3 Things All Bloggers Should Remember

*This is a collaborative guest post

Blogging can be a wonderful hobby, a handy side hustle or a full time job. It can bring so much to your life as it provides you with a creative outlet, connects you with a thriving community and can open up opportunities. For those bloggers who make an income from their blogs, it is a brilliantly flexible way to work.There are thousands of blog posts out there offering you guidance and tips to improve your blogging, but today we want to share with you a few tips to help you to be able to continue enjoying blogging when reality creeps in. Here’s our top ‘3 things all bloggers should remember’, to help you stay on track.

You have complete creative control

It is your blog, and as such you have complete creative control. 

You might find that you choose a really niche focus for your blog or you might keep things much more general and label it a ‘lifestyle’ or ‘family’ blog. The point here is that it is your blog, and you get to decide on the content, from an overall theme to the posts that you choose to put out there daily. 

Whether you are writing about an hdb for rent in Singapore or sharing tips around leash training a Schipperke, blogging is blogging and you can write whatever you want on any given day. You can choose to write your own content and take your own photos, or you can accept guest articles. You can choose to work on campaigns with brands and companies, and equally you can decline them if you do not feel that they are a good fit for your blog.

Have the confidence to share whatever you feel like sharing and to say ‘no’ to proposals that you are not completely comfortable with. Your blog is your space, so keep that creative control. 

Social media should be fun

Generally speaking, bloggers need social media. It is a rare blogger than does not use a single social media channel to promote their blog, whether that be daily or from time to time. 

When you first set up your channels it can be enjoyable branding them all with your logos and avatars and completing your bios. You then start following people and chatting to them and connections develop. It is fun!

However, somewhere along the line, many of us lose our way with one or two of our social media platforms. We start obsessing about pushing our Pinterest impressions or getting more engagement on Instagram, rather than enjoying posting and interacting. 

Whilst there is no doubt that it can feel like hard work and be frustrating sometimes, the take away point here is that social media should be fun, whether it is a part of your job or not. When it is fun, it does come through in the content that you are sharing. 

If social media is draining you, then step away from it for a while and go back to it when you feel fresh and positive again.  

Accept that you will never be ‘finished’

The thing with blogging is that you can always do more. It is going to be impossible to say that you have ‘finished’ for the day, the week or the month. This means that you need to accept that fact and learn how to switch off each day. 

When you write a post, you could always write one or two more. When you promote a post, you can always do more, without question. You could share it twice as much on Twitter or schedule it again to Pin on Pinterest. Then there are all of your previous posts, you have hundreds so you could be sharing those all day long on every single social media channel that you run. Have you posted to your Instastories today? Have you engaged with your followers on Twitter? Have you shared something to Facebook? When did you last comment on other blogs as that can boost your profile? Well, there are hundreds of thousands that you can read there! It really is a never ending list.

Along with all of the above, you can and will always be learning. Again, you will never know all that there is to know as you have so many things that you can try as a blogger, along with the fact that new software, social media and apps are developed all of the time. 

Accept and embrace the fact that blogging is always ‘on’, and make the time to be ‘off’.