Q1 – Blog Review – Silver Sky Studios

Q1 - Blog Review

Overall Reflection

It turns out that creating a new blog and posting consistently is a lot harder than I previously thought it would be.

At the start of the year, I had a lot of enthusiasm as this was an exciting opportunity which offered a lot of new learning experiences. However, I can now recognise that the original goal of posting twice weekly was very ambitious. Trying to complete two new posts a week while also working full-time and managing family and general responsibilities is perhaps too challenging for me to take on right now.

I have throughly enjoyed writing and uploading the posts I have be able to complete so far, but having the pressure and constant feeling of failure for not achieving my weekly targets is perpetually hanging over me. I set out to create this blog as a form of expression and to use as a creative outlet. I am worried if I keep an unrelistic goal then I well become burnt out and disinterested from my initial intentions for this blog.

Going forward I want to take stock of my successes and setbacks with the blog every few months to see how I am progressing and re-evaluate how I approach the areas that are holding me back. I think this will be a good way to remotivate myself and allow my goals to continuiously adapt to my current circumstances.

Highlights

1 ~ Travel has been a deep passion of mine for a very long time and it is somthing I am always keen to share with others. Over the last few months I have been able to see some wonderful new places and gather information to share on this blog. Head over to the travel section of the blog to check this out!
2 ~ Investments have been made into new technologies in order to make the planning, writing and posting of blog articles far easier and more efficent.
3 ~ The posts that I have been able to deliver, I have been imesly proud of! I regognise that this is still just the start of my blogging journey, and there is a lot of skills I will be able to develop over time and processes that I will be able to streamline in order to make posting more efficient. I am still very pleased with what I have been able to create by myself. With very few expertise and little background knowledge of this world, I am extatice that I, of all people, managed to create a website from scratch!

What was successful?

During January and Feburary I uploaded posts beyond what I was expecting to. However, this was often in replacement for what I was originally intending to post. This has meant I have not completed the writing and uploading of all the posts I planned when designing the schedule back in December. That being said, I gave myself space to vear off track and create posts about things that interested me in the moment. It created freedom, where I was otherwise just following the plans set out months ago by a version of myself that could no truly predict what I would want to post about a few months on. This is a liberty that I will indever to carry forwards as my blogging journey continues.

What setbacks were incurred?

Keeping up with the posting schedule was far more challenging than I expected and often I missed deadlines due to lack of time or enthusiasm to research and write the posts.

There are multiple posts that I started writing and have left unfinished as profectionism has held me back. Every time I come to upload something new there is an overwhelming fear that it is not good enough or will be riddled with mistakes. This has been one of the main reasons why I have not met the targets I originally set at the beginning of the year.

What will be continued?

Although having a variety of areas to write about may be spreading myself a bit thin, they are all still areas I care deeply about and have great passion for. I have concluded that even if I only create one post a month about each topic that is still better than ignoring it completely and deminising my own satisfaction by restricting what I can talk about.

Additionally, taking the time to stop and reflect has been very powerful in remotiviating myself and feels like the first step to getting back on the right track to progress this blog to what I originally wanted it to become.

What will be changed?

Going forward, I will try to stick to a writing schedule which has been built into my weekly schedule to remove the excuse of not having the time to research and write the posts. I will trial posting once weekly then when this becomes natural and easy I will try scaling up my posting frequency again. Using the next three months as a grace period for myself as I am still finding my feet in the blogging world.

There have been a number of different side protects I have been interested in over the last few months that have taken my time away from the blog. I need to pause these persuts for the time being and allow myself to refocuse on writing entries for the website rather than trying to start a thousand different things all at once. When I have made a stable and managemeble posting schedule, then I can look to branching back out to other creative streams like my Etsy shop again.