My GBGV Life – Our Seventh Year Starts Now!

Oh my dog, My GBGV Life is starting its seventh year! I can’t believe I have been blogging since Nov. 8, 2011 with my first post, “How it all began!”, that is over half my lifetime! I still remember achieving the first year or two and marveling at those who had been blogging for five years or more and I am more than there myself! Who knew when I had the idea to start this blog what would actually become of it all! For this special occasion, I thought I would share some fun details about My GBGV Life.

This was me back in 2011. What? I was eating Milkbones? Where were the healthy treats? The walls in my office were bare, and everything looks so blank! Do you know what possessed me to start my blog? My mom! She wanted to understand how a website, blog, and social media work together for her real estate job. At the time, we didn’t even know there were other pet bloggers, or dogs on social media. How naive we were!

Where did the name My GBGV Life come from? Mom told Gramma we wanted to start a blog about me and we tossed out some names like Emma the GBGV, All About Emma The GBGV, and some others. Gramma said to leave my name out as it would limit things down the road which is true. Now my sisters are involved and it still works. Mom wanted something fairly short for social media, and out of all that, My GBGV Life was born. I started on WordPress.com as a free site, but in 2014, I went to self hosted and also got myself a real logo which I still totally love. Glogirly Design does most of my design work and I love what she comes up with!

It took forever to get some online fans. In the beginning other than friends or relatives, no one read my posts. Finding friends on social media was also a rough road. I think I was stuck on 49 Facebook followers for months! We are not a family of quitters, so we kept on going, exercising lots of patience. In time we discovered a whole world of dog and pet bloggers and eventually became in involved with many of those groups which have helped us grow over time.

Originally, My GBGV Life was to tell stories about me and to promote the GBGV breed, but over time, it has changed to not only promoting the GBGV, but we now are happy to post a lot about healthy foods, treats, and a healthy lifestyle for all dogs. 2014 was the year we started in dog sports and we like to share out experiences with our sports to help others make the decision to give dog sports a try too.

Blogging is hard work, and I’m thrilled to have my sisters to help lighten my workload these days! I’m still the boss, but it is nice they can be involved in some of the work since they seem to enjoy all the benefits of being bloggers. You will see their faces more and more around the blog and social media, but I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry! Mom enjoys working on her photography, but with her new business really taking off, time has been a bit tight. We have six social media channels to run besides the blog, which also takes a lot of work. I decided to list some facts about my social media channels in case you don’t follow me there. I do post different things on my channels, so if you want more of me than the blog, social media is a good place to go.

Facebook – By far the most depressing social media around, but it also sends the most readers to my blog. Over the past six years, Facebook has changed the rules for pages so much that it is no longer a lot of fun. My posts get limited exposure because I refuse to pay to boost them, and pages can’t interact with other pages like we used to. Nevertheless, I still have around 3400 fans and I am thankful for each and everyone of you! Stay tuned for some fun new timeline covers coming soon!

Twitter – We love Twitter and it is our biggest social media with over 11,000 followers. In the beginning we spent a lot of time building a good base, but these days most of our tweeting is sharing. We love it because it is easy and fun! I just got a new header for my page too which I love as it matches my business cards, blog header and soon my Facebook cover too. I like to use the French flag since we are a French breed.

Pinterest – Pinterest is an on and off thing for us. We go in phases, but it is also dangerous as once you start looking around Pinterest, hours fly by! My Pinterest account has almost 1900 followers but we should have more. I just can’t seem to focus on it.

Instagram – Instagram is a lot of fun. Since we got a decent Smartphone two years ago, our account has grown quite a bit and we now have almost 2800 followers. I feel it is a lot like Twitter and is pretty easy to work with. The key is good photos, short videos, and the hashtags.

YouTube – Mom and I are not real into watching videos, and we are not very good at making them either, but we do have our own channel! Amazingly, I do have over 130 videos out there!

Google+ – This is the black sheep of social media for us. We post on it five days a week, but never have liked it and don’t really engage much with it.

Most of all, I’m super thankful for everyone that comes by and reads my blog posts, or checks on me through social media. Blogging is a lot more fun when a dog has some fans! I thank each of you from the bottom of my furry, hound heart and send you all GBGV hugs of thanks. I sure hope you still enjoy my blog, and if you have any suggestions for me, please leave a comment as I would love to hear them! I think for a puppy from England who ended up in Minnesota, I’ve done well for myself, and can honestly say, I’m kind of a big deal!

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