the nitty gritty of being a full time bloggerI’m never gonna be ok with discussing my income on the internet, nor do I think it’s useful at all in this conversation but money is a big part of blogging if it’s going to be your job and by the end, I wasn’t making anywhere near the amount I needed to in order to cover my bills. Not only was I not making it work financially but it wasn’t working for me mentally at all and it was taking too much of a toll on my mental state. Even making the smallest amount of money from my blog still means a huge amount to me, I feel extremely privileged to have made an ok living from something that I was doing for free because I was so, so obsessed with creating blog and Instagram posts. However, I made a lot of mistakes within my time due to having so little faith and confidence within my skills and not knowing enough about what to charge and what legal rights to put onto my work. Those are things that I was only going to learn in time which is ok, it’s easy to look back and regret some of the decisions that I made but it was all part of the bigger picture for me to learn and grow from and I’m grateful for every single opportunity I had. The collaborations I worked on are something I’m immensely proud of but as a smaller blogger, I often felt the way I was treated by some PR companies and agencies was reflected in the number of followers I had. There is a lot of unprofessional practices within the blogging world and very few legal rights for those doing the work which is a huge issue across the board. The amount of anxiety and uncertainty I felt around not only securing jobs was one thing but actually getting paid from them was awful. Constantly needing to chase and ask to be paid for the work I’d completed months before is something I couldn’t mentally do anymore it was having such a negative effect on my life as I was in charge of everything. an unhealthy relationship with the follower countI think it’s pretty impossible when your job revolves around social media to not pay attention to your likes and followers count, especially when it comes to any brand work as that’s what the success of the campaign is measured on. It was a constant battle mentally to not let the numbers completely dictate how I felt about what I was doing online and at the end of 2017 my Instagram suddenly starting leaking followers and it’s never been the same again. I have no idea what happened or understand why but I can’t deny how much it affected how I felt about myself and my work. I constantly questioned what was wrong with me and my work for people to unfollow at such a consistent rate. It didn’t matter what I did either, and even when a post did well which give me a little endorphin high it was still constantly niggling away at me why people were unfollowing. Then, of course, there was the constant worry about brands not wanting to work with me if people were unfollowing or if my engagement was suddenly very low as both of those things are very much of my control and despite the rational part of my brain knowing that I still couldn’t shake the quite serious effect it was having on my mental state. I’ve had to do a lot of work mentally to work out how to use Instagram in somewhat of a healthy manner, which I get may sound ridiculous but it’s true. Getting that immediate interaction and validation from strangers online is completely addictive and it’s hard to separate that validation from my own value of what I’m doing online.
