Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Canary Beck has posted a very interesting piece over on the [SL] Blogger Support site about the importance of blogging within a niche, particularly when it comes to Second Life fashion. As its name implies, [SL] Blogger Support is a group designed to help Second Life bloggers support each other with inspiration, knowledge and resources to make virtual world blogging a little easier. While there's a wealth of helpful info on their site, Canary's piece is an absolute must-read for anyone starting to dip their toes into blogging. Really, it will make your life so much easier.
But there's one thing that Canary left out. One more reason why finding the right niche for your blog is crucial.
The most important reason to find your niche? It's so you don't lose your mind, and empty your wallet in the process.
Here's an example. One of the very first virtual fashion articles I ever wrote was about the use of flexible prims (a.k.a. flexis) when they first arrived in SL. My newbie blogger approach? I found every single piece of flexi-enabled fashion that I could, took a picture, wrote about it, and strung them all together. That article was a behemoth, and it was bad. It was garbage. I spent a lot of L$ and a lot of energy building one big monstrous thing when I could have just as easily divided all that content up and spread it out across weeks and weeks of my column. All that money and all that work was as good as wasted in one big disastrous article that I'm sure only a handful of people even bothered to read, because it was all over the place.
And once I was finished with it, I was exhausted.
Translate that situation to a Second Life fashion blog. The broader your focus is, the more you'll feel you need to be covering. This is especially true when you're still riding the high that comes with a brand new blog. You're having fun, you want to do more, and you don't know your limits well enough yet to apply the brakes before things skid out of control. I've been there. Every Second Life fashion blogger likely has. We've all been the one looking at all the new releases, saying "Oh, I need to blog that. And that. And that!" Considering the number of fairs and events, I imagine it can be even more overwhelming than it was way back when I got my start.
Slow down, take a breath, and narrow your focus.
Carving out a niche can limit you, but that's not a bad thing. Besides, no one's saying you can't break out of that niche every now and then either. Even the most prim and proper fashion blogs have moments of punk inspiration.
Be sure to read Canary's original piece over on the [SL] Blogger Support blog.
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Ooh, good insights you brought to notice. Personally I tend to be more classic than most, even more so than say Harper or Berry, so I stick to the classic. Though as I say a bajillion times, technically I'm not wearing pure retro, it's "retro-inspired" And I tend to prefer commentary anyway.
Posted by: CronoCloud Creeggan | Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 02:14 PM