On Vlogging Preference & Reviving My Blog [AKA an Update]

I remember being pulled to blogging several years before actually beginning to blog. As someone who's always had the desire to be a writer and even briefly considered doing journalistic writing, there's always been something incredibly appealing about being able to curate my own space on the internet full of my own writings and musings in whichever form I want. Finally, in 2012, I went for it. I started this blog and started posting about Project Runway. I used it pretty casually throughout the end of high school all the way through the end of my freshman year of college.

And then, in the summer of 2013, I got serious. Without getting into too much detail, I lived with my parents over the summer in the small town they'd recently moved to, and I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't know anyone, I had a job in customer service that was kinda miserable, and also felt like I was regressing from "independent adult at college" to "kid at home with parents." Definitely not the best of times. And I found myself throwing basically all of my free time into blogging. I did a lot of fun 30 Day Challenges and CDs On My Shelf posts, and one of my rant-y posts about a scam company actually went semi-viral. Even today, when you search the company, it's near the top of the search results.

I kept this up for quite a while, posting as frequently as possible, and trying to get into a routine. And then, right at the end of 2013, I discovered BookTube. I've always been a huge reader, but in college, I hadn't really been making much time to leisure reading... but BookTube re-sparked that interest. It led to my blog taking a very book-heavy turn. I was essentially doing BookTube-esque videos, but in blog form. Wrap ups, book hauls, reading challenges, etc. But by mid- 2014, that wasn't quite enough for me anymore. I wanted to make BookTube videos. I wanted to reach a wider audience and talk about books with more people. I wanted to actually have a comment section and to interact with people about books instead of seeing a decent view count with zero comments.

So, I started a BookTube channel. I posted a couple videos in the summer of 2014, and then began posting regularly at the end of 2014. And that's been my main focus ever since. Video was never my primary desired form of communication-- it's so much easier to say exactly what you mean when you can type and edit-- but I've enjoyed vlogging for the 2.5 years I've been doing it. I don't have a huge audience, but most of my videos get comments, and I do actually get to interact with people and get feedback. And as that's been going on, I've been less and less devoted to this blog.

Obviously, it hasn't been inactive. At least, not completely. Most of the time, I still post once or twice a month, but my post count has continually gone down over the past 2.5 years, and especially since the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. I think I posted a grand total of 12 blogs throughout the school year. And the main reason for that... is my vlogging preference.

What I mean by this is that, since I reach a wider audience on YouTube and I get to interact with people more often on there, whenever I get a good idea for a topic to talk about, it almost always gets put on the "vlog" list rather than the "blog" list. I always think "no, this is a topic I want to talk to people about, and that'll work better on my YouTube," and end up putting almost every idea down in the "vlog" column, delegating only my obscure TV show rankings to my blog. Because apparently, everything else is "too good" for my blog. I've had so many ideas that would probably be communicated better in blog form that I've posted on YouTube instead simply because I can converse with more people about it and reach a wider audience on there. That's obviously not an invalid reason, but I hate that I've turned this blog into something deserving of only my most niche, obscure interests and nothing else.

So, what's my point? My point is that you should prepare yourself for more diverse content. I'm hoping to do 30 Day Challenges again, and to post some discussions and just general updates. Maybe even favorites posts. And definitely some book reviews once I get around to it. I'm still definitely going to be doing my niche rankings posts because I freakin' love them, but I want to do more interesting stuff on here, and I want it to be more than just the spill-over from my YouTube. I want it to contain lots of different, diverse things. After all, it IS supposed to be the diverse and random thoughts in my brain.

Also, I say this at the end of every post, but please, make sure to comment on stuff! One of the most motivating things ever is seeing someone interacting with something I've posted. I love fangirling over my favorite topics, so feel free to join me.

That's about all I wanted to say in this post. The summertime is always when I have the most spare time, so I always feel really inspired and motivated to get creative and write/blog/vlog a lot, so I hope to be really active on here over the next three months (and the future too, but grad school is hard, y'all)!

Check out my links below!

YouTube Channel 

Facebook

Goodreads

Thanks for reading! If you like my posts, I'd really appreciate if you'd subscribe/follow so that I know you're enjoying what I'm posting! And don't forget to join in the discussion in the comments!