Blogging beginnings and tricks how to prosper your blog

A brief history of my time on Tumblr

Hey. As you might have heard by now, I’ve had the Tumblr blog renegade-is-in-my-blood for years.

Over time I learned a lot about the whole blogging thing. By simple trial error I figured things out and I’m about to share with you my blogging tips and tricks on how to prosper your blog.

Like many other Tumblr blogs, mine was (still kinda is) a mess. I’ve gone through different phases and it was a long and rough journey until this happened:

I started my Tumblr on 12 May 2013 as a diary. I remember posting a cringe-worthy description of my day.

But hey, we all got to start somewhere.

Luckily I lost interest after a short while and deleted them all.

Then my blog turned into a typical depressed teen blog. Not that there is anything wrong with that. You do you.

But basically, what I did was reblogged dark quotes and self-harm aesthetic photos.  Once again, I was interested in it just for a short while and I suddenly turned into rock bands blog.

Name renegade-is-in-my-blood is a quote from my favorite band Paramore and their song called renegade- take a listen here if you like.

From here I turned into an anime blog. Obvs.

Anime blog turned to TV shows fandom- Sherlock, supernatural, doctor who, American horror story, game of thrones… Basically, you name it I saw it and blogged about it.

From TV shows fandoms are really close to (fanfictions) youtube and YouTubers. Danisnotonfire (at that time) and Amazingphil was the only thing I blogged about.

This was the time when I realize I earned quite a lot of followers- around 7K at that time.

It was when I got my first Tumblr message from a lady describing their fashion website Beautifulhalo and how they would love to work with me. I was very skeptical. Getting money on Tumblr sounded off to me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot but in the end, I was too scared I would somehow lose my blog I’ve been working so hard on so I refused.

As I said it to the lady “I wasn’t a fashion blog”.

Now when I look back it was very irrational of me to refuse such an opportunity because of my blog’s aesthetic. I could have earned much more. But fate and the same lady from beautifulhalo had other plans for me as I got another message from her offering me the collaboration again, or at least more details about how the whole collaboration would work.

I said yes and the rest was a history of a dream job.

You can check how I got to work with beautifulhalo in this article. 
I learned that I really enjoyed promoting fashion stores and money and free clothes as a bonus was just great.

Since that first message I got many more and accepted working with most of them. I’ll tell you the details of each store and how you can do what I do in individual articles. You can find them all HERE.

Now my Tumblr blog is a mess of aesthetic photographs, fashion clothes recommendations, my reviews of them and memes (ofc).

How I prosper on my tumblr

Now with double digits of thousands of followers, I try my best to promote all of the stores I work with without being too much of an annoying sell-out blog.

But that’s not that easy as it sounds (yes I’m complaining about blogging too much)

Here are some tricks I observed over the years of how to keep your blog active and prospering:

1.Post as much as possible so people in all time zones and all times can see your content.

A great tool for that is the schedule option. Basically, how you do it is when you click on the settings of the reblog button and choose the schedule you can plan what day and time your (or any other) post will be shared on your blog.

For example, I post all day long 24 hours. I’m from the middle of Europe so my evening ( most productive internet time- most of my followers are the most active from 6 evenings till midnight and this information is earned from years of observing the internet) is around US noontime. And let’s face it many people have other business to do at noon than sit on Tumblr. But when US followers have evening I’m deep asleep in my country.

So I could have changed my time schedule to satisfy my American followers (but neglect my European followers) or I could simply schedule my posts at the ideal time.

Problem solved.

Here are picture manual on how to do it:

Tumblr allows you to post 250 posts a day and you can schedule 300 posts per day. When you over cross the 250 posts, any other post you would possibly want to make would simply not be posted and stay in your schedules until you reschedule it again the next day. Post limit renews after 24 hours.

I use this amazing site to check how many posts I have already posted that day and how much is left for me to share as I try to post the max amount of posts I can.

This is the site: postlimit

You simply put your Tumblr URL and it generates your information like mine here:

Scheduling takes time too I’m not gonna lie. For me, it’s easier to schedule everything at once and then I don’t need to care about my blog and my potential income anymore cuz I know my blog is working for me.

I usually take an hour or two before bed to schedule 250 posts for the next day. But I check my schedules every morning to check if I have hit the post limit (very often) and all of the posts that weren’t posted at a time after I hit the post limit needs to be rescheduled for another day. (or deleted it is up to you but they just won’t disappear on their own)

2. Be selective of what you put on your blog

I understand that in the amount of 250 posts a day you can’t be very picky as there’s simply not that much time to analyze every potential post.

My trick is: pick your favorite blog or blogs and reblog everything from them. I know my fav blogs post things I like and even when the post I want to see hasn’t loaded on my slow internet, that post is already scheduled on my blog.

I trust them not to post anything controversial. Here are my fav blogs

• thebootydiaries
• heavenlydaisy

I try to schedule 100-150 posts from those and the other 100-150 posts are my own.

I re-reblog my own collages, recommendations, outfit ideas, review from stores I collaborate with.

Each post contains a link to the store where you can buy those items with my specific track code. In that case, if someone made a purchase of something I get a small commission from that store for bringing them, new customers. Also if someone from my followers chooses to use the discount code I share they can get a discount off their order and I also get a commission so both sides win.

But for that, my followers need to see what I offer.

It’s important to keep my post at the top pages and keep reblogging them again and again.
As I collaborate with around 10 stores and I try to post from all of them I use my own tags to trackback to each post. Also, you can track each store because of their individual tags.

3. Keep your followers coming

When I started doing store promotions regularly I noticed a massive fall in my followers. Many unfollowed and I can’t blame them I understand that not everyone is interested in fashion and if a blog changes their content you’re not obligated to stay their follower just for the old time’s sake.

Looking at all suddenly k-pop blogs I’m following but not remembering following in the first place.

This will happen you just gotta stay positive and do your thing.

I promise if you keep going right people will find and follow you.
The annoying thing I do is putting my signature on random aesthetic posts – little x or xo.

That way if people reblog that post from you and are too lazy or busy to delete your caption their followers will see your URL name on their feed and the simple ad is made.

I try to just add my caption and not to remove one that was made by the author. But I prefer a post without any caption at all.

I also use online sites for gaining followers such as

• Blog-plug

You put your URL name and a short description of your blog and if people are interested or have a similar blog they will follow you.

Follow for follow works the best. I use this one the most

• Gatherfollowers

Same thing. Solid website.

4.Side blog

If you have some more free time make a second blog (through other emails, not the same you use for your main blog- if you make the second blog there both of your blogs will have the same post limit of 250 posts- and that’s not what we want if our goal is to spread your posts to the widest audience)
and repeat all the steps I mentioned before.

But be careful and take it slowly. From my experiences when I created a fresh blog and started following many people ( so they could follow me back and I broaden my audience) and reblogging everything from my original blog, Tumblr might shut you down after a few days or weeks (it depends) because of fake account or something.

How I solved this problem:

I use my younger sister’s Tumblr.

She created it years ago but never really used it so she gave me her password. I cleaned it a bit and now with a few thousand followers on there I simply reblog all of the posts I put on my main blog.

This is how many other followers will see the same posts as my own original followers.

Here is my side blog:

In conclusion

I’m not any Tumblr pro, just an observing blogger.

I hope this will help you reach your goal.

I’ll share tips on how to start earning money and working with fashion sites as I do next time.

Stay tuned.

Let me know what you think of this tips or if you have any well-established tips of your own and would like to share them let me know in the comments.

Thank you for your attention, means a lot
xo Natalia