Blogging Ain’t Easy
With my 6th blog anniversary coming up, I have come to terms with how difficult blogging has really become. There are a few reasons why I have becoming a little bit jaded when it comes to blogging and I will try to explain my thoughts here.
1. A blog is a jealous mistress
My blog has been my confidant, my Friday night date, my tell all and my little digital soap box for a long time. But it is insatiable and hungry for more. More photos, more events, for products. The better content I give my blog, the more it wants to up the ante of the previous post. It is exhausting. Gone is the vigor I once had when I would return from an event at 11pm and upload photos til 1am to make sure that the event recap was up before the party attendees were the next morning. A blog is such a one sided relationship, when I am giving it my all, my opinions and it hardly tells me anything in return. I use to think of my blog was a tree, the more sun and water it gets the more it grows but I was wrong. The blog is more like a ping pong ball. Unless you keep the momentum going as quickly as possible and very precisely – it will just roll off the scene and sit in a dust pile. I guess the more I decided to live and experience things offline, the more my blog suffered online. There is a direct correlation between when I started dating my boyfriend and when my blog traffic took a nosedive and I have the analytics to prove it. But alas, reality lives offline and cannot be photoshopped (and that is a good thing)
2. “I”dentity Theft
A blog is so personal and I got to a point where I stopped fascinating myself. I became disinterested in “I” and drew more attention to “our”. Our new apartment, our plans, our life, our perspective. The less I was interested in just me, the less I could muster up in my online realm.
3. So Many Bloggers
Everyone is a blogger and that is a good thing. But companies make me feel like a duck and they are playing shoot the duck. I didn’t even go to BlogHer or any social media conferences this year because the thought of this collective blog ‘industry’ makes me reach for Gravol. Bloggers are at a weird place right now. A few of the bloggers who know the right people are doing cool things, creating collabos with Target, travelling the world and quoted in Vogue and sitting front row while we all wonder, when is it my turn?
4. Jobs in Social Media
Anything you put your time and effort to becomes a skill. If you spent 10,000 hrs in your lifetime blogging, you are deemed as a social media expert. The first wave of companies that tried to enroll or should I say enlist bloggers were ‘brand ambassador’ opportunities and cash prizes and what not. What happened to that? Social media, like the people that fuel it – are live and unpredictable. And since corporations and brands are built mostly on pretense, that is a big no-no. Then there were high paying jobs called Social Media Expert or Community Managers that were paying 6 figures if you know how to Facebook and Twitter and say SEO here and there. I scoff at this, most of these opportunities turn you into a monkey (sans the cymbals).
5. Eons from Now
Unfair connections and nepotism will forever be the biggest challenge for immigrants like me. Even though I grew up in Canada, when to school there and in the States – the network that goes several generations deep will not affect me in this lifetime or career. I could however become that pioneering great grandmother one day years from now…
6. LIKE
With the advent of Pinterest and Instagram, where you can double tap your way through life – What is the point? These brain snacks will never leave me satisfied and these teeny tiny info tidbits are not enough. I am use to reading books and discussing them – with a group of intelligent real ladies with no Amaro filters on them. I love watching full feature 2 hour movies and pondering over them. I consumed less but felt more nourished. I had less LIKES but I liked things more.
So the next time you meet someone and they say they are a full time blogger, before you scoff at them – know that blogging ain’t easy and it’s about to get a whole lot harder in 2013. It is certainly a path of uncertainty so thread wisely.
