“Find your niche!”
“Find your audience!”
“You have to show up every day if you want to see progress!”
“Buy this course!”
“Attend this webinar that will walk you through everything you need to know!”
“Don’t ever do anything that is not on brand!”
“Try this $3000 program!”
This might seem like a weird way to start a blog post, but that’s fine. I honestly don’t even know if I remember how to write one, considering it’s been over a year since I posted anything meaningful on my blog. In fact, it was hacked a few months back and I lost literally EVERYTHING. I’m still a little paranoid about it, to be honest. Sure, I should’ve backed everything up and blah blah blah, but that’s a discussion for another time. I was taking a look through my Instagram feed the other day and realized I only have a handful of posts from 2019. So what happened?
Before I get to that, I just wanted to give you a heads up- this post will quite possibly be all over the place!
I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about that recently. I could take the easy road and say that I stopped because I was hacked, but that would be a lie. It had been months since I not only posted something but longer than that since I actually felt good about what it was I was doing. If I’m being honest, I was kind of pissed off that I had put so much work into something, taken all of the advice of these people who appeared to be “successful” doing the same thing I was trying to do, and worked hard to make something meaningful, only for it to flop. My blog never yielded what I wanted or what I had originally planned on doing. I felt like a complete and total failure and it just killed it for me.
There are a number of reasons why I failed… and failed hard. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure my subconscious was fighting me pretty much the whole time. I knew deep down that I wasn’t doing something that I was super passionate about. It felt like a job, which was what I was trying to get away from. I was taking advice who looking back, I’m pretty sure just pretended to have their shit together.
Literally, all I see when it comes to starting a profitable blog or business is the same crap! The courses and webinars all show you the same stuff because everyone is just trying to do the same thing. Someone who claims to be uber-successful, showed them one way of doing something and now everyone and their mother are trying to pump out the same content. The problem is that either whatever they’re telling you doesn’t work, or that super popular course that you bought that promises to outline the steps you need to take, doesn’t actually deliver on that promise.
As I’m writing this, I realize that I probably sound incredibly bitter, but I’m really not. I’m just here reflecting and making a few observations.
Anyway, I got sucked into an endless world of webinars that were going to make me rich in no time, courses that I paid good money for that didn’t deliver (no, I never asked for a refund), neverending follow chains that didn’t really do anything but boost a meaningless number, and so much more. I started the whole blogging journey when I left my job at a big bank that will remain nameless. I was incredibly pumped because I’ve always loved to write and from all of the research I’d done, I thought it would be a piece of cake to make money doing it.
I started out wanting to do just a general lifestyle blog, writing about whatever I wanted, which is how I started. Then, shortly after, I took the advice of people who looked more successful than me and were claiming that they had nearly overnight success, were able to quit their jobs, were able to travel full time, etc. I “niched down” and focused on that and that alone. For some people that might work, but for me, it didn’t. Sure, I could have been doing it wrong. Maybe I wasn’t specific enough. Maybe I wasn’t targeting the right people. Maybe I wasn’t where my ideal audience was.
Or maybe my audience got the vibe that I didn’t love what I was talking about. Or maybe it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. Or maybe it was because I was trying to put on a positive face when that’s not how I felt. Who knows? The point is, I failed and feel like I sold-out my own creative ideas for what other people claimed was the right way to do it. And now looking back, I can see that a lot of these people were pretty much “fake it til you make it” kind of people and weren’t nearly as successful as they made themselves out to be. It’s easy to forget that what you see in social media is typically going to omit the nitty-gritty details and try to only show the positives.
So, after a year of trying to force it to work and blowing through my savings, I went back to the banking world. I left that world for many reasons and hadn’t planned on going back, so you can imagine how disappointing it was. I’ve never considered myself to be a failure, but here we were. I beat myself up about it for a long time. I’ve always had very high expectations of myself and to fall short was just a lot to wrap my brain around. I didn’t touch my blog except for maybe once or twice (when I’d get a random boost of motivation) for nearly a year after I went back. But I’m not going to bore you with a pity party LOL. Don’t worry.
I am, however, going to tell you a little bit about why I decided to write this post and try the blogging life again, what I’m doing differently this time, and how I don’t really care if it will be “successful” this time around or not… in Part 2 😉
