What Blogging Has Taught Me

 

It is crazy to think that I have now been blogging for over a decade. I can still remember writing my first ever post and uploading it onto Blogger. If my memory is correct, my first post was about the Kat Von D Lock It Tattoo Foundation. A post which has now been archived because it was simply too embarrassing to leave on the internet. Hell of a lot has changed since I wrote that first post. Both personally, professionally and here on my site. So, I thought that today I would sit down and share about that experience. But more than anything else, I am going to share what blogging has taught me.

 

Be resilient.

I cannot preach to you enough about resilience. As you can see from my page title, ‘The Reluctant Blogger’, I often think about throwing the towel in. When my mental health isn’t on the best level, I could very easily click the delete button and never look back. But there is something about blogging for such a duration, that my resilience comes back and I am straight back on it. This online space has taught me to keep coming back and keep going.

 

It isn’t always about making money.

If blogging has taught me one thing it is that it isn’t always about the money. Back when I first started my site, I didn’t earn a crumb for years. Then all a sudden it was like a switch went off and the cash started rolling in. I was getting money from AdSense, partnership offers and so much more. When I wanted to broaden the kind of posts that I was writing, I knew that it was going to change. People don’t really want to do sponsored posts with the girl talking about depression. But I wanted to use my platform for a specific reason, and I am glad that I’m going it.

 

The community make it worth it.

I’m not going to lie, when I first started blogging the community was much stronger than it is today. If I would upload a post, other people would go mad sharing it, commenting and working hard to get a better reach. In times when I have thought about throwing the towel in for good, it is always the community that make me come back. Blogging has taught me that there is still a sense of community and how lovely it is to be a part of something.

 

Having somewhere to write is an outlet.

As a creative person, having a blog has taught me that I need an outlet. I need a place where I can generate content and push it out. I’m not saying that the content I produce always has to land with people, but it does me the world of good having somewhere to publish. For a while when I realised that it was writing that was my passion, I tried to journal. To me, I thought that simply putting pen to paper would be the same release. It was not. Having an outlet is amazing and I encourage all creatives to do the same.

 

Be authentic.

A few years ago, I had a vision for my blog. I wanted to make it into a platform like the Vogue website. I wanted to stop making posts personal and to make everything more top tier so that it would be fashion, beauty and lifestyle hub. I wrote in that style and changed things up for a while, but it wasn’t me. I like to be authentic. I’m very real with people and writing in that way made me feel very false. People always engage so much more with posts when there is somebody relatable at the other side of the screen.

 

I hope that you guys enjoyed this post. Blogging has been something that I have done for over a third of my life. It has been a commitment, taken up a lot of my time, but I have loved it. The opportunities that I have gained from it are fantastic. Not to mention that it has helped me excel in my career in marketing and it really gave me a clear path that I wanted to pursue. Thinking back, I am glad that I took that leap. Even more than that, I am glad that I kept going and stuck at it. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has been a continuous lesson that I have loved.