Have you ever washed your hair expecting good results but your hair didn't turn out as you expected or even hoped?
That's happened to me several times. I have hair that tends to be on the dry side so it's important that I use a lot of moisturizing products - shampoo, deep conditioner, and leave-in conditioner - but sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes my relaxed hair needs a little bit more to moisturize it and keep it moisturized. That's when I add another step to my wash day. That step is the pre-poo.
When it comes to my beauty routine I think I’m a pretty low maintenance gal. I don’t have a lot of skincare products or makeup. Partly because I don’t want to spend a lot of money when spending a lot of money isn’t needed. I also don’t spend a lot of time on my routine. I keep it quick, simple and cost-efficient.
That being said, there are five beauty products I have that are my favorite and I have to have whether I’m at home or traveling.
Like many other bloggers as 2016 was coming to a close, I sat down and reflected on the past year. Most of my reflections were pertaining to my site A Relaxed Gal - what went well, what didn’t go well; what I could have done better; things I learned; things I planned to do and never did; etc. What I found is while 2016 was a mix of highs and lows it overall was a good year for arelaxedgal.com.
During 2016 I saw exponential growth on my site, grew my social following, and implemented many other changes. Here are some of the highlights:
- My overall social following increased by 388% since the beginning of the year
- Unique Visitors to my site increased 661% year-over-year
- Site Pageviews increased a crazy 763% year-over-year
- I started an email newsletter. If you haven't signed up already you can do so here
- I converted to rich pins on Pinterest
- I launched a Facebook page
- Revised my site topics to be hair, beauty, blogging, and life (a mix of personal finance, travel, and home)
When I find a hair product that works I use it as often as I can. This applies to shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, you name it. If it works after using it at least three times, that hair product becomes the hair product I use again and again until it doesn’t work anymore.
Before I started my healthy hair journey if a hair product stopped working I would try to power through and hope it would start working again. Or I would ditch the hair product and try to find another one that did work.
Now that I’m more knowledgeable about my hair and hair care, in general, I now know why I would experience this. It wasn’t necessarily the product that stopped working, it was the product build-up on my hair.
2016 is over, but I still have one last 2016 traffic report to share. I share my monthly traffic reports partly to hold myself accountable and help me keep a closer eye on my monthly stats. I’m also doing this in the hopes of helping and encouraging other bloggers who are looking to grow their online presence.
Welcome to 2017! I’m always excited about entering a new year and thinking about how I can make this year better than the previous one. Setting goals is a good way to do that. I prefer to not call them New Year Resolutions because of the connotation of not following through with Resolutions. Also, I’m used to setting goals because that’s a big part of my job - Setting, measuring, and achieving goals for clients and even for my own personal performance on the job.
So here I am setting 2017 goals for my hair. To determine what those goals should be I started with looking back at my 2016 hair goals and seeing how well I did (or didn’t) do with them
- Maintain the health of my hair
- Enjoy my hair more
- Try one new hairstyle each quarter