Today’s post was a spur of the moment idea. Not because I didn’t know what to blog about, but because I suddenly felt an urge to say a bit more about my blog and my reasons for doing things the way I do them. Of course, if you have any suggestions for improvement, I’m all ears, so feel free to leave a comment down below to give me your feedback.
In case you weren’t aware, this blog gets a new post 7 days a week and there are two blog posts on Thursday. Of those seven days, 3 days are for beauty posts, food, nails, fashion, music and lifestyle all get 1 post. The majority of my blog posts is beauty related, yet I don’t see this space as a beauty blog per se, even though the number of blogs I post means I am allowed to ‘brand’ myself that way.
The reasons for writing more about beauty than the other topics is on the one hand a simple one: it’s easy. Blogging about beauty products is the least time consuming of all the different types of post I create. I buy products, snap a few shots, use them on my face and ta-dah, blog post set up done. Lookbooks take hours to create as I have to plan outfits, try them on, then find a day with good enough lighting and time to get in front of the camera to snap the pictures. The most time consuming are quite possibly videos as the prep and post recording work takes the most effort. Editing can easily take up 3 hours, which is why I cannot make videos a more regular thing.
On the other hand, beauty blogging is the most fun for me. I love to try out new products and especially with make up you can see an instant effect. I find it harder to blog about perfume or hair care products, because those are effects a camera or a screen cannot portray. By now I have found my mojo of what I want to put into a review or beauty post. The past 6 months I’ve also decided to not rely too heavily on new products anymore, but also do posts on favorites from my collection and closer looks to particular brands I have in my collection.
But I don’t see myself as a ‘beauty blogger’ or this space as a beauty blog. I started this blog because I wanted to write, to have a creative outlet, that allows me to do whatever I want. I took this space as a place to write about those things I love most. And where I love beauty products and make up especially, I have so many more interests. At first, I didn’t know how to combine all those things into one blog, and since there wasn’t much of a plan behind it, I just posted whatever I wanted to post. I would literally decide at 10 PM what would go online the next morning. I figured that having a schedule makes it easier to combine blogging and having a job so I decided what I wanted to blog about the most and made up a schedule around that.
The problem is that I’m only skimming the tip of the iceberg. I don’t get around to blogging about some of the topics I feel most passionate about in real life. It has been ages since I wrote anything about language for instance and album reviews have been non-existent ever since I first tried writing one. The reason? It’s too difficult to blog about for me. In the case of language, I simply know too much about English, Dutch and language in general that I can’t stick my knowledge into a bite sized blog post that is still interesting to read. In the case of albums, it just doesn’t seem to be anyone’s interest anymore and the past 5 years or so most of my music listening has shifted towards single songs anyway.
In any case, what I’ve decided to do is to create the blog that I would like to read myself. I find single topic blogs too one sided and it means I have to follow 20 blogs to get my fix on all of my different interest. So this space isn’t a beauty blog, because make up isn’t the only thing I care about. I love music (music truly was my first love), fashion, language, teaching (my job), working out, cooking, tv series, reading, traveling, movies, politics, international affairs, art, literature and there is oh so much more. Where writing about one single topic will get you a bigger audience more quickly, I’ve decided it would be boring for me to do so. I would simply stop enjoying writing and since enjoyment is why I started writing in the first place, I thought it best to keep this blogging experience fun for me. Kudos to anyone who happens to enjoy it too.
What do you like in a blog?
Are there any topics I mentioned in the last paragraph you’d like me to try and write about in the future?
2 responses to “Why this isn’t a beauty blog”
I enjoy the variety of your posts. I am an avid reader so talking about books would be good; also movies.
Thanks for taking the time to have a blog. Donna
I have a book post planned for some time in the next couple of weeks! So stay tuned.