Back to Blogging Basics

I know so many people that have fallen out of love with blogging over the last few years, including myself, but I couldn’t work out why. Was it the saturated market, was it that other platforms took over, or was it that we all suddenly hated writing. I don’t think it’s the latter somehow.

Blogging used to be like diary entries, where we could all be nosy, share ideas, lifestyles, inspiration and more. I used to love interior ideas, beauty tips (that I never followed!), fashion posts and more. However, it became a much bigger beast and suddenly there was pressure to become an ‘influencer’, by which I mean to sell things. Sell space, sell affiliate links, sell products and include ads in posts, sell ourselves and our personalities – personal branding, darling! While I did all of that – maybe not the personal branding, I’m a bit crap at that bit – it all became a bit more competitive, a bit more showy, and just generally more business-like than a personal journey. I think it made it difficult to post anything, due to concerns over lack of engagement from brands, fear of rejected ideas, or not looking professional enough.

I love what I write about now, I love that I went down a more wellbeing route, because that’s truly what I live for and care about, but I’m going to back to basics on the blog. While I will still use some stock images, I want to bring my amateur photography back into the blog. I want to spill my thoughts on pages that might interest others, but certainly interests me when I look back through old posts. I want to share a journey of life in the early 2000s and I want people to engage because they want to and not because it helps them get engagement on their own platforms.

The same goes for Instagram, I’ve started posting again. Not very regularly, but whenever I feel inspired to, and not when I’m told is the optimised time. Because my life is not a business, it’s a journey. And a short one at that. I want to share the beautiful places I visit so that others may see it too. I want to share my food pics to inspire others as others inspire me with theirs. I want my unfiltered face and life out there so I have memories of good times and so that others who follow me might be inspired to have good times of their own without the worry of perfection.

This blog is still that place to bring ideas, and reviews, and to share my journey on the path to enlightenment – too deep? I want to share my wellbeing and mindset tips and ideas, because it’s something I’m really interested in. But I won’t be worried about brand deals, or sounding professional, because I’m not a professional. I’m learning, and will continue to.

Cancel culture has a lot to answer for, but I’ve always shared unbiased and balanced views (in my opinion), with an effort to have facts rather than just opinions in this space and I will continue to do that. I may get things wrong, I might have slightly controversial opinions, but mostly, I just want to write and find others that think similarly or that want to learn something new.

I currently have 118 drafts in my blog account. Some are just a paragraph, because they were too much to go into at the time. But this has taken me 10 minutes to write as it’s just thoughts flowing. That’s how I love to write and why I do, to get things down, to let things out. Some of the drafts are like this too, but fear of [insert whatever it was here] stopped me.

I also had a very snazzy website design before, and am so gutted that it’s been lost in the drama of trying to switch website hosts, so I’ve got a basic, free template again that’s really not doing what I want it to. I’d spent years on the other one, tweaking parts, coding parts. I think previously I would have waited to get it perfect before posting, and I’m still going to work on it in the background, but I don’t need to add any more drafts to the list!

So, in the words of the legendary Christina Aguilera, I’m going back to basics, to where it all began.

P.S. I’m writing and pressing post, no formatting, no adding anything in. I want this to be a pure page spill. I’ll add a nice stock image so it doesn’t make my home page look bad when I’ve finally sorted it out!

If you used to blog, what stopped you from continuing? If you have a blog, do you still blog in the way you used to or have you changed your style? Do you read blogs anymore? Too many questions! Send me your thoughts below.