As I sat down today to plan my blog posts for this week’s big trip to Japan, a wave of anxiety washed over me.
I love what I do. I’ve been blogging for 13 years now, and it’s gotten a lot harder over time. I redesigned my website about 6 years ago (for the 3rd time or so), which cost a fair bit of money. At the time, blogs were taking on a more editorial feel, so I designed my blog to reflect that trend of reading more like an online magazine than a personal diary.
Blogging has taken on many different forms over the past decade. From year to year, trends have shifted from glossy edited images to mirror selfies, videos, carousels, and more. Some years collage posts performed well, while other years posts entirely dedicated to one product performed best.
As a content creator and blogger, it’s my job to navigate these changes and try to maintain consistent, high-quality content for you all.
So why did I stop? Actually, my product uploads. If you click on my “Shop Page”, you will see a nice assortment of products that I have manually uploaded to this blog from various retailers across the web. Once I have uploaded these products to my Shop Page, I can insert them into my blog posts. It takes me anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes to find each product, depending on the post I’m working on. On average, I feature at least 20 products per blog post to offer a nice selection of different brands, price ranges, and styles. It takes me about 5 minutes to upload each product to the backend of my website. (PS I don’t have an assistant to do this for me)
It took me about 20 minutes to write and upload this post, but for an average post, it takes me the following amount of time to upload products: 600 minutes product research + 5 minutes per upload x 20 products per post = 100 minutes. So just a post like the one you see here takes me 700 minutes.
That means 11 hours per post.
This means I’m spending more than a full day on a single piece of content. This blog is not my primary source of income – it’s a lot of work to maintain and from an investment standpoint, it’s not the best way to spend my time on my business.
But I love it, so I’ll keep doing it, although you may or may not start to see some slight changes here, like text links to products and collages I made (made in half the time).
I hope you all continue to enjoy reading this blog as I’ve loved writing it for the past 10 years. I will continue to update the shop page and post at least once a week, so please let me know in the comments if you enjoyed it and if there’s anything you’d like to see more of.
xoxo Jaycee
Source: Fashion – Damsel In Dior – damselindior.com
