JulesBuono [dot] com is now TheLiteraryLifestyle [dot] com!

Curious to know more about this rebrand?

I always enjoy it when some of my favorite bloggers share behind-the-scenes information about their businesses. Sometimes, they are my favorite posts! So, I decided to share a little bit more intel for anyone interested in and/or new to The Literary Lifestyle.

I started my blog, Jules Buono, in 2019, right after my honeymoon. During the wedding and honeymoon planning process, I took tons of notes in a quasi-article format both to get my thoughts out of my head and to share the things that worked for us with friends and family who may need them. I also read a lot more and wrote book reviews just for fun. (This was before Bookstagram and BookTok.)

When we returned from our honeymoon, I felt a creative void and wanted to blog more publicly. After all, how else were friends and family going to see my notes?! It just made sense to have a digital place to call my own.

Despite being trained as a lawyer, I also had a fair bit of education and experience in blogging. I had kept several blogs (mostly private) throughout my life, going back to even before Microsoft Word existed. I was writing on a blue screen with a cursor as a child! (I hope that doesn’t age me too much.) I had also taken writing classes and taught myself some coding along the way.

In the early 2010s, I had also represented my husband’s company, which was based on search engine optimization, and I learned a lot about this crucial blogging skill in the process. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a whole slew of things that website owners do both behind the scenes and publicly to help them appear when you search for key terms.

So, anyway, I decided to start a blog. I wanted to write about books mixed with a bit of lifestyle, but I never expected it to amount to anything “real,” so I wasn’t really thinking of branding, nor did I have the courage to start a brand, particularly since it was just a hobby/side hustle. I also wanted internet privacy and security, so I just chose my nickname/social media handle, Jules Buono, as my blog name.

Big things in life often happen to us when we least expect them, and over the next year, the blog started to grow and start earning some income. We also experienced quarantines that kept us home. I was reading a lot more, writing about books a lot more, and really enjoying that focus!

Right around the New Year of 2021, I started talking more publicly about my blog and realized that, in real life, it sounded silly that it had a nickname that had nothing to do with what I grew to focus on — books and reading!

I started thinking about re-branding. “The Literary Lifestyle” came to me in the middle of the night, and I jumped out of bed and bought the domain name. I started re-doing the site, but there was one big problem. Changing your original domain name can really mess up search traffic and ad income, which is how I made money. It was a risk I was too scared to take. So much about blogging as a business is SO technical.

So, I simply redirected the new name, TheLiteraryLifestyle [dot] com, to the old name, JulesBuono [dot] com. In other words, since 2021, if you went to TheLiteraryLifestyle [dot] com, it would take you to JulesBuono [dot] com. It was a little confusing, but overall, it was a decent compromise.

Are you still with me?!

In 2022, I left my job to focus full-time on The Literary Lifestyle. I then started spending a lot more time and money on business efforts on the back end, like securing the trademark for The Literary Lifestyle, which took over a year.

In early 2023, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became a big deal, but bloggers didn’t really know what to make of it yet. By late summer 2023, though, I was seeing a lot more fake book blogs pop up with fake bios and stolen, automated information. Someone even used AI to steal my own law school experiences that I wrote about. It’s been both an expensive legal hassle and a scary thing to deal with.

When I tell you that running a digital business is like the Wild Wild West, I mean it! I have gone through so many crazy things, from having my name stolen to having my image stolen to scammers scraping and stealing my entire site—you name it!

Shortly thereafter, in fall 2023, Google started making massive changes to their algorithm for many reasons (that’s a whole other blog post), including dealing with this unprecedented proliferation of fake content. In the process, many, if not most, “real” bloggers were all but removed from Google search, which is the bread and butter of our businesses.

The way it generally worked was that if we followed Google’s best practices, then when people search Google for terms like “best beach reads,” our content would be shown in the results. People would click on the articles, and we would earn money from ads and links on those pages. So, it was absolutely devastating for those of us who spent thousands of dollars and hours on this work to lose nearly ALL of it.

Believe me when I say I’ve gone through every stage of grief in the process, but this turn of events has also caused me to take lots of new and different actions with my business. I redesigned the site, started working 1-on-1 with SEO and tech experts, shifted to more social media efforts, and so forth. It’s been an all-day, every-day process that may never be complete. It just keeps continuing in new and different ways as technology rapidly changes at a pace faster than ever before.

This leads me to now. One big thing I’ve been hearing a lot about in the age of AI is the importance of bloggers branding their businesses and being more public personally. We kind of have to prove we are real people and real businesses writing real content in order to exist now.

As I’ve done this, attending industry events, publicizing my full name, and making public relations efforts with the media, I started realizing how confusing it may seem that I have a brand name, a full name, and a nickname all tied to me and my business.

It drove me absolutely bonkers that every time I referred to The Literary Lifestyle, it linked to Jules Buono. Also, my new author bios have my full name, Julianne Buonocore. I really don’t want any person or algorithm to think I’m fake or misleading.

It finally hit me that I never changed the domain name only because Google was known to “punish” people for that. But now, Google removed us bloggers from their search results anyway!

I have a really tough time making big decisions and am not a risk taker, but once that all became clear to me, I knew for 100% sure that this decision was the right one for me and my business, despite all the warnings and horror stories. Suffice it to say that chasing algorithms for a living has been both the absolute hardest AND most rewarding work of my life at the same time.

So, that’s it! Nearly five years later, JulesBuono [dot] com is now fully and finally TheLiteraryLifestyle [dot] com. I hope it serves you well.