It's Ok For Our Blogs To Change.
"Oh she's changed"
How often have you heard that whispered about someone? Had it said about you? Said it about someone else?
The idea of a person changing is seen as a very negative thing, as if everyone is changing for the worse. By saying "oh she's changed' we might actually mean she's not into the same things she was before, she's not hanging out with the same people as before, she's not the person she was 6 months ago. And ok maybe if 'she's changed' and she's turned into the world's biggest bitch then sure, change is a bad thing. But if 'she' has changed just because her interests have? Not so much.
Having a niche on your blog divides opinion most of the time. Some people swear by it because how else do you find your 'place' in the blogging world and some people (me included) think WE are our niche and that allows us to write about any god damn thing. But what if our blog focus changes? What if we decide to change our niche? What if we stop blogging about high street and start blogging about high end? Does that mean people will start whispering about how we've changed?
NGL I've stopped following blogs before because their niche has changed and I'm just not into the new one and that's ok. I didn't suddenly start hating them, I didn't start throwing shade at them on Twitter, I just stopped reading.
The absolute classic is when bloggers get a bit of success on their blogs and start being able to afford nicer things and working on more high end campaigns and start being taken on holidays to the Maldives and we, the smaller blogging community who were there when they were blogging about Primark and a weekend in Leeds, we go OH SHE'S CHANGED. Instead of being happy for the blogger in their successes and how we've watched them come up from the bottom to the top, instead we go well she's unrelatable now because she can afford the stuff I can't.
I'll hold my hands up, I'm just as guilty of this as the next gal, I do it all the time, I've recently been on a massive unfollowing spree of big bloggers on Instagram purely because I felt their constant holidays and £200 a day photographer snaps were too glossy and unachieveable for my own feed.
But is it REALLY a problem if our blog changes? No of course absolutely not, in fact it's more healthy and reflective of real life. We accuse big bloggers left right and centre of having forgot their core readership with their high end move but we forget that's just as relatable to them because that is literally their life now. Their blog is still as reflective of their lives as when they were whipping up posts in the local McDonalds as now when they're in a paid for hotel in NYC.
My blog has changed, my blog changes all the time and I have no doubts when you think about it yours does too. I change up my permanent series like nobodies business without any regard for my readers because at the end of the day you have to write content YOU love. Did I think about the fact people might accuse me of changing when I started doing fortnightly favourites not weekly? Or when I changed my month in photos from literally just images to a format? Or when I kinda stopped writing about my creative work? Or when my promo images got glossier and I started taking flatlays? No of course I didn't because those were changes I wanted to make and if the reader hated that change so much then uhh off they popped then.
If we stuck to the same old schedule, the same old posts, the same old format, the same old photography, the same old topics the entire time we blogged we'd get nowhere. We wouldn't grow, we wouldn't find room for new things, we wouldn't open ourselves to new readers or opportunities and we probably wouldn't enjoy it all that much.
We change all the time in life, god forbid I was still into the same things I was into when I was 17. Our blogs are reflective of real life and that in turn is reflective of change and that's no bad thing in my opinion.
