Blogging: Things I Love and Things I Hate

Hello, friends! You didn’t realize this, because I always have a couple of posts scheduled, but I’ve been in a terrible blogging slump recently. No motivation, no ideas, no patience to sit down and write something. When I did sit down in front of WP, for example for our monthly wrap up, it took me three times as long to write something than usual.

Good news is, my slump seems to have officially ended, which makes me so happy and I wanted to share this bit of good news with you all. Especially because me conquering my blogging slump while writing a post about blogging is kind of fitting? I like that.

From this bit of rambling at the beginning (and the title), you have surely figured out that today’s post focuses on blogging, in particular, on the things I love and hate about blogging. I originally intended this to be a list, but it turned into a discussion with only a few main points, so uh, I hope you’ll still enjoy it?

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What Makes Blogging Great

blog hopping

I love interacting with our readers on our site, but visiting others’ blogs, reading their content, and leaving meaningful comments is half the fun of blogging for me. I know there are bloggers who dislike blog-hopping, which is fair, but I don’t think I’d like to be a part of this community if I couldn’t interact with my favorite bloggers on their blog or on W&W. Not only do I love the posts my favorite bloggers come up with, but I also find them incredibly useful, as most of my to-read list is made up of books I discovered through book blogs.

I won’t lie, though, blog-hopping is time consuming and can take a lot out of me. This is especially true when I don’t feel up to blog-hopping for a while and I end up with hundreds of posts piled up that I need to check out. The bigger the pile gets, the more stressed I get, and the harder it becomes to actually start going through this pile. Even so, blog hopping is absolutely worth it, in my opinion.

creating images and styling posts

Okay, so that sounds way more professional than I am, but we’ll roll with it. I love creating header images for my posts on canva, and I’m surprisingly proud of most of the header images I’ve created. After I’m done with the header, I can start working on the formatting of the post, which is another thing I enjoy. I like to play around with the colors of the text, and enhance the post by adding pictures, quotes or gifs to it.

That said, this process isn’t without problems! Sometimes, nothing seems to be working, and I have to redo the post’s formatting over and over again until it starts to resemble something I could be happy with. At other times, an image I’d originally thought looked good turns out to look massively underwhelming after I place it at the top of a post, so I end up redesigning it. Even so, the satisfaction of having a post that looks good is well worth all the trouble.

What Makes Blogging A Struggle

writing introduction to posts

Look, I love writing posts, I do, but introductions to posts are a nightmare to craft! I’m at a point where the introductions I write always sound the same; they feel boring and bland, and it makes me wonder how you people get through them and get to the rest of the post. 🙈 Do you have any tips on how to write better introductions?? I’d love to hear them.

social media

I’m not good with social media, at all. I strongly dislike instagram, to the extent where our account is currently inactive on there, and I’m terribly intimidated by twitter. Instagram, I have a massive list of problems with which we don’t have time to discuss, twitter, though, is a bit simpler. I love browsing through twitter, quietly liking and retweeting stuff, but I’m intimidated by how fast paced the site is, and I always feel awkward when I reply to a person’s tweet, even if we’re mutuals. (Replying to someone’s tweet who isn’t a mutual? Unthinkable.)

I also struggle with “promoting” our posts on twitter. I want to word my tweets in a way that doesn’t feel too repetitive, but I always feel like I’ve failed on that front. On top of that, I never know when it’s okay to tag authors and when it isn’t. Typically, I don’t tag them in reviews because I’ve seen some authors say that they dislike to be tagged, even if it’s a 1000% positive review. Part of me thinks that’s completely fair – and it is – but another part of me feels like this puts added pressure on bloggers, as we try to figure out who likes to be tagged and who doesn’t.

Earlier this year, I’ve written mini reviews for two contemporary novels that became my all time favorites. Because these were mini reviews describing why these books became favorites and because I was proud of how the post turned out, I ended up tagging the authors. Both of them were so kind and liked/shared/replied to my tweet; it seemed like they were genuinely happy to be tagged. Even so, I won’t make this a habit, because (1) don’t want to make authors feel bad in case they hate being tagged, (2) don’t want to make myself feel bad because I worry over what they think.

On a similar note, I used to tag authors in recommendation posts, and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback and nice interactions from that. But now I rarely do this, because what if they hate it? What if I seem greedy for likes/retweets? I know for a fact that many authors love to be tagged – I’ve seen them mention it and some of the authors I follow always like, retweet, or reply to any tweets they were tagged in. So my point is – social media is a big can of worms that makes me nervous as hell.

Let’s chat!

Do you tag authors in your tweets promoting your posts? Do you think it’s fair to expect bloggers to *know* what each author prefers? What do you like/dislike about blogging?