What does it mean to have passion? Passion can be characterized as an incomprehensible feeling of warmth and joy. Some people have many passions while others only have one. Whatever your passion(s) are, they can drive you to persevere through any and everything life has to offer. The Mjournal is built on a passion for fashion and journalism. A passion that grows stronger every single day. To truly understand where my passion comes from, you'll have to go back to the very beginning of the Mjournal.
The Mjournal logo is a M inscribed in the shape of a heart to represent love for fashion and style. The word journal is written in script on the heart to represent the journalistic component. Building a logo was anything but easy. The logo for any product or business should reflect what it is in a nutshell. The Mjournal was a lot of things and trying to put it all into one symbol was proving to be quite a challenge. Besides just designing the logo, I had to decide how to display it. A white background just wasn't going to cut it. At first, I put the logo on hundreds of backdrops and decided I would just use a different background each time; Then I thought that would be too confusing. I must have spent hours trying to find backgrounds that worked and finally I stumbled upon a few I liked. It was down to three choices and I had to decide. I switched through the three samples hundreds of times and finally one of them stood out. It was abstract and simple. It had a perfectly mesmerizing component.
I began the Mjournal 2.5 years ago because I have a love for fashion. The site has grown spectacularly compared to what it once was. In late 2014, the Mjournal was but a newsletter. Many pieces of content on the site today were born out of the newsletter that was once posted weekly. The newsletter, if you could even call it that, consisted of mostly images and fashion tips less than 3 sentences long. The birth of a blog didn't come until months later. The site now totals 5 blogs. When the first blog was created, it was nothing like the Mjournal's blogs today. It too, was just images with basic captions attached. I first began the Mjournal as a way to kill time and play around with Microsoft newsletter templates. When I finally showed my parents they had told me I should publish my works on a website somewhere. I remembered many of my teachers had used Weebly to build their websites and so I did too. I started building one day at a time and after a few days, I had a website with 3 pages. a home page, a newsletter page, and a comments page. As I continued to post, the first days of discouragement set in. My website would get zero maybe one pageview or unique visitor per day. I remember telling my dad I had only one pageview and he told me: "well, that's a one hundred percent increase compared to zero." I'm not sure why, but that made me feel a whole lot better. I knew success wasn't instant and believe me when I tell you for the Mjournal it wasn't. Whenever I felt down about my stats, I just thought: every new pageview is another one hundred percent better than zero.
Prom Fever first launched in March 2015. It was about that time; Girls were talking about what they wanted their prom to be like. Boat loads of prom ads were beginning to surface. Then came the brilliant idea to be a part of helping girls find their perfect prom dress. Just like any girl I had dreams about what my prom dress would look like. I looked at prom websites when they popped up in my google browser. I launched Prom Fever from the cafeteria of my middle school with no idea what it meant for the site. The first few days were rough and views didn' t really pick up until late April. When Prom Fever ended in May, its launch has changed the site forever and I was proud to say I took a chance on my idea. Prom fever now gets views in and out if te prom season.
Summer Madness launched the following June, a month after Prom Fever. Inspiration for the event struck while I was summer wardrobe shopping. I thought: there are hundreds of people who need to shop this summer. Hence came the idea for Summer Madness. Online shopping is how people get all the clothes they need and rather than them having to go to the websites I chose to bring the websites to them. Summer Madness is still not nearly as popular as Prom Fever, but does bring in it's fair share of visitors for just a one month event.
The Outfit Inspiration blog was a spawn of my polyvore app discovery. When I first used the app I was beyond excited about designing and even considered a career simply styling outfits. Once I changed my username to Mjournal, I decided to officially link polyvore the site. I started publishing my sets on the outfit inspiration blog and slowly gained views. Polyvore also sparked the idea for Fourth Frenzy. Fourth Frenzy is a week long event which features independence day inspired looks being posted daily. Believe it or not, Fourth Frenzy actually began as just a pinterest board and later grew into a full blown blog event after I began seeing Fourth of July sets on my polyvore feed.
Since the earliest days of the Mjournal, celebrity content has been a part of the site. However, it has been shifted every which way in attempts to find the most convenient display. Celebrities being added and removed over the past 2.5 years has created the list of celebrities currently on the site. The first major revamp of this content occurred in January 2016. All celebrity content was broken up by celebrity rather than content type. Each celebrity had their own crossroad page with content subpages as it is currently set up. Celebrities once had videos then posters and finally both were removed never to return. Celebrity pages also got moving headers and later uniform backgrounds.
Some may or may not remember the effort of fan fashion reviews. For about a week I waited for submissions and never got any. I decided to post a sample to help encourage people to submit and still nothing. Thus, the fashion review page on the site was born. I had decided if no one else was going to submit, I was going to post fashion reviews myself. It began with Ariana Grande and just kept going. You may think the fall through of efforts stopped there but it didn’t. In June 2016, I attempted to begin post notifications. Needless to say, no one was interested. I only recieved two submissions. One from me as a test run of the program and one from my dad who just signed up to make me feel better. Nevertheless, I still keep that page up because I know one day the Mjournal will be popular enough that people will sign up for notifications.
Navigating the Mjournal may be the best addition to the site since color combos. The page allows users to better understand the site and how everything works. The Inspiration for Navigating the Mjournal came when I was updating the trending page. I thought: 'do people even know what the links are or what pages do?' Then I decided to tell them. I spent about 3 days writing content for Navigating the Mjournal and slowly added to it as the site grew. To this day, multiple views a month go to the Navigating the Mjournal page.
Just like anyone starting to post, the most important thing was stats. In June 2016, I began reading about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how it can help improve website stats. I started to understand how it affects the presence of a website within search engines. Then I played around with meta keywords and other SEO settings on the site. Finally, I figured it out! It isn't just about the permalinks and the keywords. It's also about the domain name. The .com, .net or .org. Having a subdomain like .weebly.com meant my site barely existed in competition with all the domains on the web. Competition is among one of the many things which affects where a website falls on the ranking list for search engines. I decided it was time. I purchased a domain name and the site officially became mjournalts.com. The TS stands for 27 as the Mjournal was founded on October 27, 2014. The purchase of a domain name changed everything. The number of paheviews and unique visitors began to increase almost instantly. The number of referring sites per month began to increase and the variety of search terms was showing. It wasn't just the SEO, but the domain in conjunction with the SEO that made all the difference.
The Mjournal has grown tremendously over the years and continues to do so every day. I remember when 19 pageviews and 1 unique visitor was a big deal. Now I reach an average of 250 pageviews per day. That's a whole lot compared to 19. Building a brand or building anything takes time and effort. Success doesn't just happen overnight. It takes believing in something at it's worst and smallest to benefit at it's best and biggest. Once upon a time, the Mjournal didn't get more than 5 pageviews a day or even a week . It used to be 3 pages and some photos. Now it is a website full of content that gets viewed multiple times a day.
I am KD Konfidential. Sole owner of the Mjournal. I started the Mjournal because I had a love for fashion and writing. I would see all these instagram blogs and magazines accounts and thought: I could do that. I began writing the Mjournal newsletter and the rest was literally history. After the newsletter content was broken up into separate pages and pieces, More journalistic content was slowly added to the site.
My dream job has changed about 12 times since I was 12 and I'm sure it will again before i'm 18. Throughout all the different careers I have considered, one thing has always stayed the same. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be in the fashion industry. When I wanted to be a marketing manager, I wanted to work for a fashion line. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a fashion director working at fashion shows. People, careers and dreams can change but passions never do. If your passion changes, was it ever really your passion?