Dealing With Blog Discouragement (BEDM)

The more that i’ve been involved in the blogger community and the longer i’ve been doing this, i’ve seen more and more blog discouragement from their owners. It’s gutting sometimes to hear your friends, and some times complete strangers on the internet feel bad about what they’re putting out there. I know i’ve definitely felt like that about my own posts time to time. I wanted to talk a little bit about blog discouragement and how i over came those feelings myself.

The most comments that i’ve seen about being a little disheartened by your blog is that the growth of it is potentially quite slow. Seeing huge bloggers with thousands of subscribers is quite intimidating sometimes, admittedly. I’ve been intimidated by my FRIENDS because of how many followers they have. That’s insane to me that literally i’ve been scared of my friends because of their follower count on their blog. I’ve seen a lot of people discouraged by their peers online, because they have more followers. It’s not anything that should ever be an issue. I’ve seen people shoot to 1,000 followers in days and i’ve seen people steadily grow their base up to 100 followers. Everyone working as hard as the rest.

It’s taken us a very long time (over four years in fact) to reach a moderate base of people who actually read our blog. It’s been a long time for us to reach a follower count that i’m incredibly proud of, but each step along the way still felt like an achievement for me. When we reached 10, and 20, and 50, i still celebrated every single little achievement, and i think that’s something that stopped a lot of the discouragement that i felt. I always saw what i was doing as me putting something else in to the world and adding a post for just one person to read if they needed it.

Blogging takes time, that’s the one thing i’ve learned over the last few years. I’m glad ours has had a pretty slow growth because i’ve appreciated every second of it and really enjoyed putting the work in. I also found the slow growth incredibly useful at the beginning because i had a smaller audience while i was playing around with the blog and figuring out what i liked and didn’t. It worked out really well to have a tighter knit of people to give me feedback on what i was doing.

That being said, dealing with blog jealousy is something that i really have struggled with before. I think it’s natural as people to feel jealous of those that are in the same field as you, and as the YA community has grown massively, it’s natural for you to feel a little unnerved by other bloggers coming in and you feeling jealous of them. That may be their blog, their graphics, their followers, them as people, their Twitter account, there are so many things that you could be jealous of. One of my really big things has always been being jealous of someones blog layout and their graphics. I’ve admittedly never put a great deal of effort in to ours (i’m not talented in that field but it’s going to be changed this year) but i’ve always been incredibly jealous of other peoples.

I’ve found ways around that jealousy and ways of coping with it. Admittedly, it’s something that doesn’t really go away because we’re human and it’s natural, however i can guarantee many people have felt it in the community before you have. I’ve learned to deal with it by realising we’re all here for the same reason and we’re all here because we love books, and we’re all very individual with how we want to portray that to the world. I found a way to make the blog my own and something i was incredibly proud of, and that seems to keep those feelings at bay.

By any chance that someone finds this post and needs it at the moment, i wanted to share some of the things that have continuously pushed me forward with the blog. I’ve always put a lot of significance on making friends with other bloggers. Often they’re the way to push yourself forward and will always be there to give you advice and support if you need it. So definitely push yourself on social media to make friends with other bloggers. Also book events are great ways to find other bloggers!

I also have found it incredibly useful to keep good contacts with publishers. Often events are great for making contacts, and Twitter works wonders for staying in contact with publishers. Once they know who you are and what you do, more opportunities tend to come your way. Plus, it’s always fun to talk books to pretty much any other book enthusiast!

Something that’s actually helped us grow our blog is promoting on numerous social media accounts. We started off with just a Twitter account for our blog, but we’ve slowly grown it and promoted on other platforms and it’s really helped us grow a little bit more, spreading to people that wouldn’t normally read our blog.

There are some really difficult parts of having a blog, i fully admit that. Most of us work around our full time jobs and general life schedules, and it’s not a secret i’ve found blogging extremely difficult to keep up with before. But the friends and connections i’ve made through this experience is something that i’ll never forget and something that makes everything worth it for me. I’m still incredibly proud of mine and Sophie’s little part of the blogger community that we’ve built up from us knowing nothing and just wanting to talk about books that we’ve just read.

We’ve both dealt with a lot of discouragement, and i hope this post helps at least someone in knowing that they’re not alone with it! If not, i hope you’ve enjoyed this chatty post!