I Deleted My Lifestyle Blog- Here’s What I Learned

Sometimes you gotta kill some of your darlings but keep the overall spirit alive.

Last Saturday I deleted over 90% of the content on my blog Octoberdaydreams.net. It was not an on a whim decision, but it’s a decision that I’ve learned from.

I enjoyed writing that blog. In the last year I’ve switched my focus from writing poetry (which can encompass any subject) to blogging. It has not always been a smooth transition.

I transferred my approach to poetry to blogging. I do think that having the ability to write on any subject is great. I also agree that especially in the world of blogging, the focus of a blog can get too wide. The focus can also be lost completely.

That’s what I think happened with mine. I started it originally to write about creativity and dealing with depression. Especially the connection.

However, at the third month mark my focus was gone. This spread out for six months.

My blog ended up being a catch-all for: self-care, minimalism, organizing, minimalist fashion and personal ramblings. Plus the occasional one off topic.

This is not entirely bad. However, for me, it felt cluttered. I still enjoyed it but felt scattered.

I loved writing every single post on that blog. It was hard to cut so much in an attempt to start over from a failed blog.

The results I had hoped for weren’t pouring in from that blog. The niche and focus became a constant worry.

I got too much into my own head about everything.

So I killed the blog I had spent almost a year working on. I went from 61 posts to 10 in the course of an hour.

Deleting 90% of your hard worked content is a shock to the writing mind and the system.

I have tried for the last week to write in one niche. To be honest, I’ve never felt less motivated.

It’s not that I couldn’t find one niche that I knew enough about to pump out content for a while.

For me, it’s writing while focused on the topic plus how that topic connects to other ideas that matters. I think through inter-related parts.

If a niche has other ideas that connect to it, I want to write about everything. Therefore, one niche is too narrow for me.

The main reason I regret deleting that blog is not that I thought the blog made sense as a whole (for me it didn’t). It was the fact that I hate being pigeonholed as a writer.

So I went back to the drawing board.

Going forward, I have an audience and a topic in mind. Those are my two parameters when I sit down to write.

I still plan to write a lifestyle blog, but (for me) it needs to be centered and relevant.

That’s the game plan at least… waiting to see how it pans out as a whole.