Blogging For Yourself vs Blogging For Others.
Blogging is a tricky old business isn't it? You start it off as a hobby and just writing for fun and then you get sucked into the world of scheduling tweets and tracking your stats and suddenly you're questioning whether you blog for the love of it or whether you're typing away to get them pageviews racking.
But does it even matter? Is it wrong to blog for business? To create content you knew people want to read? Is blogging for the love of it any better if nobody is reading?
Personally, I generally try to do a bit of both.
I started my blog as a university project and then loved it so much I just sorta carried on.... My content was generally driven by what I wanted to write about and not a second thought given to anything else. And then people started reading my blog. And then lots more people started reading my blog and I started paying attention to my stats and started recognising what people were responding to best.
I still blog 90% completely freely, giving less than two hoots to whether it's popular or not but I definitely do cater my content into a format my readers enjoy. For example, my bullet journal posts are the ones that have gone viral and that people have responded to the best, so I make sure to tailor to that. Every month now I add at least one new bullet journal post for the readers who have previously enjoyed that content - it just so happens I love writing them too so that can only be a bonus.
I think it depends on where you want to go. If you are just blogging for the love of it and you genuinely don't care what reception it gets and have very little interest in who is reading it then I think you go gal, you blog whatever the flip you want. If you are interested in making a little business out of your blog and you do analyse your stats religiously then I think paying attention to what's working and what's not is probably the way to go.
At the end of the day I don't think it makes you less relatable, less authentic to tailor your content to blogging for your audience just as I don't think it makes you less of a successful blogger to post whatever you want.
What I would say is if you have an idea of content you want to post but you don't think it fits in with your theme.....fuck the theme. If you're a beauty blogger and you want to write about a book you read - go for it. If you're a fashion blogger and you want to write about the shite day you had - go for it. If you're a creative blogger and you want to write about your ootd - go for it.
I personally am not a huge fan of beauty blogs or fashion blogs, like I appreciate how fabulous they are and how glossy and sassy they are and I love that - it just isn't my vibe and that's fine. However, I follow loads of these blogs because in every 10 fashion or beauty posts there's 1 lifestyle one or a bullet journal one and that is why I follow them.
I follow people whose content is diverse, is different every day, whose blog is unexpected every time I visit...people who post what they want when they want and the only thing that's consistent is the quality. And that's apparently why people keep returning to my blog too.
The moral of this rambly little post (if there is one) is work with whatever works for you. If you want to curate your content you do that. If you want to write a big brain dump every day you do that too. Post what you want when you want, chances are someone is going to love it.