When I first started this blog about nine months ago, I didn’t really think anyone would read it. Realizing that people DO read my blog has given me so much joy and a great sense of purpose over the past months. I’m really lucky that the large-cup-size lingerie blogging community is really small and supportive, so I’ve been able to grow an awesome readership in a pretty short time.
Still, I’m not exactly a high roller. No company has ever tried to send me a free product to review (gosh, I wonder if that’s because of the threatening name of my blog… ha ha). I’ve been invited to a “press event” exactly once—someone forwarded the invite to the Gok Wan shapewear event to my email, but I had class that day and oh, oops, I also don’t wear shapewear. (Well, I wear shapewear leggings because they’re more opaque.) It would have been inconvenient and dishonest for me to attend that event, as well as not very useful because so many other bloggers already wrote about it. So I didn’t worry about not going to that event, and I don’t really think I’m missing much by not going to other press events because they’re not as appropriate to my blog’s content as they are for lots of other people. But I admit I sometimes get a thinner skin than usual and feel hurt when companies don’t invite me to their press events. And then I have to put on my big girl pants and move on with my life.
Here’s how I justify this. My blog is not about companies, it’s about my readers. I want to help people while simultaneously being amusing and irreverent. I usually don't focus as much on pressuring or promoting companies as I do on sharing my excitement or disappointment with certain products, and trying to figure out who would like them or hate them (not simply whether I personally like them or hate them, as I thought I'd be doing when I started this blog). That’s what drives me to write my blog—I love writing, I love feeling useful, and I have a fairly large amount of information and knowledge on large-cup-size bras. If I knew about mountain biking or cupcake baking, I’d try to write a useful blog about those things. That’s why I make a priority of posting often and responding to comments and emails.
Things I HAVEN’T spent any time focusing on are my sad, abandoned Twitter, and my totally nonexistent blog Facebook page. I don’t really understand Twitter and I’ve never fully figured out how to use it. The whole Twitter concept sort of bums me out because it makes me feel like a 95-year-old great-grandmother who has managed to sort of figure out email—the best thing you can say is “At least she’s online at all!” As for having a Facebook fan page for my blog, I haven’t done it because I just feel like it would take up a lot of time that I’d rather spend writing actual blog posts.
Then again, I can’t QUITE give up on my dream of becoming fabulously famous and popular and having hundreds of thousands of people, including random celebrities, reading and promoting my blog! (I’m pretty sure most of us cling to this dream.) And so I sometimes wonder if I might increase my readership by making better use of social media. I like to think that by striving to post regularly and (hopefully) intelligently, I will naturally grow and maintain a loyal readership, and that’s been overwhelmingly true so far. (Thanks, awesome readers!) But I also wonder if there are some more awesome, loyal readers out there who have just never seen my blog at all because I don’t connect over social media much.
Awesome, loyal readers, I would love to know YOUR view. Do you often discover new blogs through social media? Would you find it fun and interesting if I cobbled together some kind of Facebook fan page? Does anyone REALLY read Twitter? (Yeah, yeah, I know everyone except me reads Twitter…)
The other pertinent question is blog design/layout. One of my friends recently made an offhand comment “Yeah, you really need to work on a design update for your blog”, as though it was wearing leg warmers and playing PacMan, or something. My design is admittedly pretty craptastic right now, I sort of just used the first template that popped up and I am only now figuring out that there are ways to add a more interesting or original background. I’m thinking I will add my own background (like maybe gray and white stripes?). BUT, I know that personally I always feel a little sad when blogs update their layout. I just don’t really like change. Plus, I have this odd attachment to having a really low-tech and simple design. So I’m wondering if anyone else has a similar attachment or if more technical updates would make the reading experience more pleasurable. (Like do people wish I had a bigger font? Do you crave more tabs?)
If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know in the comments… thanks a million for that, and for reading my blog to begin with. It honestly means more to me than I can ever express.
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