I started blogging in December 2012. This is considerably late given that blogging first exploded into the online scene in early 2000s.
My interest in writing (or rather blogging) started when I noticed numerous advertised articles on eating places and travels appearing on Facebook.
I started to study what blogging is all about and how some people are using blogging as a platform to make money through product endorsements, invitation to events, paid posts, free product samples and advertising banners on their blogs. These bloggers can even get free flight, travel and hotel accommodation if they are invited to write about these companies services.
Of course, there is also the issue of integrity where bloggers were paid by companies to write favourable reviews of their products or services.
The power of these bloggers are determined by the number of followers they have on their Facebook Page, searching ranking on Google and traffic to their blogs. One of the fastest and easiest way is to run contests to win vouchers and free dining for readers who like and share their Facebook posts. All these done to get more people to like the Facebook Pages of these bloggers. This is the power of social media.
Hmmm...
And so I thought perhaps I could do this for a living. Imagine getting paid a few thousand dollars just for writing an article about a product.
After all, who doesn't like to eat good food, stays at nice hotels, go travelling, gets invited to exclusive events and receive free samples. More so when all these are FREE. It's like living the ultimate lifestyle that everyone wants but few actually do.
So should I be writing about food only? Should I be involved in all things that interest me like travel, fashion, etc?
Well, the food blogging scene seems to be getting crowded. But it's also the easiest. You'll never run out of topic to write as there's always a new restaurant or eating place opening up somewhere every other day. And people are looking for new places to eat every day. Don't believe it? Just look at how much time you spent deciding where to go for lunch or dinner every day.
You just need to have some pretty good photography skill and an ability to put into words the taste of food expressively, plus providing some information like pricing, location and promotions.
But then I realised taste is a very personal thing. What tastes good to you may taste bad for me. And due to the high failure rate of the F&B industry, many information become obsolete very quickly. And it takes more than just using words like melts in your mouth or divine to write an article.
And I had another problem. I couldn't afford to dine at expensive places every other day like there's no tomorrow. Some of those bloggers probably started part-time, paid for food from their own pockets and blogged about them until they've built up a large following and start getting invitation or paid assignments before quitting to go full time. To approach companies for opportunity to write reviews about their products or services with a blog that has zero followers is going to land me flat on my face.
And writing about a company that just gave something to you free of charge is going to skew my review. Will I be objective? If yes, will any other companies be willing to let me write about them? Or am I obligated to write something good about them? If yes, what about my followers who placed their trust in me?
The same issues kept surfacing for topics like travel, hotel, etc.
So what should I blog about?
I noticed that I'm interested in the marketing aspect of business and so decided to blog about marketing.
Thus, outrageous marketing was born.
As I blog about this topic, I soon realised that there are a lot of other stuff that are related to marketing. Branding, change, human behaviour, human potential, promotions, rules and regulations and weird things that happened.
So now I write about things that happened to me, my surroundings, friends, news that happened and what we can learn from them.
But people in the place that I live in are all very smart, smarter than me a thousand times. And I can't write. Why would people want to read what I blog?
It's been over three years that I've started blogging. Some days I get inspirations and blog a bit more. Sometimes, I just do not know what to share. I've since learned to just let it be. There's really no need to force myself to post something for the sake of posting.
There are only 248 followers on my Facebook Page (Outrageous marketing) and most of them are my friends. A good handful of them are Thai friends I've made on Facebook. I would think some of them do not understand what I'm writing about at all.
Sometimes my blog traffic got spike to a few thousand views. For the most part, it hovers around 100 plus.
I've yet to find out how to earn money from it.
Should I continue blogging? Is blogging for me? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing something else that I can be more successful at? These questions keep coming up from time to time.
But all these are no longer important, so I hoped.
It's something that I would do it for free.
Even if there is only one person who gets something out of it.