creativity crisis

Hello,

Having been running my YouTube channel for nearly 4 years and in September, I will have had my blog for three years. In that time, maintaining both platforms has been somewhat of a challenge – to have them compliment each other without stepping on each others toes or overlapping isn’t easy.

But recently, I feel like I see YouTubers who started at the same time as I did sky rocketing into hundreds and thousands and millions of subscribers and I just don’t know if bloggers are getting the same hits? Or maybe it’s just my blog?

In the first two years of my YouTube channel I steadily built a following of nearly 600 subscribers, it’s diminished a little bit recently but in my nearly three years of blogging I find I have a much more consistent audience on YouTube. Is YouTube where I should be putting my focus? To my understanding (and from what I see on social media) people seem infinitely more interested in video content than blog posts, articles and words. It’s easy to watch a video but reading takes that little bit more concentration so if I want to pour my heart and soul into one of my platforms surely I should make it the one that’s more likely to be more successful?

Is YouTube more influential than a blog? Does it matter? If I like making both forms of content should I just carry on doing both? Or do I sacrifice one to put all of my heart into the other?

This is literally the entire point of the ‘creativity crisis’ series – so that I can have a ramble about things that stress me out sometimes.

I really love YouTube and I really love my blog, for a very different set of reasons – but it’s so disheartening when I work so hard and put so much of myself out online to be put to shame by those who spend more time putting repetitive flatlays with open lipsticks and fake flowers lying on a rug on Instagram (I refer you to creativity crisis #1: social media).

Maybe I do need to focus more on social media, or maybe I need to make more of an effort to post content more regularly, or maybe I take a step back and work on writing, filming and editing what I feel truly expresses my creativity.

The conclusion to all of these creativity crisis rants I feel is going to be I just need to stop freaking out and make what I want and whilst everyone can say ‘it doesn’t matter about views’ or ‘it doesn’t matter about subscribers and followers’, it’s also hard not to notice when you’re so invested in what you make and you want it to do well and you want to show it off to the world so it can be stuck on the metaphorical fridge.

That took a different turn to what I was expecting, but what I mean is that I love YouTube and I love making videos and I love editing but I also love writing with all of my heart. I love how I could make a video and a blog post about the same topic and it would take such different turns and be presented in such different ways and to such different communities and I think that’s what I like about being a blogger and a YouTuber – that I can try and bring those communities together.

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx

Hello!

I was going to write a post about whether I wanted to have children because quite a few people have been asking me about it recently and I thought it would be an interesting discussion and it just wasn’t. I wrote out about three hundred words and I spent the whole time looking at the word count to see if it was long enough and I just don’t think that’s what anyone wants from a blog post.

I’m having a sort of creative crisis at the moment – I always think of myself as a really creative person who does everything a little bit differently and takes a different approach to things but looking at my blog and my YouTube channel, I show literally none of the creativity I like to pride myself in being. I push myself too much to make content on a very regular basis and that makes it harder to show creativity and flare.

Then I’m faced with the decision of do I upload less frequently and spend more time on posts or upload more regularly and potentially grow an audience (as everyone I’ve seen talking about getting readership on a blog or subscribers on a YouTube channel says you need to upload frequently and regularly) and I can’t figure out what to do.

I’m much happier with where my content is now compared to where it was before Christmas and I feel like I do have more of a focus but I don’t know how to bring creativity into what I do. I’ve got lots of new things I want to try over this summer but with how work is panning out it’s looking like I won’t have time to give them the focus and time they deserve.

I’m at a block where I’d love to make Internet content full time but I don’t have any sort of income and I need a job and I’m just not sure where to take it.

So I’d love some help, some feedback, a contribution event – what do you think shows creativity in blogging? Is it photography, or blog design, or writing about things in a way no one else is writing about them? I think I need to explore new things on my blog, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to carry on uploading three times a week. For now I’m just going to play it by ear, but I would really appreciate if you could leave some ideas in the comments!

Thank you for reading (and putting up with my crisis),

Sophie xx

sophie counts clouds

blogging vs youtube | creativity crisis #2

creativity?