Answers To My Questions #2

Another week, another round up of this week's 'Answers To My Questions'. As you may have figured out this new feature is essentially a round up of blog articles this week that I found interesting - just a slightly different take. I'm one of those people who reads to learn something new and that doesn't change just because it's a blog post - in fact I think that gives me even more reason to read (not that I need any more reasons to spend my time perusing the blogosphere).

Answers To My Questions #1

Today I want to introduce a new feature to my blog that I'm pretty excited about. I love reading weekly round ups on other blogs, and seeing what they've been up to during week, what products they've been loving and what they've been reading around the blogosphere. I don't think that I get up to enough during the week to document (I'm such a hermit, ha), and I am dangerously behind on my Bloglovin' feed (something I need to rectify immediately) so I couldn't do a decent round up, but I do occasionally find answers to questions that I didn't know I had whilst I'm just browsing the internet, doing my thing

And so that is what this new feature is about: 'Answers To My Questions' shares bits and bobs that I discovered over the week, and presents them in question and answer form because it seemed like an interesting way to do it. Sometimes you don't realise you had a question until you see it asked, and you find the questions surprisingly illuminating. Or maybe that's just me. Without further ado, onto the answers and questions!

Q: How can I link recommended posts at the bottom of my blog?

A: LinkWithin 

I discovered this little gem in Cluttered Closet's article 'Blogging Tips They Forgot To Tell You' which contains tips that I would have liked to have had in a little handbook that they should give you when you decide to start blogging. Except that might suck the fun out of blogging, which is a large part about discovering things for yourself: blogging is a journey, not a destination, after all. 

Q: What is the best way to get cheap indoor lighting?

A: LED camping lights apparently. 

This tip came from London Beauty Queen's '5 Piece Blogging Photography Kit', in which she includes an LED light strip as a way to get better lighting when the weather just isn't cooperating with you. Also, I think it's taken for granted that we all live in houses that get great natural light. My room only has great natural light in summer. The rest of the time? Not so much. This post also contains some other great little tips (Blutack has saved me so much hassle now) so it's definitely worth a read. 

Q: Where can you get simple, pretty, affordable premade Blogger Templates?

A: BloggerTemplate Etsy Shop. 

I wasn't happy with my blog layout, and though I kept telling myself that I could DIY it and learn HTML soon enough, in the meantime I was feeling quite uninspired with my blog design. So you can imagine how ridiculously happy I was to stumble across BloggerTemplate on Etsy, where Bard Jeda makes great templates, that are instantly downloadable, come with clear step-by-step instructions and best of all, don't cost a fortune. My goal is to eventually have a Pipdig design, but in the mean time I am very happy with my BloggerTemplate. The templates are also on offer for $2.99 until the 18 January, so definitely check him out if you were hoping to give your blog a new look for the new year.

Q: Is there something that I can get to beat the winter blues?

A: Yes - Lumie Light! 

The winter season with its short, often gloomy, days plays havoc on my moods, and I've heard wonders about light therapy, but I'd also heard that the special lamps were super expensive, and so regular exercise, healthy eating and supplements was your best bet for fighting off them winter blues. So you should have seen my face when I saw the Lumie Light on ViviannaDoesMakeup's 'Evening Detox Routine'. I was like 'Yup, gotta have it'. It's a bedside lamp that you can time so that in the mornings it'll gradually grow brighter so you can wake up to light and in the evenings, you can time it to gradually get darker, so you can wind down for the night, and hopefully have a better night's sleep. Unfortunately, since they're a UK-based company, the prices go up when it's from their international stockists, so I'm putting this on my 'to buy' list for when I move back to England! 

So that's this week's Answers To My Questions. What interesting things did you come across the internet this week? 

Thoughts on Sunday: It's easy to get lost trying to be a blog you're not.

So. I haven’t blogged all week. It’s been quite disheartening in the sense that it’s not that I don’t want to blog, it’s just that I haven’t wanted to blog on my blog if that makes sense. I’d come up with all these potential blog posts on top of the week I already had planned, but when it came to sitting down and writing them, I just couldn’t. In my head I told myself it was probably because I hadn’t taken any decent pictures of the products I wanted to talk about or because I was too wrapped up panicking. what I’d write about fro Halloween so the unnecessary pressure I was putting on myself was making me not want to write anything at all. 

In the end, I pinpointed the reason behind the fact that I wasn’t being myself. I was trying too hard to be something I’m not. I realised this yesterday as I was watching Lily Melrose’s vlogs (how did it take me so long to realise she has a vlog channel?!) and came across this vlog: “Advice” for New Bloggers. Lily has some pretty solid advice. I really like her main “advice”: 

 

“Don’t listen to blog advice.”

 

It was a point that made me go ‘Ah, that might be where I’m going wrong’ especially since I'll happily admit that I'll be the first to save or bookmark a particularly interesting article with blog advice. I think Lily goes on to explain it so well why listening to blog advice can be detrimental when she says:

“The thing about blogging, is if you think too much about it you get consumed by other people and what other people do. Blogging -or vlogging- is about expressing yourself as a person and being who you want to be but just on online media. You’re the one writing the blog: you can write whatever you want. Everyone’s blog story is different and if you ask any blogger how they became successful, they will probably tell you I don’t know”.

This part of her vlog really struck a chord. I realised I was so wrapped up in finding a niche, having my pictures be perfect straight away or stick to a blog schedule or have super amazing beauty content whatever that is)- regardless of whether I was happy about writing it or not. I was putting pressure on myself yes, but of the terribly unproductive kind: I was trying to be something I’m not. 

 

I realise now that I am not all the bloggers that I admire or need to necessarily have the same posts that I like. In reality, I’m not even what I think I should be in my head. I’m still figuring out who I am as a person let alone what this is as a blog, so really it’s okay if it’s a little all over the place at first, because in all honesty, that’s a perfect description of me: a little all over the place until I find my feet.

There's a difference between being inspired by the blogs you read and trying to emulate the blogs you read, and it can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish between the two. However, only one of them can help you grow as a person and add to the blog you want to write; the other is pretty much gauranteed to leave you frustrated, because regardless of how well you're doing, you'll never ditch that nagging feeling that you're not being you.

So for the next coming weeks or even months, I’m going to experiment and try different features, content, layouts - you name it -and just have fun with it, figuring out how to do all the things that have to do with blogging through good old trial and error, because she is absolutely right. It is really easy to get lost in the thoughts of being successful, doing things “right” and not looking like the total newbie that you are, and forget why you started blogging in the first place: because you wanted to join on all the fun.

So basically, from now on, I'm going to just be myself. Whatever that means.