One more year has come and gone. Well, it will still be around for about four days, I guess. We still have the week! Either way, the sad, nostalgic lament of "Wow, time flies" is overplayed and growing old (just like I am, sigh), so I will sidestep all of the cliché sentiments and move into a foreword of sorts for my ten most popular posts for the year.
At the start of the year, I resolved to post twice a week, once on Tuesday and once on Thursday. I am still a full-time graduate student with what is essentially a full-time teaching and research job, so I decided to start with an easy and manageable schedule that I can add to once I get the ball rolling again (My blog took a huge hit when I disappeared on that unexpected hiatus). I stuck to the schedule surprisingly well for the first half of the year, especially after I launched my Weekly Reading series that I added to every Thursday.
Blogging finally became a routine for me. It was such a sustainable and efficient schedule that I even had time to dedicate to regularly updating my Instagram. I was slowly creating an aesthetic for it and was building up my following, so I finally felt like ExtraExtravagant was getting back on track and growing again. Things were going so well that I considered finally expanding into creating YouTube videos.
Then, this past Fall semester hit, and everything basically went to shit. I was taking four classes as a student, teaching two classes for my teaching assistantship, and working on a grant-funded project for my research assistantship. How graduate school usually works is you take two to three classes per semester and work on either a teaching or a research assistantship. It did not work out that way for me, unfortunately. What that means is that once August hit, 24 hours in a day became way too little time for all of that, let alone blogging, so yet again, I had to place blogging on the backburner.
Here they are! You can click on the titles to navigate to the posts themselves.
10. July Drugstore.com Haul
9. 5 Hair Myths You Shouldn't Believe
It does not come as a surprise that the Celebrity Style Inspiration for Any Age post is the most popular one. The series itself was probably my most popular series when I launched it in 2015. This is the most recent one, but I planned for the series as a whole to have four more installments (40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s and Beyond). If 2017 goes as hoped, I should be able to complete the entire series by the end of next year.
Another series that I want to continue into 2017 is Style Ideas by Bloggers, my most popular series for this year. I was actually able to complete it for 2016, and three out of the four total 2016 posts made it into this lineup. One of my favorite aspects of running this series is the opportunity it provides me (and you) to connect with other bloggers, so I do not see this series going away anytime soon.
Besides that, the guides (albeit clickbait-y) seem to be a reader favorite too, and the good news is that I have quite a few ideas for more of them all sitting around as drafts, so I hope to be able to get to them too in 2017.
I honestly have no idea how 2017 will go. This coming Spring semester, I will only be taking two classes, but I still have my teaching and research assistantships. Plus, it will be my graduating semester, so I have my entire thesis research project to conduct and write up to prepare to defend and hopefully graduate! After that, I will be going home to Malaysia to visit my family for at least the summer, and everything after that is super tentative and in-the-air, so I really have no idea if I'll be able to get back into blogging consistently again. Fingers crossed!
What types of posts do you typically expect from a fashion, beauty, and lifestyle blog?
