A Site a Day in the Month of May: Healthylivingblogs.com

Good Monday morning to you all! I hope your week is off to a great start already. I don't know about you, but it's pretty easy to start off on the right foot when I'm fully caffeinated. I'm easy to please.

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know that I can get pretty personal up in here. This blog is both a way for me to share my passion for healthy living, and reflect on the ups and downs of life. It's both intimate and open, serious and silly. I try to strike a balance because I think that's what life is all about: no one is ever 100% one way or another. We're all multifaceted, multidimensional people who some days feel overburdened by life and others, just plain gleeful. I really hope that this blog captures that aspect of humanity from my perspective, and that is resonates with readers. All this to say that I decided to feature Healthylivingblogs.com today because it represents, for me, what makes maintaining this blog so fun and so scary, all at the same time.

Healthylivingblogs.com is a site "designed to enhance the already tight-knit, supportive community of the healthy living blog world." HLB boasts a membership of over 2,000 blogs, whose creators share a desire to bring their interpretation of health to a wider community. HLB also hosts an annual summit, the Health Living Summit, in a different U.S. city every year. The HLS brings together bloggers, business professionals, and other healthy living experts for a weekend full of informative sessions and workshops. Participants gets to hob-knob with other bloggers and sponsors, all the while learning tips and tricks to take their blogging, business, and social media skills to new levels to reach a greater audience.

Healthylivingblogs.com is an amazing resource. It teaches bloggers how to market themselves and leverage their online presence to grow their business, increase readership, and ultimately touch more lives to make a bigger impact. While I recognize the amazing potential of this site, I can't help but be intimidated by all the great blogs I've discovered through HLB. The content is so great that I often find myself comparing myself to other bloggers: "How do I measure up against them?" "Is my writing as good hers/his/theirs?" "How am I coming across to readers? Can my readers relate? Am I BORING?!"

Something we all--me especially--should keep in mind!

All these an myriad other insecurities plague me to the point of inaction, which, let's face it, is the ultimate failure. Part of my motivation to post every day this month was the desire to just write, get my voice out there, and not worry about how it sounds or how I come across. Self-actualization conquers self-doubt, and the act of writing a post every day this month has instilled a sense of accomplishment in me that has set the wheels turning. I am so proud of myself that I may even reward myself with a trip to this year's annual HLS!

I'm going to go for it!

Will I see YOU there?!