We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susie Lynn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Susie, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I started my blog back in 2019 and really wish I had started sooner! Not only because the blogging industry can be saturated, but also because year after year I grow more and would be that much farther ahead if I had only started sooner! I first decided to create my blog after following some of my favorite lifestyle bloggers. I noticed they all had the same thing in common. Their pictures were heavily filtered, as were their instagram stories and videos. They would painstakingly show only the perfect side of their lives and not the messy parts. It became hard to relate to. That, and they are all extremely successful with a lot more money funding their blogs. Since I started from the ground up, I made my own website and had to teach myself how to do basic coding and things I never learned in high school or college. Thank God for Youtube tutorials and friendly customer service reps at WordPress is all I can say.
Looking back I wish I had started my blog back when I first became a stay-at-home mom. I went through a bit of identity crisis when I quit my normal job (I was a manager of a shoe store.) I had worked ever since I was 16 even through college, so I felt a little lost when I first quit. It was all absolutely worth it to get more time with kids, but there are so many things I wish I had blogged about back when they were infants!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve been blogging for a few years now and my lifestyle blog is called gracebeautyandfbombs. People think I am named Grace (I am not) and that I am using the word beauty for beautiful people. My husband is actually the one who helped think up the name. I didn’t think “Susie’s f’ing amazing blog” would cut it. And he said, “You have a lot of grace with stressful situations. And your blog is about beauty, and you love the f word. Boom, a blog name was born. To me the word beauty in it is two-fold, both because I review a lot of beauty products and love them, but also because my husband and I live for traveling. So we capture a lot of natural beauty in our trip photos.

My blogs cover a lot of bases. Once my kids started grade school I got heavily involved in their school’s PTO. So some of my blogs revolve around how to raise funds for your child’s school. Some are how to throw successful classroom parties or a creative Teacher’s Appreciate Week theme. Some blogs cover trips we’ve taken or things we’ve done around Denver. And some are just the musings of a middle aged, foul-mouthed mother.

I’m most proud of my followers, both on Facebook and Instagram. Not the quantity of them, but the engagement of them. There are a million women out there like me who can relate to my blogs and appreciate some honest info that isn’t flowery or full of BS. It feels like a community of friends on my social profiles, and I adore that. And while I may keep it real, I also am a glass-half-full gal, so even when I’m having an awful day, I find the humor in the chaos.
The main thing I want my followers to know about my work is that it’s authentic, honest, and refreshing! We could all use a little light these days!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think being honest with your followers is always the first step to create loyalty. When I put up a photo of my home decorated to the nines, they know that it took days for me to stage, and lots of hours shopping to hunt for certain decor. When they see an idea on how to raise money through their school by having a school store for instance, they also see the mistakes I made doing it so they know what NOT to do. (Which sometimes is more valuable than having a laundry list of what you should be doing.) I also think that laughing at myself in my blunders helps them relate to me as a person. My other tips to get more followers or engagement is to post…A LOT. I now make it a priority to post once a day, whether it’s an Instagram post, or a quick reel. You need to put yourself out there and not be afraid of looking like a total fool if you want to build an audience.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The blogging world is quite saturated. Everyone wants to be an influencer or gather a ton of followers on Tik Tok these days. About six months into my blogging, I felt completely overwhelmed. Trying to learn how to do some basic coding and build a website from scratch about drove me insane. It is not my forte so it took a lot of work and a lot of mistakes. In fact, it’s still continually a work in progress. When I was six months in, I wasn’t really focusing on taking great photos or having Pins for Pinterest or any graphics to go along with what I was writing. To me it was all about the words and everything else would be an added bonus. I slapped together a quick blog about how to make a cute “Halloween Boo Basket” and took some half-ass photos. Little did I know that Goodhousekeeping.com would pick it up and publish it on their site. It forced me to go back and look at that blog through the reader’s eye. The pictures were blurry with an orange and black blanket as my background which washed out all the orange and black Halloween goodies I was trying to showcase. I hadn’t really linked a ton of the exact products I had used or made it easy for readers to shop it. So I revamped it. And I’m glad I did because that helped gather me some new followers. I could have just said, “It is what it is” and hoped I’d still gather business from it. But instead I was honest with the fact that my photos were sub-par and that I’d up the ante with the next post. And I did!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gracebeautyandfbombs.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gracebeautyandfbombs/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gracebeautyandfbombs
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susie-lynn-058654a/