Reflections on Eleven Years of Blogging
I don’t know what feels stranger - that I started blogging eleven years ago or that I launched this blog four years ago.
Blogging in 2008 was a completely different experience, based more around keeping an online diary and sharing your inspiration on your own online space. It was a way to talk to like-minded people from all around the world before Instagram existed. It was a place where I could escape the monotony of my job and share the things that really interested me. I could wax lyrical about fashion week, dissect my favourite street style photos, talk about the photographers that inspired me, and share the other blogs that I loved to spend my time reading. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having started your own blog in the past couple of years, but there was a certain magic to the early days of blogging that is missing from the current blogging world.
Back then, blogging wasn’t about making money. None of us thought that in our wildest dreams we could be making a living from our websites. It was simply a way to share, create and connect with others. For me, it was the creative output that I needed, as well as being the first form of social media that I really got into - it was a way to discover and speak to like-minded people all around the world, before Instagram was even a sparkle of an idea in the mind of its creator.
The people who inspire me, truly inspire me, are those who I’ve been following online for over a decade. Those whose blogs I began reading as a fashion-hungry graduate who craved an entrance into a world that fascinated her. Lots of these girls lived in New York, working creative jobs within or adjacent to the fashion industry. I remember watching with jealous eyes as they would convene in the city around fashion week with cute picnics in the park. Nowadays, most of these girls, now women, have stepped away from fashion. Those who haven’t are running their own independent, sustainable brands. They all still take photographs, and some of them write enthralling words that allow me a glimpse into their lives. Some have wrote books, others raised children. Several work with flowers, styling and growing. There are ceramicists and painters. They all have one thing in common - they’re multi-faceted, embracing their various interests and talents.
Obviously, there are brilliant blogs I have only discovered recently, as well as many talented bloggers who have only begun in the past couple of years. Blogs are much more professional-looking now - custom-built sites in abundance, as opposed to those clunky Blogger templates we all struggled to customise. It’s now much easier to make a living off blogging with brands paying for partnerships, rather than being over the moon when someone offered you £50 for a sidebar ad. Blogging is now recognised as an industry - and yes that means there are plenty of people just in it for the money, but there are many, many talented folk out there that have been given an opportunity to share their creative work with the world. All those (myself included) who dreamed of working for magazines can now make a living creating their own content without worrying about unpaid internships and a competitive industry that it’s notoriously difficult to enter.
As the quality of the content shared on blogs has increased, the frequency of blog posts has decreased. When I first began writing my blog (you can have a peek at my old blog here) I posted every other day. These days, I aim for once a week. I write longer, more carefully considered posts. Many of my old blog posts were focused on imagery, whereas now words are the heart of my blog. How I blog has definitely evolved over the years. The images used to come first - I’d spot photographs that I wanted to share and write something to accompany them. I now see writing my blog as editing my own online magazine - I think of ideas for content I would like to read myself, then shoot images to accompany my words.
There have been lulls when I thought I might perhaps stop blogging or couldn’t find the inspiration/motivation to invest much time in my blog. Ceasing to write my old blog and launching Field + Nest was a huge step. I let go of something that wasn’t working and that my heart wasn’t in, with the spark of an idea to create a website I felt proud of. It took a while to get in my groove and realise exactly what I wanted to write about, but I feel like I’m now there. The past two years, I’ve created content on here that I’m really happy with and I’ve gathered up a readership that encourages me to continue posting.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote about why I love to blog and why I think blogging isn’t going anywhere. I stand by what I wrote. Not only was this one of my most popular blog posts ever but I loved reading all of the comments from other people saying how they still love reading blogs or were thinking of starting one of their own. You don’t need 300,000 followers on Instagram to write a ‘successful’ blog; you just need a wi-fi connection and inspiration.