Wednesday, December 3, 2014

On Blogging...

Several months ago, I saw quite a few posts from other bloggers regarding the state of the blogging world/community, so to speak. To sum it up, they were discussing the change of blogging as a hobby to blogging as a profession. Over the last couple of years, blogging has actually turned into a viable profession. For many of these “professional” bloggers, what started as an outlet, a hobby, turned into a full-time job. To do this though, you have to delve into the PR, ads, and sponsored post world, and many felt it could be a difficult balance. It seems now that many people are starting blogs in hopes of it turning into a profitable career. I wanted to give my take on it as a fairly new blogger.


Why I started blogging
I started this little blog in 2012. I had been reading blogs & watching YouTube videos for a long time before then, but finally decided to take the jump myself. I am a very introverted and very shy. I had recently moved to a new city and started the next “chapter” of my life. I loved seeing the daily little things from other people’s lives and decided I wanted to share mine. Not really for other’s to see, but as a way to record this time. I started with pictures from my iPhone and then started to borrow Preston’s old DSLR (which I have now basically taken over). Many of my first posts were nail art related as that was pretty big at the time, and it’s easy to take pictures of your nails. It progressed to beauty product reviews and then to more lifestyle pictures. I am still trying to find that perfect balance. But until then I just take pictures of everything and anything.

Full-Time Blogging
I’m going to just start with a simple statement. I am not interested in being a full-time blogger. I started my blog about the time when people started making money-salaries-from blogging. What started as being snapshots into other’s lives started to feel more and more overproduced. Now in 2014, it feels harder and harder to relate to bloggers & vloggers these days. They are basically pseudo-celebrities.

I am always going to be happy for those that love doing this and are able to turn it into their career. It’s just not for me. I am a complete believer in choosing a job that you love, and my career ambitions are just not in the beauty or lifestyle genre. This blog is the life component of my work/life balance.

The Challenges
I can see how being a full-time blogger can be challenging, and I am glad that the “success” of my blog isn’t so tied to my dream or ambitions. It would be very scary for me to have all that riding on it. Especially as the “blogging bubble” might just burst. If you are starting a blog now or in 2012 like I did, you are competing with established bloggers that are making big bucks and all the floods of new people that came in after that wanting to make big bucks. It’s tough out there. If you look back at those famous bloggers first posts, you might notice your blogs content is leagues better, but you aren’t going against that, you are competing against them now.

Even if my goal isn’t to increase followers or revenue It doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel the pressure that others are describing. I still want to be consistent and interesting and relevant and have quality pictures and content and all of those things.

In saying that, I know it will be harder for me to get a “following”. I can’t post as regularly with full-time hours. I am chasing daylight to snap pictures or waiting for the weekend with a pile of ideas and products to sit on my window sill (the only decent lighting in my apartment). I am not sent products from companies, so I won’t be revealing the latest. I don’t make money off this blog, so it can’t be cycled back into updated equipment or items to review or write about. My Google Ads account generates probably around two-dollars a month, so I will never reach that $100 threshold. Ha.

The Perks
Even though I am such a small blogger, I have had a lot of awesome “blogger experiences.” I have been to brand breakfasts, I had my nail art in the Wall Street Journal, I have been emailed by companies, and I just had some products sent to me, which was a strange feeling-I had no idea how to write up a disclosure for that…

The greatest “perk” of blogging for me is that I have a record. I have hundreds of pictures that I can look back on. I can watch my beauty tastes differ and can read about how my life has changed. Having this blog challenges me to document and share little parts of my daily life. It gives me an excuse to take out the “big camera”, as I affectionately call it, and take pictures of the leaves or lipsticks or of Preston & I wandering around our neighborhood. I love that I have all these memories. And they aren’t just on my hard drive, they are compiled and annotated in my words from that point in my life.


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