Lake Michigan and My Thoughts on Blog Monetization

dress (old from old navy) - shoes (old from dsw) - bag - sunglasses - necklaces (old from h&m)

I'm switching up the scenery here on the blog! Here I am at Northwestern, where my boyfriend lives and goes to school. Because he's here, I'm in Evanston a lot, which is just a 20 minute train from where I live in Lakeview. One of the perks of living in and around the Chicago area is the proximity to Lake Michigan. His campus is actually right along the lake. When it gets warm, it is such a treat to have the cool lake breeze and dip your feet in. We were on Periscope during our walk, and were asking people to guess where it is we were. A lot of people said, west coast, east coast. And I answered mid coast! It's one of the best things in the midwest. Of course the water is freezing right now, since it hasn't warmed up to the surrounding temperature. But come July, I'm definitely going to hit the beach! This is one of the few dresses that I own. I actually wore this outfit to work. With the right shoes though, you can definitely dress it down. I wore this dress in this post as well.

Anyway - now to the second part of my post: blog monetization. I post a lot of outfits that I wear to work and on the weekends. But let's be honest, I don't own a lot of clothing. The clothing that I do own, I absolutely love and wear to death. I dress quite plainly and I really enjoy doing so. With that said, I do shop. And I do affiliate link the parts of my wardrobe that are still available for purchase via ShopSense. I work a full time job in a completely opposite industry to this and I actually started this blog as a hobby.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with monetizing a hobby. But today, I was reading through some of my favorite larger blogs and saw some affiliate linking practices that just really turned me off. Huge posts full of affiliate links for similar items that they don't even own. And I just wanted to talk about it here because it's one thing to link to the exact item you own, and maybe one that you tried on but didn't fit you right. And it's an entirely different one when you make a post dedicated to items that are available for purchase at X store. There's no value to that.

So with that, I solemnly swear that I will only link to the exact item that I own in my outfit/product posts. I don't like to suggest similar items unless I either own or have personally tried that product. I cannot speak to the quality otherwise. Adding onto that, if I am recommending or not recommending something, all opinions that I write on here are my own true opinions.

Linking up with Style Elixir