Micro Brew; Spring Cleaning (Prompt #2)

Good morning!

We are here again with the second prompt of March’s theme “Micro Brew Spring Cleaning” (March 18) – [from Lauren at NorthernPlunder] Reflect on your blogging thus far. Is it going the way you thought it would? Are you seeing an improvement? What could your followers do to help? What direction do you see your blog going? 

WHAT’S MICRO BREW?;
THIS WAS CREATED BY MY FRIEND MELANIE / THE LIBRARY OF MARS. WE WOULD DO THIS ON TUMBLR, BACK WHEN THAT WAS MY ONLY REVIEWING PLATFORM. I’VE BEEN WANTING TO DO SOMETHING MORE ON MY BLOG BECAUSE MY REVIEWS ARE AS UNPREDICTABLE AS MY READING HABITS. I THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A FUN WAY TO PROMOTE SOMETHING THAT YOU LOVE. IT’S ALSO BEEN RE-BRANDED FROM “MICRO REVIEW” TO “MICRO BREW” BECAUSE OF SOME CONFUSION AND TO FIT WITH MY BLOGS OVERALL THEME.I WILL BE POSTING THE PROMPTS ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE MONTH AND ANSWERING THEM ON THE FIRST AND THIRD MONDAYS OF THE MONTH (ANYTIME IN BETWEEN WILL BE GOOD TIMES TO POST AS WELL). [FROM ALLIE’S BLOG]

I feel like i’ve talked alot about my blogging journey over here .. so i’m sorry if you’ve been here a long time and I end up saying the same thing over again 😅

For one, I never really thought of where I wanted my blog to go.. At first, I mostly created this wordpress out of a whim as I was on booklr and I had a week off from work and I thought “hey, why not!” ; In the end I am very glad I choosed to do so !

There’s quite a difference between the bookish tumblr and a wordpress blog, if you ask me, I feel like the tumblr side of book blogging is FAR more easier. You don’t really need to come up with your own contents – as you can just reblog stuff out of the others in the community, and you can randomly «Chat» with your followers more easier VS here, that you do need to write your own posts, and I also feel like they do need to be longer. On tumblr, posting a sentence long is something totally acceptable; while I wouldn’t see something alike that over here for exemple..

Do I feel like it prepared me for the blogging world ? well, not really .. as you may recall, after a week or two of having great ideas I just flopped and didn’t blogged for a week with the intent of abandoning it.. Things are nice and good until you run out of ideas and have no idea what to do anymore 😂 Not that I knew what I was doing either.. Maybe I should’ve made more researchs instead of jumping into it like that, but in the end it worked out ! Thanks again to my lovely blogger friends who encouraged me to keep going ❤️  i’ll be forever grateful.

Now the improvements; I certainly do see a difference in the way i’m writing. If you go peak at my very firsts posts/discussions posts, Ithink I tried too much in a way? I tried to write too “professionally” and unlike myself.. I think I found my blogging voice now, and the writing comes to me so much more easily! I do not pretend to be anything. This is just coming out of my brain onto the page, without any filter or “ohno but you need to sound professional“. My first reviews were also all over the place.. while now I do feel like they are more structured, though i’m on my 3rd different way of writing it.

Although some will say restricting to one or two “niches” are needed – The fact that I made my blog so much more open now and not just strictly books have helped me alot aswell ! My brand would be mostly books, blogging, personal experiences/sharing, aswell as a bit of “whetever I want” added to the mix. Video Games and Animes mostly too when we have something to say – this has made the blog so much more me, aswell as eased the blogging slump where I do not know what to write as don’t have to restrain myself to only a few things, you know ? If I feel like writing about something, that’s what I write and that’s it !

Blogging to me is about the sharing. Writing for the readers and what will make your blog “work” is good… but it’s so much better to write it for yourself first and foremost. This is your space, it can be whatever you want it to be. When I read a blog, I wanna see the personality of the author coming through, that’s what makes it so unique. 

Lastly, where I want it to go; as you may have noticed, I recently started to make some slight changes in my categories, blog theme and posts’ headers. Feel free to tell me what you think ! I’m still not sure I like my headers… but I have no idea what to do with them and it does take a while to change them all -so we’ll do with that for now 😆

I’m thinking that I wanna go for self-hosting, though not knowing which is the best option for me ; Thinking BlueHost maybe, as i’ve seen it was WAY less than taking a plan with WordPress, and everything you’d want seems to be there.. I would need to do some reasearch before doing anything however, as I don’t know how to install it and stuff, and the last thing you’d want is to mess up and lose the blog.