Over the past several years, I have found myself collecting domain names like stamps (which I also used to collect, but that’s a different story).  This one, www.miss-elaineous.com, was the first. It was originally divided in two: one side to share my PhD research and the other for my freelance proofreading business.  Now, it’s been turned into a launching pad for nine different sites, some of which are well established and others that I plan to begin when I have a bit more time.

One of the established sites is Indian River by Air, a website I started in 2013 as a retirement gift for my father.  At that point he had been flying powered parachutes and taking pictures of what he saw for five years or so, and it seemed silly to have these photographs showing a unique perspective yet which were only seen by immediate family and friends.  From that, the website and social media channels were born and I gained the experience of running an international website through trial and error.

The learning curve was steeper than expected but a lot has been picked up each step of the way.  From posting each thing myself several times a day on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to discovering how to use Hootsuite to schedule posts.  Figuring out how to work around increasingly restrictive dissemination as Facebook changed the rules on us.  [Did you know that you don’t see everything in your newsfeed? And posting links reduces the number of people who sees posts.  As does mentioning words like “sale”, “store”, or simply $.]  Adding another social media platform to the mix with Instagram. Learning the ins and outs of MailChimp to produce a weekly newsletter.

These experiences are what encouraged me to start my other websites; stay tuned to read more about these later this week.