Let's go back to the beginning...
When I started my Instagram back in May of 2017 I was a bright-eyed newbie with a lot of goals I set for myself. Little did I know that those goals wouldn't go as I planned them too. Little did I know I was setting goals for myself that set me up to fail. I would set goals for my amount of followers every month, it worked for a little while, but the issue is that all that I was focusing on was how many followers I had. That was getting challenging and I was not anywhere near where I thought I would come May of 2018. That was the main thing that really made me not want to continue blogging. I would log onto Instagram and see girls gain 2,000 followers in a week when it had taken me a whole year to get there. I let the numbers discourage me. I let other girls who looked like they had it all together and looked like they knew exactly what they were doing lower my self-confidence. I felt like my blog couldn't even compare to theirs and felt like no one wanted to read what I was doing and I really began to come down on myself.
Leaving school to go back home for the summer...
That's when I left my college town for the whole summer to come back home to work. My college town is where my best friend/photographer lived, and now I was a whole hour away from her with differing schedules and boyfriends and lives in between. Blogging took a back burner to everything that was going on in my life. I was coming up with excuses to not get my blogging done, not enough time, no one to take my pictures, laziness, etc. But, I was just hiding behind my true feelings.
Beginning to work with LiketoKnow.it...
I knew when I started my blog that blogging was what I wanted to do. But, I'll be honest with you guys I had no idea that blogging was as much work as it is. It is a lot more work than just a hobby, but I loved it. When I began to use LiketoKnow.it I realized that I began posting less. I loved the idea of people being able to shop everything that I was wearing within seconds of me posting it, but I did not love the burden of posting with it. Before this I would edit my photo and then post it and be done, I could plan out a couple of weeks worth of posts in advance and have everything ready to go. This was how I stayed on top of posting every day and also how I had time to get blog posts done on top of my school work. But, when I started using LiketoKnow.it for my posts it almost tripled the amount of time it took for me to post a photo. I would have to go online and find everything I was wearing, or alternate similar options, then save it, post it in the LiketoKnow.it app and then finally share it to Instagram. I loved that I was finally getting to work with a company I had only ever dreamed of working with before, but I wasn't able to put out as much content as I wanted to because of this. If I wasn't in school full time, this would probably be a different story. But school always come first, no matter how much I love blogging. It was everything combined that started to make blogging feel as if it were a chore, I wasn't having fun doing it anymore. So, I decided to take a break, well I don't think it was an actual decision that I knew I was making, it more so just happened on its own.
Heading back to school...
When I returned to school after the summer had ended I had intended to start everything on my blog back up. So I started slowly, I went and posted for a few weeks, but had the same feelings as I did before. Blogging was feeling like a chore instead of like the passion that I used to feel for it. Then there was school since I started college I had been an education major. My school doesn't make that easy on anyone and there are a million hoops that you have to jump through before you can get anywhere in your degree program. Everything was beginning to take a toll on me, I didn't know where to turn because no one in my degree program seemed to be able to help me. Ever since I was in kindergarten I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, that's why it was so hard for me to come to terms with what was happening with my degree program. That was when I decided it was time to change my major and to go about teaching in a different program. As an education major, I was constantly stressed and unhappy because no matter how many classes I took and did well in it felt like I was never progressing because of a test that I just couldn't make the right score on. So, I took a leap of faith and changed my major to Family and Consumer Sciences. It was a terrifying but exhilarating decision, I sat down with the director and figured everything out and left her office feeling like a two-ton weight was lifted off of my chest. The stress from school caused me to forgo my blog and get my life together, it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it was what I needed to do. Now, I am in a new program and I am the happiest that I have ever been in school now and I cannot wait to see what this program does for me. It has brought back the confidence in me to get my blog back up and going again.
What to expect from "Zoe Taylor Beauty" in 2019...
This year I've decided to challenge myself in ways that I never have before. I have decided to set goals for myself that I never have before. One of those is with my blog, I want to go about my blog in a way that makes me happy. I don't want to force myself to sit down and write a blog post when I'm not feeling it. I don't want to feel like I have to have two or more blog posts up a week to feel fulfilled. So, Zoe Taylor Beauty the Blog is coming back a little different in 2019. As I mentioned before LiketoKnow.it was a big struggle for me, so I will not be using it on all of my photos on Instagram. I will, however, be using it on all of my blog pictures, which will mostly be outfits you see on Instagram anyway, so you will still be able to shop those outfits. As always you can always DM me or leave a comment on the photo if you would like the link to an item! I am doing this so that I can put out more content that I am happy with and so that I don't feel like blogging is a chore. I loved blogging and I used to have so much fun doing it. I have thought a lot about it and I am ready to try this out and see how it goes! I hope you guys will continue to support me through this small change!
If you've stuck around to this. thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I can't explain how much it means to me for you guys to read my story. I didn't want to jump back into this without first explaining myself. I also didn't want to write a sappy post about where I've been, and all the excuses I can make for not being here. I wanted to give you guys the real honest truth, and this is it. I thank you guys so much for sticking around through this while I try to navigate the blogging world and the adult world. I cannot wait for this journey together. I am hoping to do a photo shoot in the coming weeks so that I can get some looks up for you guys! Stay tuned, I have a lot of fun content planned!
xoxo,
xoxo,
Great stuff as usual. Keep up the great work!!! Fitness
ReplyDelete