For this week’s assignment, I had the opportunity to review one of my peers’ blogs for PUB 201. I was paired up with Kithara Kekulthotuwage where the blog is about fashion. Her posts contain comments on the outfits of celebrities Read More
The post Peer Review 2: KEKU STYLE first appeared on Tmylife.
What’s the point of a deload week? Since I’m currently doing one right now, I’ll tell you:
What Does Deloading Mean?
A deload week allows your body to recover while exercising at a lower intensity.
What Does This Look Like?
According to Military Fitness, a deload week could include:
This might look different for a lot of people. For instance, most of my workouts from this week ranged around 45 minutes. Some days I maintained a lower weight with the same amount of sets I usually do, or I did a max of 3 sets for some exercises. This is what works for me, but maybe something else works for others.
When Is It Time For a Deload?
It depends, but if you are working out consistently, various articles suggest to deload when you are feeling physically exhausted, experiencing plateaus, or you’re nearing the end of a fitness cycle.
This article gives a good timeline depending on how long you have been lifting. For someone like myself who has been lifting for a little over 2 years, I should be doing a deload week every 6-8 weeks. For new lifters, every 8-10 weeks is sufficient.
Why Do You Need to Deload?
In addition to the 1-3 rest days you may take during a normal week of lifting, your body needs to recover physically before you can go heavy again. A deload week is a great way to recover by doing lower-intensity workouts for a week.
Ultimately, you should do whatever works for you! Contact me if you wanna chat more about it!
The post The Importance of Deloading first appeared on Lifting With Lita.
As you may already know, I have a whole section on my blog dedicated to my skincare product favs at the moment. HOWEVER. I try so many new products on the regular and therefore I always have new favourites that I’m loving and using constantly. So I thought it would only be fitting to include a little image carousel with all of my current favourite skincare products at the moment! I’m super excited about this because I want you all to know my favs and to keep them top of mind if you want to try some new products or if you’re looking for better ones. This little list of mine will allow you to do so in a quick and easy way!
This is something I’ll also keep up to date constantly as well. And since I mentioned that I have new fav products pretty often, I’ll be adding and subtracting to this image carousel every week to keep it fresh and relevant <3 ALSO by clicking on an image, you’ll be able to see the product and to purchase it if you’re interested in trying it! I’m so happy and excited about this new addition to my website and I’m looking forward to hearing your guys’ feedback about it as well!
Chat soon,
xx Marilyn
The website I had the opportunity to review for my second peer review is TMYLIFE by Nicole Tam! Nicole’s website is a blog created to write about her day-to-day life while sharing her personal thoughts on various topics and interests. Most of her blog posts are based on challenges or things she’s doing or going through, which I really love. Her blog feels super relatable, comfortable, and open because of the tone and language she uses in her posts. Being around the same age as Nicole and going through similar situations and challenges in life and reading through her posts make me feel that I’m not alone. Her blog definitely gives off big sister or best friend energy and I think because of that her website has the potential to be liked by many people similar to me! A lot of people nowadays want to be consuming content online that feels relatable, and I think Nicole’s blog definitely gives that feeling.
Nicole’s first peer review mainly highlighted and complimented the aesthetic, style, and design of her blog, and I think that she’s done a great job at continuing to thrive in this area of her brand. I really love the different headings she has been posting within, “A Day in a Life” and “T Time!”, and I love the style of her blog posts and the format she’s been following in each of her posts. However, one suggestion I have is to create a PUB 201 category as well for all PUB 201 related posts. As a viewer, I’m not sure where I can find these posts and I think having a dedicated category for that content would be really helpful. Another suggestion I have is to add some of the content she has in her “About” section to her home page. Being on the TMYLIFE home page as a viewer, I wonder what about the purpose, value, and reason of the website so I think having a blurb to highlight the individual or personal aspect of the website would be helpful! Also, adding the mission statement to the home page somehow would be beneficial for the audience to keep them wanting more.
In terms of social media channels and posting, I can see that Nicole has her Instagram and Pinterest linked which I think makes sense for the purpose of her website! I think it would also be great to make the social icons a bit bigger for her audience to recognize and know that she has social media platforms that they can follow her on for more content! Overall, I really love Nicole’s blog and aesthetic, and I think she has a lot of potential to expand her website more on social media and to gain a larger audience.
I will be reviewing Maria’s website, Life with Mar, which is a blog focusing on her adventure diaries. I can tell from her mission statement that her purpose is to tell her stories and encourage others to try new things, which is very motivating. This quote, “Fall in love with the process of becoming the very best version of yourself”, highlights the main purpose of her website.
Looking at Mauve’s concepts of brand, identity, and logo, Maria’s website addresses all three. Her brand is her storytelling of her adventure diaries, whereas her identity and logo are represented through her design and colour layout of the website. I like that she uses a consistent colour palette for her website, something I have been trying to apply to my website as well.
Taking a deep dive into her website, Maria has 5 menu items at the top of the page, with a footer menu at the bottom, and her logo and title centred at the top of the page. A couple of things to note are that the Home page button and Find Me page do not work and come up as errors when clicked on. Overall, I like the simplicity and aesthetics of her website, as it is visually appealing and easy to navigate as a user.
In terms of content, the 5 C’s of content marketing can be applied to Maria’s website. She calibrates her content and makes her goal clear to her audience. She creates engaging content, and she curates her content to be fairly consistent across the board. I would suggest she try to circulate and convert her content by expanding her brand across social media channels. For her type of content, I would recommend she try launching an Instagram or TikTok account. Ideally, this would help her convert her audience by inviting website traffic. At the end of each post, she uses Twitter and Facebook as call-to-actions for her users, by encouraging them to repost the post somewhere on social media.
I would strongly recommend that Maria takes a deeper dive into her storytelling, and perhaps make a post that details why she chose this focus for her brand. Sherrett’s article on storytelling explains that telling a company story will appeal to viewers and draw them in.
Overall, I like Maria’s website! As a user, I am drawn to personable content, and I think she represents that on her website. I will keep reading her content in the future!
Check out her website here: https://lifewithmar.blog/
Links
https://www.boxcarmarketing.com/storytelling-for-business-do-you-have-a-story-to-tell/
The post Peer Review #2 first appeared on Lifting With Lita.
I was talking to my parents the other day about getting enrolled with CAL and how that extra support will be really helpful for my university journey, it will help me (try) to function as a human and a student without going into a depressive episode because of my anxiety. And today, I was talking to my mom and she mentioned how my dad was concerned about this being bad for me because it would highlight my issues and somehow reinforce them and make them worse … dramatic pause for effect … And okay, I get it but no.
I had to really laugh about it because it was a little too clear to me how my parents did not understand what I was going through even if they tried to understand. And I love my parents but their concerns are misplaced. Highlighting my problem will make it worse? I do not need a reminder of “my problem”, I live with it every day. And I have been working on not phrasing it as “my problem” or “a problem” or even “it”. This is part of me now, so it is me now and trust me, I do not need a reminder at all.
Having help will not make it worse, it will make it better (hopefully) and if I ever do need a reminder, well, at night when I close my eyes to sleep and I suddenly feel like my eyes are moving and twitching without my control it reminds me that my anxiety is doing things in my brain; and when I need at least 3 days to recover from my anxiety flair up because I miss a deadline I think that is reminder enough; or when I suddenly need 14 hours of sleep, in a day, to have enough energy for the next day I think I will remember that my brain is not “normal”; or when I can’t go to sleep for hours because my brain just won’t shut up. The point is, I know what I have to deal with and I am learning to deal with it, but I need the extra help sometimes and that is okay, it will not re-enforce my anxiety disorder, it will just help me deal with life a little better. And I actually sometimes do need the reminder that getting extra help is okay, that this new normal is okay, that I have the support of the people that love me even if they don’t always understand what I am going through, those are the reminders I need.
So, I appreciate the concern dad, but help will HELP and I need help sometimes. I got the reminders covered.
With love,
Your princesa
Hi, back again to another PLOG! Today I bring you guys back to another food plog with Korean BBQ at my friend’s place. We started the day off by buying ingredients at HanNam Supermarket. We went low budget with all Read More
The post PLOG: Exclusive break time? K BBQ and PARTY!!! first appeared on Tmylife.
So for this week, I’ve been trying to brush up on my analytics and better understand how to generate more traffic for my site. Admittedly there is a lot to learn!
Of course, I have Site Kit, and of course, I’ve connected that to Google Analytics, but I wanted to take it a step further than that. I want to understand SEO better to make the most out of the data I’m collecting, which means learning a ton of new terminology-all with their strategies.
I hate social media, for the record. I’ve spent years and years disavowing it. Staying clear entirely. But now it seems like those days are done. I decided social media was the best way to start getting my link out there. But I need a reason to have, say, a Youtube account. Then it hit me. Why not migrate my recent video onto Youtube? Then I can just embed it onto my site! That is a win-win-win situation! First, I don’t have to take up the valuable space on this site hosting a video. Second is that I now have content for youtube, and the third is I have a network to cross-promote.
Okay, so I did it! Here’s the link to my new youtube channel!
I also did a Twitter thing… why in the name of God did I do that?? Recently, I was mentioned on Twitter for my talk at a journal conference, and I felt a bit of FOMO not being able to reply to thank them for the shout-out. Keeping in line with my goal to get serious about my promotions, I bit my tongue and signed up. Now I can promote new pages and at least squeeze a bit of analytics out of it.
So here I am on Twitter.
That’s it for Social media.
Another step I’m taking is to hone in on some SEO research. Last week, I decided I wouldn’t mind a side hustle as a copy or content writer. In addition, how cool would it be to generate money from this little publishing experiment? BurritoReProductions isn’t meant to be a content mill. Still, at the same time, it would be kinda cool to build a subdomain to showcase some content and copywriting to give me future opportunities. This week I’ll analyze the data and see which keywords and topics are naturally coming up as a launch point. I also plan to look at more trending topics and see if I can write a few samples in the vein of those topics. We’ll see how it goes!
I also want to start cross-posting… I wonder who among my classmates would be interested in some cross-posting mutually beneficial marketing.
I’m still struggling to find my own in the design side of things. I don’t know what I want it all to look like. I’ve tried many variations but keep returning to this green page. It’s my fallback! I’m trying to stay positive, though. I know that perfectionism kills progress. It may not be what I want, but it gives me a platform to work from. I will keep playing around, and hopefully, something will become of it. But I’m no longer as concerned about the design as earlier this semester.
I enjoyed reading the article “Design Machines: How To Survive the Digital Apocalypse.” Not only is it fantastically written, but its design is also exquisite. There was so much that I had intuitively felt was true but had not quite found the words to express for myself. That we exist in a copycat culture or that so much content online is crap—crap selling crap. Or something not necessarily addressed but of the same vein, that AI templates are quickly becoming the norm for content, only adding to the tensions raised in the article.
I’m unsure how to employ best what I learned from the article. I think it’s just food for thought. I’m tempted to say we need to act more authentic in our publishing spheres because if we become too complacent with that cookie-cutter style of content creation, we will be outsourced by automation. The one thing we have to offer that our machines can not is our humanity, warts and all.
