The Great Blog Shake Up

Every once in a while us bloggers become uninspired and complacent, am I right? I have been blogging for over 2 & a half years and since coming back from holiday I’ve hit a bit of a wall. I’d taken on a lot of freelance work before my trip to ensure I had plenty of dollars and if I’m honest, I completely burnt myself out as far as writing is concerned. While on holiday I didn’t blog at all and it felt good, so good that when I came back I still didn’t feel very inspired to write anything other than my holiday diary. But as those posts wore on and they didn’t seem to be very well received it just made me feel less and less inspired to write unless I had a deadline. But I’ve made a firm decision that as of today, that needs to change.

In an effort to stop myself becoming burnt out again, I’m leaving the world of freelancing behind for the time being in an attempt to live solely from my blog earnings. I registered as self employed as a way to ensure that I could work around my daughter’s schedule but in recent times I’ve taken on so much that she hasn’t been getting the focus she deserves. I was putting far more time than 16 hours a week into my blog and other freelance projects, I was constantly replying to emails and hitting deadlines. That wasn’t the point of this. Hopefully this will give me more time to spend with her, and more time to put into my blog. I want to have time to approach it in a business sense, in promoting my posts, my thoughts and really giving you good content not something rushed. Yes there will be promotional posts to boost my income, as ever these will all be marked with a * and anything that isn’t written by me will be marked as “content”. However I don’t want my readers to skim over posts I am being paid to write, I want them to be solid and relevant content.

As far as content is concerned, I am taking a more “lifestyle” approach as I started this year. I want to return to my roots of recipes, more outfit posts, travel, Disney and my life in general as a single mother. I’m hoping to invest in a few new lenses over the next few weeks which will help me continue to improve my photography. I want to shake my layout up a bit, and return to the level of interaction I once had over social media. As i’ve not been in a great place of late my social media presence has diminished to almost a couple of posts a day.

Tonight I’m going to settle down and really concentrate on ways to improve my blog and really bring it up to scratch. Thank you so much to everyone for sticking by me during this dry patch. I promise Cocktails in Teacups will be back and better than ever.