I’ve decided to write about my symptoms lol. Even since I’ve passed that 2 years mark, that blog graveyard curse feels real. The more I learn about blogging, the less pleasurable it has become. So here we go, sharing my blogger’s symptoms instead of goals 😉
**Will like to emphasis that this straight hair do took an hour~ my brother didn’t recognise me LOL clearly straight hair and I are not meant to be.
Knowing SEO ruins life
Yup, the bread a butter of organic growth is actually pretty poisonous for my mind. Example:
- Have I repeated the key words enough?
- O, let me add a header so that the relevance goes up.
- Back link others posts to boost things up, yeah?
- Think of ways to add specific wordings to bait the engines
- Add a bunch of meta data and alt info to the photos (takes soooo much time) etc.
The list rages on. It is stressful. I always feel that my posts are inadequate if I don’t all the skills set possible. At the end, it was like, I will never be ready to post! Don’t know about you, but for me, these type of ‘extra’ effort is totally trashing my creativity and personal enjoyment as a whole.
Social media is a boring stupor
Scheduled posts, regulated time, colour scheme, reaction inducing content, hash tags (for IG 25 – 30), comment and like account similar to your own blah blah blah. How is it possible to enjoy blogging? Or am I supposed to run my blog like a professional?
Affects decision making
This one is maybe a bit odd. Selecting visit choices based on how photogenic the place is or whether the place has any photo op possibilities. Life ruining, I swear. It is like, I battle to enjoy the place at all.
This is something that Museo del Prado reminded me. **As I am writing this I was like, “Maybe I should only schedule this post after I’ve written about Museo del Prado (Madrid, Spain)? This way I can back link.” See how SEO knowledge ruins life? ** In this museum, NO photo of any sort is allowed. As I explored the museum, I realised how pleasant it was to just not take photos at all. Anyways, you know where I am going with this. It just that after blogging for a while, it causes me to amass a TON of photo. Which normal person takes 300 hundred shoots withing 3 hours? I am not talking about with a phone. I am referring to taking the bloody 1.5kg + camera around with me everywhere. I even specifically only buy handbags that caters for this type of needs.
Hesitation to publish
Another symptom is thinking too much. As I learnt more about blogging, I got more critical of my own posts. So what happens? A ton of drafts and nothing published! A more recent victim would be my Bourjois Healthy Mix BB cream. Just because Bourjois’ official website’s ingredient list doesn’t match the list on the packaging, I kept postponing publishing my posts. **btw, after 4 months of chasing after Bourjois, they still have not clarify on that matter; so I ended up only doing a first impression for youtube.
Fellow bloggers quitting
The nice thing about starting a blog is meeting people along the way, usually, fellow bloggers that started their blog around the same time (within the same year). Soon after 2 years blogversary, people will start to post less or just quit all together. It is very triggering! Yes, Stashy, love and hate you at the same time. You are causing me stress by quitting. The biggest impact of bloggers that I love quitting is that it is very much a bitter sweet sensation. It is like, I totally understand why they quit.
*Stashy is my doppelganger, she called it quit and now I am forced to just read all her archive for a 2nd / 3rd time. She wrote almost exclusively about beauty.
But then again, I also meet mega committed bloggers like Rachel (beauty blogger) who is just getting better and better at her craft. She is soooo incredibly consistent with her posts! It is soooo admirable that she stay committed for so long!!! If you don’t get the idea by now, blogging is NOT a joke and it takes a lot of time / effort.
As a closing statement (lol), there is no magic fix to any of these symptoms.
