Rebranding in 2021?

Life moves so fast that sometimes you really need to take a moment to appreciate how much things have changed. In my lifetime I’ve seen dial-up internet, flip phones, walkman devices and a time without YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify and mobile applications – and I’m in my 20s. When I really digest how quickly life is speeding ahead, it starts to make it easier to box life experiences into “millenials”, “Gen Z”, “baby boomers” and beyond.

When it comes to my blog – I’ve changed the way I’ve approached it over the years as I have naturally grown up and matured. When I was younger, my blogs were short and recaps of my day, andI had a website mostly for the purposes of sharing coding and Paint Shop Pro tutorials / Paint Shop Pro graphs. Rebrand 1: As I was entering my teens, I fell in love with make-up anddecided to also branch out and create a beauty blog, where I spoke about all things makeup and new Boots buys. Expansion: Fast forward a year or two later and in enters the years of being really into fashion – this outlasted my beauty obsession by a mile and when I started working full-time, I was able to start to pay a photographer to take some photos of me around every month or so and thus entered higher quality time for Skylish. I’ll add that I still am into beauty and fashion, but just personally not to the point where I feel I need to write about it online frequently anymore.

Rebrand 2: When I got bored of writing about my outfits, I found that the blogging world I was a part of was moving too – more thought out “think” pieces or just helpful tidbits related to all things “adulting” were coming to the forefront and the focus on outfits shifted primarily to Instagram (and even that recently is evolving into more than just photos – but videos with interesting transitions now too). Whilst my blog was no longer a style blog, I kept up the frequent photoshoots to accompany my posts out of habit, before COVID shut that down for me in 2020. Despite this, I continued recycling a ton of old photos for almost a year, just because it was what I was used to doing – I was going through the motions but not really thinking about what I could do “next” or do “differently”

One day somewhat recently, I noticed that somebody who I know in a “non-blogging a non-social media capacity” had viewed some of my stories on Instagram. It prompted me to cast a more critical eye over how I was “branding” myself online, and if there was anything I needed to do to press the update button and get things back up to where I felt I was currently. A few small tweaks, and I’ve done a bit of rebranding over the first few weeks of the year…
 

My blog

I wanted to bring my blog back into the forefront in 2021, after having two pretty slack years – that is, still blogging, but not as much as I’d like it. I’ve dipped my toes into many different things over the years – from drama and dance, to webdesign and coding, to working on a fashion brand. The one thing that has always stuck (so far), and that I’ve found time for no matter what, has always been writing and blogging. It’s why I never really have a proper answer for people when they ask me how I maintain blog and work a 10-12h a day job. It came easy to me because I enjoy it, so… I just get on with it. Remembering this – and having my boyfriend remind me – I decided laziness really shouldn’t stop me from writing 52 posts a year, because it’s something I know I can do. I wanted to return putting more effort into this thing that I find therapeutic amongst the madness of day to day life and trying to be *SucCessfuL*

This year, I’ve finally decided push ahead on this blog without the photographer-taken fashion photos. Well, COVID sort of made the decision for me, but I just decided to seal it for the future in January. The thing is, the purpose of those had originally been to tell people to buy my jacket from New Look, or my boots from Public Desire, and, naturally, the posts would be lined with a few affiliate links, but now that I wasn’t really going down the style blog route, it stopped making as much sense to me to be taking these photos on a regular basis. Not at all to say that photos like that will never again grace the cover photo of a future blog, but if you have a look at my recent posts, you will see that I have shifted the aesthetics a touch.

With the new found energy I’ve also started to explore the blogging world again, discovering some amazing new blogs and reading some really interesting pieces over the past few weeks.
 

Social media

My fitness account: In January, I also took a look at my fitness account and drew up some mental plans for that too. My fitness account is definitely the social media account that I put the most effort into these days. As much as I think it’s interesting to have picture posts with fitness tips & tricks, and sometimes you just want to post a photo where you look cute, the truth is that I originally started my fitness page to primarily share workouts. I’m not professional – but I wanted to show people how easy and simple it is to integrate fitness into your life no matter what else you have going on, and even if you are a total beginner, with serious workouts vs. sort pointless workouts you see on Instagram on occasion that are all for the *aEstheicS*. But, when I first started my page it was the case that my photos would perform better than the videos, so surely but slowly the focus shifted there. Over time however, this has balanced out, and I’ve refocussed a little more back onto the video content in recent weeks!

My main account: On my “main” account, I used to post photos daily or every other day, and they were almost always those that had been taken by my photographer. But as lockdowns started to bite, this slowed down, and similar to my fitness page and this blog, I had another think about what I really wanted to be sharing on this page. Because I am focussing on my fitness page these days, my posting on my “main” account is a lot more sparse, but at a minimum once a week. It’s definitely not a page that I’m actively trying to grow, it’s just a page where I’m chilling and existing on Instagram, posting stories of what I’m up to, and occasionally sharing my new blog posts. In terms of rebranding, I’ve shifted this page more to an all encompassing “lifestyle” focus vs. here’s my outfit focus. Sometimes – yes – here’s my outfit! But sometimes, I just want to show you some decor in my apartment. Sometimes it could be a sponsored/gifted post. And – when time allows – travel content will definitely resume to!

These are the steps I’ve taken recently when it comes to deciding who I want to be online. I’m also working on a project that I’m really excited about, that should launch by the summer. I haven’t announced anything at all yet – but if you’ve got this far, sign up to this page! 😉

2021 is a year where I’m trying to get organised, and get a lot of stuff done, so I’ve really just been plugging away and trying to fit together pieces of the puzzle that is my life and where I want my life to go; this includes very quickly brushing off any bad days I’ve had so far this year because the show much go on…! As mentioned, it’s so easy to get caught up in the motions and plug away at the things you’ve always done, but I’d encourage everyone to stop every now and again, and assess if what you’re doing is still what you want to be doing.

Have a good week!

Photo: Unsplash