As a blogger who’s been blogging for a really long time, I’ve made quite a few decisions regarding my blog that I’m proud of. Here I’m going to talk about the 5 best decisions I’ve ever made for my blog.
Not giving up
I’ve had many blogs that I kept up for half a year before I gave up, deleted it and continued on on another platform and the cycle repeats so for someone like me who always has trouble finishing what I started, my not giving up on this blog for over a year now is probably the best thing I could have done for it. That’s also due to the fact that I have invested a lot on this blog with giveaways, design purchases, and hosting fee so letting it all go to waste is definitely not something I’m going to do.
Not getting suck into collaborations/sponsorships
As a blogger who accepts collaboration on my blog, I do have my personal stand on this matter. Obviously there’s no right or wrong in doing collabs because you do you, boo but I try not to take that many collabs just because I’m not really comfortable in doing collabs multiple times in a month.
In a year I’ve been blogging seriously, I’ve only ever done collaborations with brands 4 times and I did receive vouchers and cash for it. I’m very transparent and if you’ve looked into my disclaimer you’d see that I put a collab link for all collaboration posts I did.
A few months ago, I received an email from a worldwide known coffee brand who wanted to send me their newest coffee in exchange for a blog post. I was like; “okay, cool, but I charge in exchange for a review” and I told them my rate and I never heard from them again. Here’s the thing — they wanted to send me their newest product that I could easily buy at Tesco for 15 ringgit and they wanted me to do a blog post about it for the price of 15 ringgit coffee?
No, thank you.
If you can pay local tv stations a massive amount of money for airing your ads (yes, Malaysians, you’ve seen their ads on tv), why can’t you pay me just a teeny tiny of that amount of money for a blog post? You think I’m blogging for free and everything comes free in this world, is it? I know my blog’s worth and call me materialistic I don’t care but 15 ringgit coffee ain’t making my bank account happy, boo. To think that I have to take my own blog photographs for basically a free post…
Some bloggers make money from doing collaboration and sponsorship and there’s nothing wrong with that because I do that too but for me personally, I’m not comfortable partaking in too many collab in a short amount of time. That’s just how I feel. Holly from The Kitty Luxe inspired me to write about this after reading her post about shady brand collaboration.
Being careful in what I share
The old me would have easily write everything about my life from A-Z on my blog including very personal things that should be better off unmentioned. As I grow older, I know that some people wanna know about your life especially the bad things you’re going through not because they care but because they wanna see you be in that position. I know this because I do this too to someone who did me wrong so I try not to talk about my personal problems online because not everyone’s going to like you no matter how nice you think you are.
Going self-hosted
I think I’ve talked about self-hosted WordPress so many times on my blog already and some of you might get sick of reading about it but it really is one of the best decisions I’ve made for my blog. Going self-hosted makes me feel like my blog is legit and I own 100% of my contents as opposed to Blogger.com where Google owns your contents because you’re using their server to store your blog.
Another thing that I want to mention is investing in a blog design that is versatile and customisable. Using a free one is fine during the earliest days of your migration but to me there really is no point in going self-hosted when you’re just going to use a free theme that is very limiting in terms of customisation and features. I think that’s the whole point of going self-hosted, you want to be able to customise your blog however you want with a lot of features available.
Not treating my blog like a ‘job’ or chores I have to do
I personally think the moment you treat your blog like a ‘job’ or a chore you have to do every single day you start to enjoy it less and less and that will affect your blog whether you realise it or not. Last year I went through this period of time where I felt like I wasn’t enjoying blogging anymore and that was because I was all stressed out to put up contents 5 days a week not including my weekend post.
Now that I’m back in university, I am not going to push myself to update my blog as often as I used to when I was home for gap year because believe it or not my education is much more important and although I care about my readers who visit my blog every other day just to see if I have a new post up, I’m under no obligation to anyone to keep my blog updated all the time.
I’ll try to post at least once a week because I don’t want my blog to be dead but I’m also not gonna force myself to do it until I feel like it’s a weekly chore that I have to get done or else all hell breaks loose. No, not like that. If you see me not posting anything for like a week, that’s just me being occupied with life and if you see me with 4 new posts after that, just know that I have no assignments due that week. *thinks of 2 assignments due in 2 weeks* *laughs in tears*
