5 Things To Remember When You're Re-Focusing Your Blog

If you are one of the few followers of this blog that has been around since the early days, you'll know that this space has changed dramatically over the last 3 years. Just before Christmas I read Jenny Purr's post on How To Refocus Your Blog Without Rebranding and it pushed me to make the difficult decision to completely change my blogs focus.

Of course I didn't do it without re-branding, I went the whole hog. It was something that I didn't really want to do and it was very hard to say goodbye to Lilac Ghosts, a beauty blog I'd been building for the last 2 years. I did it because it felt right, my gut was telling me to just do it. There is no part of me that regrets making the decision to re-brand and re-focus, but during that time I had a lot of concerns and niggling little feelings I had to get over to move forward.

You may lose one audience, but you'll gain another. I was very worried about alienating my beauty and fashion audience, but in the end I had to trust that my new content would bring in a brand new audience that would be just as supportive. I know I've lost a few of you along the way and that's ok, because I've seen a whole host of new readers drop by and leave amazing comments, so it's all worth while.

Schedule your change over date and stick to it. One thing I found really helpful was to give myself a firm date of change over. I knew that the beginning of January was going to be when I completely made the switch and it gave me a deadline to have everything ready by. I'm not usually very good at sticking to personal deadlines, especially when I know I can move the goal posts as much as I like. However, I pretty much plastered it all over my social media that I was going to be changing at the beginning of Jan and that gave me the motivation to stick to it.

At least have a rough plan and content diary. Before I made the switch I made sure I had at least 1 months post ideas lined up ready to go. I was so worried that I was going to change my focus and then not be able to think of ideas, it turned out to be the complete opposite. I now have post ideas leading all the way to July and I still have loads more to pick out of my creative brain. If there's anything that reassures me I made the right decision, it's that generating ideas comes a lot more easily now.

It's ok to have a bumpy start. The actual content on this blog has switched quite smoothly, but the branding, redesigning and social media side of things weren't quite as smooth. Nobody hits the ground running and doesn't stumble a few times. It's always difficult to re-brand and I don't think it's ever an easy transition, especially when you're as indecisive as I am!

You're changing to make you happy, no one else. My blog has always been fairly personal, not so much a diary of my life, but somewhere I could express my creativity and passion. As I grew and my interests changed, what I wanted to write about changed as well. I wasn't happy writing about beauty and fashion anymore, I was no longer passionate about it, so I decided to do what would make me happy. I did worry that a lot of people wouldn't like the change and I had to remind myself that my blog is first and foremost for my own enjoyment, not the approval of people on the internet.

Are you thinking of re-focusing your blog sometime this year? Are you currently un-happy with the content you're producing and find you really want to change?