liked it.  They use it as a marketing piece at blogging conferences, and they featured me and my book at their recent food fair in San Francisco, which included filming an interview and food segment with me at my house to market the event- so crazy. I had so much fun working with them and I'll share more about that experience this week. 

So there you have it.  I'm probably not doing about a million things that I "should be" doing to grow the blog, but I feel pretty good about the way things are headed, with better content, and more focus than I started with. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions- and I promise I will never write anything this long ever again!

xo,
Heather

It's All Around You

Sometimes I need a little reminder.  Do you? I can be kind of a moody person, it runs in our family, I passed it on to one of my kids.  I try to harness my moodiness for good. I think it comes with being a little introverted, and creative. I try to acknowledge that I need time inside my own head, and sometimes I really need peace and quiet...and having a three year old now deeply engaged in his whining and tantrum phase sure isn't helping. So, I signed him up for a summer camp this week, and I'm taking care of business, getting happy, finishing the unfinished.  Look forward to another post from Jasper this week, and a new yummy recipe using stone fruit, and if all goes well, next week I'll have a new video post for you!

Just a heads up, in two weeks we're headed to Guernville for a little vacation. We rented a restored Mid-Century house along the Russian River(swoon). I'll be taking a hiatus from the blog while we're gone and will pick back up mid-July.  A girl's gotta take a summer break too...I'll come back sun-kissed and inspired. 

xo, Heather