Is your social media growth stalling? Shelby Vanhoy suggests giving YouTube a try

In Ask an Influencer, Business of Home explores the creator economy. This week, we spoke with Shelby Vanhoy, the content creator behind lifestyle blog Pretty in the Pines. It was 2014, and Shelby Vanhoy’s career plans were set: She had worked hard throughout college in preparation for dental school, and would soon ace her prerequisite exams and embark on the next phase of her journey. Starting a blog, she thought, would provide a great creative outlet along the way. The same year, she launched the lifestyle blog Pretty in the Pines to document her decorating-on-a-budget schemes along with snippets from her daily life. It only took a few short years for the then–early stage social media industry to kick into high gear—a change that swiftly turned her professional ambitions upside down. “I saw the industry completely change around 2016 or 2017—that’s when I started actually earning money from my blog,” says Vanhoy. “My interest [in dentistry] honestly just faded away as I was diving into this new creative job.” In February 2020, Vanhoy and her husband moved into a new Upper West Side apartment in New York, where they were promptly confined when the pandemic lockdowns set in just a
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