Philip J. Smith's Blog: Hair Romance Huge Birthday Giveaway

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Hair Romance Huge Birthday Giveaway

It's my blog birthday and you get all the presents!

(Entry form is at the end of this post)

Hair Romance Birthday Giveaway

I really can't believe it but six years ago I started Hair Romance. I've never stuck with anything this long in my life and I still love it as much as I did when I started. In fact, I think I love it even more.

Hair Romance has grown to be so much more than I thought it could and I have you to thank for that – my beautiful readers who come and read my posts every week and now watch my YouTube videos too.

Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for all your support.

I don't think you know how much it means to me and although sometimes I'm terrible in replying to emails, I do read every single one and I try to answer every single question as much as I can.

If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be able to do this and so that's why you get the presents on my birthday! I am hosting a big international giveaway and there are lots and lots of prizes to be won.

Some of you may know the story of how Hair Romance started but I wanted to share a story that I don't talk about that often which I hope could inspire you when embarking on a new project. See, I almost quit about three months after I started.

It was 2010 and the blogging landscape was a little different back then. Although as an industry it was only just starting, I thought I'd already missed the boat as all the big bloggers I knew had started years earlier. I had so many blogs that I read every day and I never thought that I could have one as well. I didn't consider myself a writer, and I didn't know if I'd have something to say.

Against that voice in my head, I sat down and wrote my first blog post. And then I kept writing and writing some more.

But no one came.

Apart from a few friends and my mum, I had no one reading my blog and I started to feel a little despondent. I couldn't figure out what the point was if no one is going to read it and so not really quitting, I just sort of stopped writing.

A couple of weeks later, I was taking a photography class at that time and I was telling my classmate about the blog I started. It's funny as I was telling these two guys about a hair blog (not really my audience for hair tutorials) but they seemed so interested with what I was doing. The more I talked, I felt this passion start to rise up. I knew I had something to say and even if people weren't reading it, I was going to give it a proper go and see what would happen.

My wish for Hair Romance was to have one person try my hairstyles – someone that wasn't already a friend – then I would have "made it". I just wanted to help one woman style her hair a little better, a little faster, and feel more confident.

That next month something definitely changed and my blog started to pick up.

It wasn't magic. I put more hard work in and I reached out to my favourite bloggers and asked them for advice. I tried to write content that I thought people really needed to hear, stuff I wasn't seeing on regular beauty pages or in magazines.

Over the next three months, I got my first comments, started seeing my traffic go up and I really felt like I was on to something I loved doing.

So if six years of blogging has taught me something – well it definitely taught me a lot of things – but it's often at the hardest points that you learn the most and where you need to keep going. I think it's never too late to start something that fires you up and makes you excited. You need that passion to set your alarm early to do work on it before your normal working days starts and then to stay up late at night finishing.

The things that are worth doing do take time but more than that, the things that fire up your passion are always worth doing. You make time for the things that are important to you.

So now it's six years later and it's time for you to get the presents so that I can say thank you for supporting me on this passion journey of Hair Romance. I really and truly appreciate everyone who comes and reads here, tries my hairstyles and I feel like you've become friends.

Hair Romance Birthday Giveaway – How to enter

Enter using the form below to win a specially curated hair and beauty prize from me.

There are six amazing Australian prizes and six international prizes for all my overseas readers. I didn't want anyone to miss out on their chance to win. Each pack is individually selected products that I know you'll love!

Here are the prizes for the six Australian winners.

Hair Romance Birthday Giveaway - Australian prizes