susan earlam ~ horror author

Hello! Hope you had a great summer? I have a blogging post for you today, read on for why.

An update a year after changing my URL.

On the 1st of September last year, I finally changed from Old Fashioned Susie to the real me, Susan Earlam, with a new URL to match.

I was tired of the name and the connotations of the phrase, “old fashioned”. At a time when the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum, it felt even more wrong, I had been stewing over a name change for about two years before I actually did it. Working within the interiors niche wasn’t exciting me any more either. I was beginning to find it fickle, some bloggers/influencers/whatever were making over their homes every few months, “just for the ‘gram,” (Instagram btw) and at what cost? The waste of product, the blatant consumerism- more, more, more, new, new, new, just for more followers and/or more brand collaborations. Yes, I’ve made over my house, but once I’d done it, I wasn’t about to start again just for more clickable content. There is bigger fish to fry, there is more to life, there is a planet we are all living on that needs us to stop buying so much stuff.

Phew.

It’s not that I’m not interested in interiors, but I’ve just changed my focus. I’ve always been about buying second hand where possible, so when the interiors blogging world blew up it was always going to be a matter of time before I disengaged.

It was strange at the time to many people, why I would give up an established name/brand, to make life harder for myself. The thing is I was already making life harder by working under a name which no longer felt authentic to who I was, indeed if it ever had…

I needed to be authentically me.

This coincided with me realising my lifelong dreams of writing a novel. I felt like I’d finally found the thing I could toil at and love every day, for the exact reason that it was/is a constant challenge.

Fellow bloggers have asked about the change affecting my Domain Authority (this is a number to indicate where you rank in search).

• DA 39 March 2018
• URL change 1st September 2018 *with redirects set up from my old URL
• DA 11 13th September 2018
• DA 31 March 2019

So, my DA went from 39 down to 11 just after the change. Then in January 2019, it was up to 19, and at the start of March 2019, it was up to 31. It’s hovered in the early 30s ever since.

If you are looking to do something similar or need WordPress help I recommend Geek Fairy who I employed to help me do this.

PHOTO by Emmy-Lou/Chiaroscuro