who is lydia elise millen in 2020?
So I’m a little premature this year but with the 8th Birthday of my blog fast approaching it was time to get all my thoughts down on internet paper and begin moving things in a new direction.
Its no shock things have been a little quieter around here than it was a few years ago. Back when I would blog 3+ times a week and would stay up until the early hours to ensure I’d get it done. It was when I started my Youtube Channel that everything changed, the engagement there as well as Instagram couldn’t be ignored and my blog just felt a little sluggish. It became a bit of a burden if I’m being completely honest. Blog posts began to back up and and sometimes, alright often, months would pass between posts. All this time I thought I’d fallen out of love with blogging, but over the last year I have realised that I simply fell out of love with blogging as it was.
The routine I was in didn’t fit me anymore, the style of content wasn’t mine and yet I was forcing myself to adhere to it all when the beauty of blogging has always been WE MAKE THE RULES. When I started my blog in 2011 there literally were no rules, you just blogged for the love of it and everyones individual styles shone through. As it all evolved trends began to appear as well as pressures to adhere, soon fancy layouts became fancier and fancier and with that, harder and harder to navigate.
The ideas of bringing in writers to help up the content here seemed tempting at one point but the reality of letting anyone other than me populate something which is literally a part of me just wasn’t an option and then it dawned on me…Take it back to the early days again Lydia and make up your own damn rules.
Having a blog schedule, shooting 10000’s of images for one post, forcing words on to the page continuously filled me with dread and held me back when it came to creating content to fill the void. It sucked the fun out of something that I once cherished so much, so with that I decided my approach to LydiaEliseMillen.com needed to change. But who is Lydia Elise Millen in 2020? Well lets get into it.
What to expect from LydiaEliseMillen.com?
Well you can rest assured there won’t be any fancy shmancy layouts on the horizons and there certainly won’t be anyone other than me and my illegible ramblings gracing these pages, I’m not sure if you gonna be happy about that last one but I’m sorry in advanced ha-ha. I don’t want LydiaEliseMillen.com to become a magazine, as much as I love reading them myself and take so much inspiration from flicking through the glossy pages of a perfectly edited article, its. just. not. me! I’ve learnt a lot since I started Vlogging and reality, rawness and…I can’t think of another word beginning with ‘R’ to go next but just basically WHO I AM, sits at the forefront of everything I do. I’ve always talked about those weird mannerisms that make you, you on youtube from my nervous laugh to the fact that I seem completely incapable of pronouncing the name of any brand this side of the 21st Century, correctly. But its that rawness that thrust blogging into the limelight in the first place and I need to get that back for the sanity of me and longevity of my blog, so thats what I fully intend to do.
I want to blog with my chest again, I want to be reactive yet realistic and when you don’t have a Creative Department, In house studio, Stylists, Directors and god knows what else working on one shoot, it can really slow the process of creative concept to pushing publish down, so reactive but realistic it is. Things are going to get a lot more instant around here and whilst I won’t be doing away with the images like the ones seen in this post, I will be integrating a little ‘Instagram flare’ into the blog. I know thats probably hella confusing but what I mean is, I’m not going to be afraid to snap a picture of a new mascara I’ve been loving and the voluminous effect it has on my lashes, using my phone and uploading it straight to my blog with a quick write up about why. Or a small edit using images from my home account to talk home trends and where to buy them. I’m looking to also ensure that all outfits posted to my Instagram are shared direct to the blog feed so you can find out what I’m wearing and where its from even easier than ever ,because I know I’m not always hot when it comes to tagging brands either. I want my blog to become more of a hub for all of my content and a space where its easily accessible and continuously populated. I want you to feel excited to come here, like you will always find something new or some nugget of information that you hadn’t discovered yet.
Every image I take and post I write is invaluable to me and I don’t want them to only bare relevance for 24hrs thanks to an algorithm that doesn’t even know its self what it wants from me.
So a little reshuffle of the old design is currently in motion, nothing too over board and slick as I’ve tried to do in the past. Just something to streamline things, de-faff and freshen up a little and make it easier for you, and me LOL to navigate. And a lot more of me, my awful grammar and terrible sense of humour is to come.
AND WHAT ABOUT LYDIA? WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM HER?
Oh what a journey it has been huh? I remember how innocently I would tap away at my keyboard without a second thought of what I was putting out into the big world wide web and I kind of sort of, what to get a piece of that back. To care less and live a lot more in the moment, to share whats in my head and show you the pieces of me that I maybe don’t get to share that often. Yes, I will still talk about fashion and beauty and all things interiors but I might also just want to have a chat with you about how I’m feeling, or what I’m thinking and I hope thats OK because I miss sharing all that with you, I really do. I guess you can kind of think of this space in the same way that we all used to described our blog back in the day, as an online diary, although I think of mine a bit more as a scrap book, just a little bit of everything on each page sometimes scribbled over in a rush with a biro and other times perfectly positioned and annotated using my best fountain pen, but always just a little scruffy around the edges. Is my spelling going to be perfect? Errr, I can’t promise you that but I can promise that it will be fun, and light hearted and if anything it will be really good for my soul so if you could, every time you read what I write, remember that its just me behind here, sharing little pieces of me with the world.
SO LETS TALK CONTENT
Well I kind of already touched on that but lets dig a little deeper. Yes outfits and fashion will still feature and hopefully more regularly but with a little less chat, unless I have something really important to say about it, but that will be something that hopefully comes with the new ‘Re-Faff’ of the site as I keep calling it. One of my most ‘read’ blog posts this year was a post where I said absolutely nothing at all so I hear you loud and clear, sometimes Lydia just shut up and share the outfit links. But one thing I want to stress which I really want to highlight more across all my platforms is the fact that I will only ever be SHARING what I’m wearing or what I’m LOVING. I am not selling it! The reason I got into blogging eight years ago was because I wanted to share the things I was passionate about, there were no affiliate links, brand deals or ambassadorships and I still feel like I keep that at the beating heart of what I put out online. You don’t NEED anything that I have or share, and I will never tell you that. I’m just sharing what I’m loving and if you’re in the market for something similar then maybe I can help, if not I hope you enjoyed the content and maybe I’ll help with something in the future.
I also want to integrate a little ‘Insta-beauty’ style feature where I just snap some products and tell you about why I’m obsessing over them. I feel like the Instagram feed doesn’t really lend itself to that for my audience or to how much I like to evidently ramble on so, I’m hoping to go into more detail and about products old and new that I love as well as focus on brands and what I recommend. This was a little idea I had when browsing the new beauty department in Harrods recently. There were so many brands that I wanted to experience but I didn’t even know where to start and I kind of wanted to just log onto my favourite bloggers site and search through their faves with a focus on one brand so you can expect a little of that too, I mean technically I’ve already started and you can have a peek at my NARS favourites here.
Interiors has become a huge passion project of mine since moving to our new home and whilst it took me a little time to find my feet, I’ve now fully immersed myself with planning each room and even as far as planning new renovation projects. As much as I love uploading to our home account @lydiamillenhome sometimes I want to give a little more detail and share tips and tricks that might not be right for Instagram as a platform and can get lost within vlogs on my channel.
So I guess what I’m trying to say, is theres more to come and I hope you are excited by that and if there is anything specific topics or themes you would like to see then the comment section is all yours, so take it away.
A few thank you’s…
I cannot believe its been 8 years, like it literally blows my mind when I think about it too much but it also makes me sad because I think about how little I’ve shared here recently. But I want to say thank you for sticking with me, everytime I post the spike in visitors has given me a little piece of my confidence back when it comes to posting and I’m so so grateful for that.
But most of all I want to say a huge thank you to my Dad, now that might sound weird but I spent a Friday night at home a few weeks ago sipping Whispering Angel and randomly watching my wedding video by myself and it got to my dads speech. If I’m being totally honest my family don’t totally “get” what it is that I do, they have grasps of it here and there but my career isn’t something thats focused on too much which I quite like. But my dad, in between talking about how proud he was of the person I have become with all my personal successes aside, he mentioned my writing. Now this isn’t new and he’s mentioned it a number of times before, in fact him and my step mum both have but I realised when he started to talk about it in his father-of-the-bride speech I felt the belief they have in me and the enjoyment they take from my writing and so Thanks dad, thanks for showing me that a misplaced comma here and there doesn’t detract from the joy a person can take from coming here.
But anyway, Here’s to moving into the 9th year of LydiaEliseMillen.com I’m positive and more motivated than I’ve been for a long time and I’ve even got a little diary to plan my content in so it must be serious.
