Can You Be Successful Without Following The Crowd? | Matti May Hardie
Hey all, how's you?
This is something that I have been thinking over for a while now, and was really bought to the forefront of my mind when I wondered if I should take to putting tags on my posts on Bloglovin' like everyone else was. This one of my conclusion-less posts where I’m just thinking at the same time that I’m writing.
I strive to be different. Whether that's in what I wear, how I act, the way I live, even the way I speak, I always try to be different and original (I entirely blame Marion for this way of thinking if I'm honest). I also try and do that in my blogging, whether that's in the way I speak, the way I present my content, even to my layout. Essentially, I want my blog to be a visual and digital representation of me. Even to the point where for ages I fought and fought about promoting my blog. I didn’t have a facebook page, I didn’t use hashtags, blogger groups were out of the question, and I didn’t use my Pinterest either. It was ridiculous guys, you have no idea. I slowly but surely ended up doing everything I do now, but I’ve only been promoting my blog the way I do for about 6 months, not even.
I’ve always been convinced that if I built it they would come (500000 cool points to anyone who gets that reference), but I now understand that it always helps. Even still, it pains me even now, because I feel like I’m going against everything I stand for.
To get on to the main point of this post. If you look at successful blogs, they all have the same pattern. The subjects don’t diverge (i.e just beauty and fashion, or just lifestyle or just home deco), the photos are all pretty and instagramable, they all have bloody adorable typography, they all have every social media platform imaginable and promote on there too. To be honest it’s not just bigger blogs, there’s a lot of blogs in general are very predictable. It’s so rare to find a different blog post, they all seem the same nowadays. I find myself craving new and exciting content that doesn’t sound the same as about 6 blog posts I’ll have read before.
I feel like a lot of people do the same as everyone else simply because they’re scared. It’s hard to do something that is different simply because it’s hard to get out there and get known without doing the same thing as everyone else. It’s kind of a vicious circle.
I mean, I don’t necessarily need to promote like I do, but then I wouldn’t be able to actually to grow my audience and share my crap with everyone else. In my opinion, blogging is a hard thing to be successful at. On Youtube, for example, it's more conveniant (and less at the same time, I guess) because everyone is on the same platform and there's only one place to find everyone, where as in blogging? There's people all over the place. Blogger, Wordpress, Squarespace, with their own domain name, without it, everyone’s scattered all over the place and you do end up relying on social media and so truly you do end up relying on social media to promote your blog and to keep readers updated.
It keeps going around in my mind, would it be possible to have a successful blog without actually doing what everyone else is doing? Or is it inevitable that I need to be like everyone else? I really hope not. I like not necessarily sticking to just beauty, fashion and lifestyle and talking about different things that matter to me. I don’t want to just do product reviews and hauls - it just seems so boring to me. I’m the most indecisive person ever, I don’t have one style, and if my blog is a digital representation of me, then I don’t want to make my blog have one style or one subject.
Like I said, I don’t have a real conclusion to this, I just wanted to talk about this. I’d love to hear you guys’ thoughts on this because this is something that really interests me.
Matti x
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