LouiseM.com was named as one of the TOP Marketing Blogs!

9th BEST Facebook Marketing Blog in the world!

12th BEST Twitter Marketing Blog in the world!

18th BEST Instagram Marketing Blog in the world!

31st BEST Blogging Tips Blog in the world!

Thank you Feedspot for this honor.

How LouiseM Became a Top Blog

I wasn’t always a top blogger with half a million pageviews per month!

So how did I get here? It started decades ago with a graphic design career.

Here’s my story…

How I became a freelance graphic designer

I worked as a full-time graphic designer in Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Los Angeles before I decided to “go freelance.”

It was invaluable to my freelance graphic design business to have had those years to build up my graphic design portfolio, to learn from my coworkers, AND to experience the inner workings of a corporation.

Small beginnings

At my first job as a layout designer, I was lucky enough to work with award-winning graphic designers at John Wanamaker in Philadelphia PA. But – I was being paid a paltry wage out of the art supply budget.

I was willing to move all the way to Arizona to earn a better wage.

In the small marketing department at Diamond’s Department Store, I was quickly promoted to All-Media Art Director. Another chance to learn – about working with management, and directing and managing my own staff of graphic designers, illustrators and photographers.

After a few years, I was ready to move on to the next challenge. I was offered a graphic design job at a catalog agency in California.

This was the go-go 80’s, and catalog work was exploding! Soon there was more work than my coworker Gary and I could handle – and we were sending out most of the work to freelance graphic designers.

It wasn’t long before I found being a manager very unsatisfying. I would send out a graphic design job with brief directions, and often was unhappy when the completed job came back.

And my own graphic design work now consisted of making revisions to others’ designs. For a fraction of what they were getting paid!

I took the plunge

In a meeting with the agency owner, I expressed my dissatisfaction. Those freelance artists – that’s what I wanted to be! Not a manager.

Would my boss support my leaving the company? Send freelance graphic design work my way?

Of course, he couldn’t promise. I was valuable to him where I was, and he didn’t want me to leave.

But leave I did, and it turned out to be the best for everyone – I worked from home as a freelance graphic designer, and the agency didn’t even need to replace my staff position.

Unlike many freelancers, I manage myself rather well!

Don’t try this at home

I consider myself very lucky that the agency was willing to hire me as a freelance graphic designer. They made the smart choice, of course, but but they could have said “No” just because I had quit my job there.

I highly recommend that anyone considering becoming a freelance graphic designer acquire several stable clients before quitting their day job! I had only one minor client on the side when I took the leap. But the business world has changed, and competition is much higher now. Be cautious.

Fast forward to LouiseM.com

I loved being a freelance designer for many years. It was only the 2008-09 recession that changed things for me.

The corporate design work I excelled at and enjoyed was drying up. Companies – yes, even those big companies like Disney and WalMart – just didn’t want to spend the money on outsourcing anymore.

Then, around 2010 I was approached by a domain broker with a client who wanted to purchase my 5-letter domain name. I didn’t use the site anyway, so I was happy to sell the name for a tidy sum.

P.S. The buyer was MySpace!

That’s when LouiseM.com was born. I didn’t really have a plan to blog, and snatched this name up because no one really knows how to spell my last name!

My original goal was to get more design  work, and I started by putting my portfolio online.

I then knew a little about how to start a blog on WordPress. Once I started blogging about the upcoming visual format called Timeline that was coming to Facebook, my site took off.

Yes, I was one of the first visual marketing bloggers, and that set me on the road to blogging success!

Just blogging for me!

Around 2015 my blog had become such a financial success that I was actively discouraging new design clients, and by 2018 I had dumped them all.

My primary source of income is advertising placements on my website. The amount of traffic LouiseM receives adds up to a lot of advertising impressions that I’m paid for via Mediavine.

I also earn commissions through affiliate marketing. Check out my favorite visual marketing resources.

Now you know the story of how I became a freelance graphic designer, and how LouiseM was birthed.