(Photo source: Pinterest)
This is a different post from the usual lets chit chat......
For those who have known me for a number of years will know I use to have a blog named "Pink Dolly" going back at least 5 years+ and blogging back then was a lot lot less competitive and generally a lot less complicated! There were no daily / weekly blog chats on twitter, in fact I don't even remember twitter being such a big thing back then in the blogging world. Brands would happily send out samples of any new releases for you to try and write about to share with your readers. There were a lot more readers than bloggers. I remember bookmarking all my favourite bloggers and clicking frequently waiting for their next blog post - it was just as addictive!
So you may wonder why what happened with Pink Dolly...I think I must have kept it going for around 2.5 years before wedding planning got in the way. I decided to take a few months break then a few months ended up being years. During that time I carried on following my favourite blogs along with discovering new ones. After my wedding I decided to get back to blogging and thought my style had changed a great deal, instead of continuing with Pink Dolly I created One Slice Of Lemon end of May last year 2014.
Looking back at all my posts I have no idea how I manage between 2-4 posts in some weeks and I am not the sort of person to write a post just for the sake of getting something up. Each post looks relatively easy when you are just reading but a lot of time / effort is put into taking photos and coming up with blog posts that I think you all will be interested in reading. Lets be honest here great photos = lots of clicking and it attracts readers to your content.
Stats didn't really matter back then and we all followed each other through "gfc / google friend connect" and you would display your number of followers on your side bar and followers would come naturally over time and it was relatively easy to build up a great following. I could have easily continued with Pink Dolly where my following was relatively good but I decided to start fresh and build up a new group of followers who actually follow for what the blog is today!
Photos.....I don't ever remember taking a photo of literally everything I ate / drank or plating up my dinner so it was fit for my instagram! To make it worse it's not your average photo it needs to look clean / fresh and pinterest worthy which means we fuss over the lighting etc... There were never so many social media options, it was just plain simple, everything would just go up on your blog. I think these days there are way too many social media options, I mean how do you keep up and have a life! I think for me personally twitter, blog and instagram is enough for me and the occasional pinterest if my photos are pinterest worthy which is rare. I think it's best to just focus on no more than 4 and really work on those rather than open an account for everything and trying to keep it up.
Admit it we all love the freebies that comes with blogging because I certainly do and it really helps me with my variety of lifestyle content and most important of all my readers really enjoy the read. All the gifted items are stated clearly on the post and everyone loves reading about new launches. I think it's important to only accept items you are genuinely interested in rather than accept everything just because it's free.
This leads us nicely over to stats, stats, stats they have never been so important and it was never like this! By this I am talking about the page views, visitors per month and following figures on blog / social media. Blogging is so competitive that brands have to be more savvy in that they want to know when they gift / sponsor a post they will get their moneys worth. They want to know how many readers your blog post will reach out to and if you tweet how many people will see it and help you retweet so it reaches even more bloggers and so on.
Lastly I think the best thing of all since starting One Slice Of Lemon is meeting a group of girls who are also into the same things as me and over a period of time we have grown fairly close! It's been great meeting almost monthly for a catch up and we are all locally based so it's easy to do.
I think this must be the longest post ever for me, I am not sure if you guys like reading these posts of you prefer my usual ones with plenty of photos and fairly minimal writing!
Let me know what you think guys! : )
This was a great post to read! I only discovered blogs a couple of years ago so I love reading about what the community was like before I found it.
ReplyDeleteAntonia x | Fifi and the Diamonds
Yeah in some ways I wished I actually carried on back then but no point in doing it if it's forced right! x
DeleteAh lovely post! I've definitely been on the slow go for the past few months on my blog. I just sort of burnt out! Blogging can be a lot at times!
ReplyDeleteAre you going to the Lush VIP eve?
Sarah
www.daisychainsanddreamers.com
Thanks Sarah. I think it's good to take a break but it can easily fall into months / years! Yes I will pop along Thur after work with the usual girls since most of us are local. Hope you can make it!
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