I love shoes. All right, truth is I borderline covet them. In 2004, I started my blog PrincessDominique.com. The platform of blogging was new to me and was basically a way to just journal and vent about all the things I hated, from people who refused to return shopping carts to the stalls and instead leave them next to your car in the supermarket parking lots to why people drive so slow in the fast lane instead of moving over and keeping the traffic moving. However, I realized that it quickly became a vehicle by which I could share the things I loved most–namely shoes. Little did I know that I was starting an international shoe movement though.
Readers flocked to the website because they said they could relate to my down to earth posts. Advertisers weren’t far behind. They were interested in what I did because I took my time and wrote meaningful content and that increased my ranking in search engines like Google and Alexa.com. Shoe lovers continued to follow along and started inquiring about where to find all kinds of brands, and I assisted them with links and features of their favorite brands and it created an unintentional shoe buzz on the website. This increased my popularity and the number of people who subscribed to my daily feed.
The idea of The Weekly Shoe Giveawayâ„¢ was born one year when I did my annual downsizing of my closet. I normally give excess clothing and shoes to The Salvation Army every year, and I still do, but that particular year I decided to give away a pair of shoes I had never worn on the website. The response was phenomenal! I thought a giveaway was an genius way to introduce hoards of shoe lovers to brands they may not have heard of or come across otherwise. Awesome brands. Cutting edge products. Designers that fit right into the scheme, style and price point of what my readers were already buying–It was an instant hit!
The visitors to PrincessDominique.com loved and continue to love the selections. The weekly sponsors enjoy the attention their brands are getting too. The only downfall was that because there were only 52 weeks in a year there is never room for every designer out there to be a part of what the website is doing. Because of the overwhelming popularity, I’ve had to start booking slots for The Weekly Shoe Giveawayâ„¢ on a first come first served basis and even today the most popular weeks are Valentine’s Day, Earth Day and Mother’s Day.
I did a segment on the Today Show in early February, 2011 about “Why Women Love Shoes” and the traffic to the website tripled after that. Advertising from blog owners, fashion websites and shoe brands have been clamoring to be a part of what’s going on at PrincessDominique.com. It’s been amazing to get be able to do something you love, have it pay bills and express your creativity all at the same time.
Fast forward to  2017, I ceased with the blog but kept the domain. I slowed down on buying shoes too, but people keep asking me what my next step is as a former shoe blogger, right now I’d have to say I’m working on a luxury line. We’ll see how how that goes. I’m full of ideas, but right now many of them are in incubation mode. But  I can say without a doubt that I truly enjoy what I do and if I can do it, anyone can.
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