How to deal when your blog post idea won't come to fruition. You know that niggling feeling when you’ve had a blog post idea scribbled down forever, you finally shoot photos for it and then the words don’t just seem to flow or sit properly? Same. I write close to 11,000 words daily and a lot of the time, it means that my blog post ideas don’t quite meet expectations and get scrapped.
Just had a crisis of confidence and deleted a bunch of my upcoming blog posts.
— Michelle (@winyeemichelle) October 6, 2015
Stock It Instead
I scrapped around 14 posts when I Tweeted that the other day. I know that 14 posts in my Drafts or Scheduled folder sounds excessive, but as a writer and content girl by day (not blogging or my online magazine, in case you wanted to know), my mind genuinely buzzes with ideas and topics all the time. I wrote a few of my lengthier, more serious posts but in the end scrapped them all because I felt they were all too ‘much’ for my little ol’ blog. Instead, those have gone into my freelance pot and I’ve repurposed a few of the photos and main points of discussion for other posts. Including this one!
I’d allotted some post space (I call it an editorial slot, heh) to a review about ethos in Kennedy Town, Hong Kong, but it didn’t really live up to my expectations and I realised I could probably share something else that day. In the end I shared this one. It’s good to consider how else your not-so-great-quality posts could be reworked.
New Perspectives
… Which brings me on to this one! We all have a blogging style, don’t we? I favour lengthier posts and fun shopping posts dotted with outfit posts here and there, the odd list, photo diary or review. This is how I’ve always blogged and it’s how I like to blog. But sometimes a new perspective on a struggling post idea is all you need. I often find it funny that I have an entire notebook dedicated to my blog – but I also used to have an entire notebook dedicated to PS1 cheat codes, so go figure… - especially as when I started blogging six years ago, we just snapped a webcam photo, dropped some words in and were off with it at 8.17pm, or whenever we happened to be free.
I often tire from writing posts from the same perspective and in the same format all the time, so try taking your post title and looking at ways to format it to make it more interesting. For example, here I made a literal food map of London, I wrote a list here to make a long post readable, sometimes I use sub-headings like this post you’re reading now, and other times I edit my photos to look more scrapbook-esque. Play around with perspective to reintroduce creativity.
Genre Adaptation
Hand-in-hand in with my last point, try your hand at something new. When my blog started, it was very much an anything and everything student blog. To put things in perspective, I had something like £51.17 of a student loan to live off for 4 months at a time. So, um, yeah. Student blog ahoy. Then I decided to channel some fashion to the blog, being a fashion journalism student and all. Soon the beauty blog took over, and arguably now it’s the lifestyle genre’s time to shine.
My point is to see your post idea from different angles: I don’t categorise my blog or posts by FASHION/BEAUTY/LIFESTYLE/FOOD anymore, even though I cover all of these and more; even if I write an outfit post, I look at it objectively and throw in handfuls of everything else that makes me, me. Try combining beauty with lifestyle – show your readers how these products fit in to your everyday life. Add a fashion spin to your lifestyle posts – perhaps you’re a total whizz at styling a particular item. Make the post work for you.
