When you are starting to blog, all the available advice about how to do it, can be overwhelming. One of the confusing thing is choosing your blog a specialisation, a category where it falls. While you can choose many other categories, lifestyle is a good way to go.
In the olden times, when blogging was new and rare, blogs which talked about life, personal events and other similar subjects were referred to as "haircut blogs". The name was derived from the idea that people would blog about getting a haircut and often it was used as a patronising term. As blogging became more mainstream (not just for us nerds who knew how to code a website) and more women got into blogging, lifestyle blogging became a bigger thing than just haircut blogging. Many different, specialised categories have risen within lifestyle blogging. Now there are tons of lifestyle blogs about beauty, family and parenting, fashion, design, living, food and travelling.
Categorising is hard for me. I don't like categorising things, I don't like being categorised. It seems to me that categories are often too narrow or too exclusive and things can fit in several categories. So I have been changing my blog's category at Bloglovin' several times. Nothing seems to quite say what my blog is about. Except lifestyle. Because lifestyle can be kind of anything. Granted, I do blog about marketing, branding, blogging, business and web design. Things that aren't usually considered as lifestyle. And then I started to think that all is part of my lifestyle. My life and lifestyle is built in a big part around my freelancing business and all stuff about web. Of course there are lots of other things in my life, some of which I've blogged about in past. Like movies or music. It's been years since my last beauty product related post. Thinking out loud is my thing, something I do with my email list and also lately with my Instagram selfie project.
One could claim that most, if not all, blogs are lifestyle blogs. Lifestyle can refer to personal attitudes, values and views of world. And if a human has written the blog post, that human has, unintentionally or intentionally, put his or her attitudes, views and values in that post. Cause nobody can be completely unbiased or keep their own views out of their texts and other forms of expression. However for many of you, who don't find categorising as restricting as I do, lifestyle blogging is something to be distinguished from other types of blogging. Thus I'll try to define it a little bit.
What is lifestyle blogging, then? A lifestyle blog usually features subjects similar to family, beauty, fashion, sports, personal development, religion, relationships, crafts (and DIY), home decor, recipes and career. The basis of a lifestyle blog is being personal. It builds from the life of the blogger. A lifestyle blogger discusses about her way of life, values, views and attitudes and builds the blog posts around them. A lifestyle blog can be specialised around one or more of the subjects mention before, but it can also more broadly handle any subjects that are close to the heart of the blogger. Lifestyle blogging includes anyone from mom bloggers to fashion bloggers. Basically to turn your blog into a lifestyle blog you must just make the decision to label it as such. To choose the lifestyle of lifestyle blogging.
Starting a lifestyle blog is easy. You can specialise to one of the many lifestyle related subjects or go along a more general way. As with any other blog, you can choose to go with hosted solutions (such as WordPress.com or Blogger) or self hosting. If you want to read more about choosing a blogging platform, check out this post. For lifestyle blogging, I recommend not getting too serious. If you try to blog with a constant frown, you will distance yourself from blogging and from your audience very soon. Lifestyle blogging requires quite a lot of personality and a personal touch. You'll need to be willing to show who you are and what you are about. You don't have to tell everything about your life. Still you will need to share some stuff about your life, in order to make your blog really a lifestyle blog. Whatever you do, don't overthink it.
Choosing lifestyle blogging is for you when you want to use your personality and perhaps don't want to narrow your specialisation too strictly. Your lifestyle blog can deal with subjects around your life and lifestyle more widely or more narrowly. Lifestyle blogging is also flexible enough to give you room to experiment and make adjustments to your blog and it's chosen topics on the go. Lifestyle blogging is about your life and personal experiments. Use your life, however exiting or mundane it is, as an inspiration for your blog content.
The lifestyle of lifestyle blogging was first published on Mervi Emilia blog. Read and post comments.
© 2010-2016 Mervi Eskelinen. Some rights reserved.
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