Why I Am Lucky To Be a SoFab Member!

If you’ve visited my blog before, you probably know that I am a member of Social Fabric®. Social Fabric is an invite- or application-only private online community that is owned by Collective Bias™, a leading shopper media company.

I had a previous post explaining all of the reasons Why I LuvSoFab. Now I bring to you, all of the reasons why I’m LUCKY to be a Social Fabric member! 🙂

About a year ago, I decided I wanted to try my hand at blogging. My sister is a blogger and she’d been doing it for years so with a ton of her help, I gave it a shot. Initially, I wasn’t sure where I was going and let’s be honest… almost a year later, I still wasn’t sure where I was going with the blog.

Around four months ago, I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Social Fabric community. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but I quickly realized that it was going to become the best thing to happen to me in my blogging career.

When I first decided that I would make blogging

my “job” I felt a little something like this…

I wasn’t making money. I had a minuscule reach and I didn’t have drive, focus, or direction. I felt like I was wasting my time and efforts on something that would never pay off monetarily or otherwise.

But, I was in school and I thought, “Hey, at least I’ll have my degree to fall back on. Oh, you mean people don’t just graduate with a B.A. and get offered amazing jobs? Wait, what? I thought college meant that you are setting yourself up for a solid financial future. You know how many college grads that are working retail, while their massive college loans continue accumulating interest charges?!?”

Ensue panic attack. 

After this revelation, I decided that I needed to focus my efforts and make my current blogging “job” into something worth while. I wanted to hold my head high when I told people I’m a blogger. So I did. I started cranking out blog posts and even attended a few conferences. But with Daddy being away on military duty, I started to feel like I was screwing up my priorities.

This pretty much sums it up.

It sucked feeling like I wasn’t totally there for my kids. I’m hyper aware that this time of my life where I have my kids with me 24/7 is only temporary and I need to relish it. So I kind of laid off of blogging a bit, until my sister reminded me about that one group that we heard about at a conference we’d attended over the summer. She told me she’d figured out how to apply, and suggested I did the same. So I did. And within no time, I was accepted.

Enter Social Fabric.

Suddenly, I mattered. Suddenly, I felt like RavingsByRae.com wasn’t just one of my hair brained ideas that wasted more money and time than I could afford. Suddenly, I was in. I felt like I’d officially been accepted into the blogosphere. It wasn’t immediate. But it happened. I stopped feeling like someone who just needed a place, other than Facebook, to voice my ever important daily happenings. I stopped feeling like I needed to come up with ways to justify the cost of domains, hosting, and design. I felt like what I said mattered to someone other than me, my family, and my boyfriend.

I feel incredibly lucky every single day that I have become a member of Social Fabric. I’ve learned more about blogging and business than I could have ever imagined. It’s an amazing feeling to know that what I’m doing serves a purpose.

Sure, it’s great to get paid to write blog posts, but SoFab is so much more than that. The community is like nothing I’ve ever been involved with. The massive amount of encouragement, knowledge, and opportunity is what really blows me away. I’m incredibly lucky to have become a member and after just a few short months with SoFab, my life has been changed for the better.

And in case you’re wondering, I am still in college pursuing a degree in Communications. I’ll be graduating December 2013. I know that when I walk across that stage, I won’t just be collecting a $40,000 piece of paper. I’ll be collecting something that ties in perfectly with the skills that I’ve acquired through being a SoFab member. And who knows, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get a job with Collective Bias as something other than a blogger, one day. 😉 Guess we’ll have to wait and find out.

**The reason I continuously write job in quotation marks is because when I first started blogging it was FAR from a job. But now, I have the utmost respect for bloggers and realize that it is not an easy job. I will also straighten anyone out when they come at me with that “blogging isn’t a real job” crap. Pshh, you better recognize!