Ah memories. This image is for those who are bringing in 2011 in Las Vegas.
What a year it’s been for myself and SASSYBELLA.com, we’ve had our share of ups and downs, but we must admit we’ve loved almost every minute of it. We have so many things to be thankful this year, starting with you and everyone else who have visited this blog and read our words.
And then of course the things we’ve always dreamed of but never ever thought would come into fruition, like our amazing press trip to Dunedin, New Zealand and our holiday (which was not a press trip unfortunately) to Las Vegas for Blog World and New Media Conference 2010 where we learnt more about blogging and embraced our geek side. It was great to hear from bloggers who have found a lot of success in their specific niches which gave me inspiration and solidified my views on blogging as a whole. And of course we embraced our shopaholic side by hitting up the Las Vegas Premium Outlet, and every other shopping mall on the strip. I think Sephora benefited from the fantastic Aussie dollar to US dollar exchange rate greatly. We also have to tell you about an amazing spa trip we had at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, but that’s for another upcoming post.
Holidays and trips aside, we also had a great time at Australian Fashion Week in May and was asked by YouTube to write a guest post about our video exploits. We also made some great friends we hope to know and love for many years to come. We plugged away at blogging although our free time was limited (darn the day job thing and needing a roof over our heads), and it yielded some great press coverage, some great opportunities for blog posts (hell, we got to interview Mulberry’s Emma Hill!) and we won a Beauty Directory Star Award for the best blog post in 2010 in Australia. It was something we never expected in our wildest dreams as we’ve only recently expanded more into the world of beauty blogging – partly under the influence of the launch of iBlogBeauty.
To continue on the beauty thing, we were also asked to guest judge the Clinique IT Girls for 2011 which was an exciting experience with some on-camera work in a rather America’s Next Top Model-style penthouse. You can check out the result here on YouTube. And as per our guest blog post on Beauty Directory said, we’re so happy that so many PRs and Marketing people embrace bloggers this year (for those of you who don’t have a subscription to BeautyDirectory, you can read out post on iBlogFashion & Beauty’s blog.
It has been a year of growth for myself and this website we started back in 2002 and we’ve managed to make it through another year with our beliefs holding firm. There has been so much said this year about bloggers and how they earn their money, we must admit that we don’t actually make enough money to make a semi living off even. But we blog because we love it, not because we’re being paid to promote something and that’s how we’d like to keep it in 2011 and beyond.
We’re looking forward to a very busy 2011, kicked off with a trip to Florence, Italy courtesy of LusiaViaRoma to take part in their second Firenze4Ever event. It will be my first European winter so it should be interesting to see how I hold up! Meanwhile you can look forward to a new-look SASSYBELLA.com come mid-late January 2011 with some new fantastic features and a few other projects we’ve taken up.
Best wishes to you and your family & friends for 2011.
Helen xx
What a year, Helen. Was wonderful to meet you and see you win the Blog Post of the Year award at the Star Awards. Here’s to 2011!