Why I Started Blogging.

*This is the second time today I have written this blog post because when I hit publish the first time the internet crashed and lost every single word so there's one of the perks of the industry for ya. 

I have been blogging regularly now since about August last year and on and off since March 2015 but by no means does that mean I'll be celebrating a one year birthday next month. 

I have never been a massive blog reader, it generally wasn't something I was exposed to all that much but then someone on my Facebook shared a list about being female in your twenties written by Hannah Gale and I read it, found it funny, kept clicking on more of her posts and then whadda ya know I've spent a whole Sunday afternoon reading her words. I have been reading Hannah's blog for well over a year now and when she shared a post of her favourite bloggers, I found a whole bunch of ladies who I liked to read too. Now I read around 20-25 blogs religiously whilst dipping in and out of others and following 2387207359437549 bloggers on Instagram and Twitter. And now I write my own blog and the rest, as they say, is history. 

My blog started, as I suspect a lot do, as a university project. I know a lot of English, Media and Journalism students are asked to start blogs as a way of keeping a handle on their creative writing and getting them into the practice of writing regularly. My blog started as a project we were given in response to a week of lectures we used to have in uni called 'Creative Industries Week'. It was round about now every year, late February that every student in the Creative Industries Faculty would sit through 4 lectures a day over 4 days from people in similar professions. We were asked to write a response to what we had listened to as part of one of our modules in our final year and well, I didn't really stop. 

We'd been told that blogging was a really good way of staying current and letting people know you were active and what you were up to when your professional website was reserved for only updating when you had good new work to upload. I started blogging super infrequently about my exhibition, my final few weeks at uni and illustration and found that actually, I quite liked it. I liked the process of writing the content, creating the lists, taking the photos and promoting it and so I started blogging more and more regularly and taking it more seriously, upping my photography and so on. 

Influenced by blogs I read and things I wanted to talk about, I started blogging a bit more about lifestyle and then started my regular segments; Friday Favourites, My Month In Photos and My Top Media Hits and now I basically cannot stop. 

My blog started as a really good addition to my business but in January I made the decision to separate my illustration business and my blog and move them to two individual hosts. Whilst they are branded the same, and that's something that I think is really important, they are now two different entities because my blog took more of a lifestyle approach and I think people were put off by 'Gwennan Rees Illustration'. 

So where do I want my blog to go? Well ideally I'd like it to continue in popularity and growth and as long as I keep enjoying writing it and people enjoy reading it and I keep thinking of new content ideas, the blog is here to stay! 

How did you start writing your blog?