Gabby Abigaill Has Great Advice for Growing Your Blog and Pinterest Page

What inspired the creation of your website?

I’ve always enjoyed content creation, but it wasn’t until I decided to make changes in my own life that I discovered my passion to help others live a healthier life with intention and purpose. I would initially share lifestyle tips on my personal Twitter account, but there was never enough space to fully express my thoughts.

So, gabbyabigaill.com was created to inspire women to live their life with purpose by creating posts on topics such as personal development, fitness, faith, well-being, self-care, and blogging. I don’t believe it’s possible to live a perfect life, but I do believe it’s possible to live a life you genuinely love by creating long-lasting positive habits.

What are your tips for WordPress users on increasing site speed as we head into Google’s core web vitals update?

Website speed is so very important and one of the areas bloggers struggle with the most! I recently published a guest post on my blog about easy ways to speed up a WordPress site effectively. However, my biggest tip would be to not sabotage your website’s speed by installing unnecessary plugins and using images without compressing them first.

How has your understanding of self-care changed, especially as a fitness and wellness influencer?

To me, it means being committed to living a healthy life, practicing what I preach, and consuming as much fitness/personal development/ wellness content as I can in order to transmit that to my audience. It also means sharing my weaknesses and keeping it real with my followers. I enjoy sharing victories and accomplishments, but I make sure to also share failures as well. It is definitely important to keep it real with your audience if you want to build a special connection and trust. At least that’s what I have learned from the influencers that I look up to. 

The idea of self-care is important now more than ever because the world we live in is very centered on the idea of hustle. Although I am personally obsessed with the idea of hustling and being productive 24/7, burnout has humbled me and taught me the importance of balancing hustle and self-care/rest.

What are your go-to blogging resources?

If you want to grow your blog, I suggest investing in foolproof blogging resources and courses to learn directly from experts. I made the mistake of spending my first year trying to “figure it out” myself and as a result, I did not see any growth throughout the year. It wasn’t until I decided to invest in myself that I was able to not only grow my traffic but monetize my blog. I recently published a post where I share all of the resources I have used and currently use for my blog!

Pinterest had a rough year with publishers, many claiming to see a sharp decline in performance on the platform. Do you see anything working well in 2021 so far?

While Pinterest has gone through a huge algorithm update that has affected various creators, it is still worth using. My account was affected a few months back, but after implementing new strategies from the Pinterest course I swear by, my account has not only grown, but my blog traffic has also increased immensely.

But, if there’s something I would suggest, it’s focusing on creating and publishing fresh pins daily rather than re-pinning, including catchy and SEO-optimized keywords in your pin titles, pin descriptions, and board descriptions, and lastly playing around with various Pinterest templates (static, animated, list, and quote pins) to see what your audience likes. I recently launched a Pinterest templates shop with a variety of Pin templates packets, which you can check out here.