Self Promotion

I am not very good at self promotion.  It’s one thing I hated when I was self employed, and it is also the thing I struggle with most when it comes to blogging, the idea of ‘selling myself’.

Anonymity.

There are some brave, (and I do think they are brave), bloggers who show their faces in their images.  I am not brave.  We do not want our children to be faced with someone confronting them, as ClearEyedGirl has experienced, nor do we want anyone who lives near us to recognise us, given the content of the blog.  Anonymity is extremely important to us.  There are some people who I know, who know about the blog, but they are people I trust.

In order to maintain that anonymity however, we have to keep strict boundaries between our blog and vanilla lives.  There is not one link between my vanilla life and my blogging life.  The location data is removed from images and I have separate email accounts for my blogging life.  Even when we go to munches we do not give our last names, so they know our fetlife/blog names but only know our first names.

Promotion.

I do wonder sometimes, if the decision to not show our faces, will ultimately be detrimental to the success of my blog.  I follow a number of blogs and people on Twitter.  The people who reveal their identities, show their faces, have a high number of followers.  Which makes me think that by not doing so I will limit the popularity of my blog.  So, what’s the answer? Is showing your face the only way to promote your blog?

I really hope not because I won’t show my face, and perhaps as a consequence I may never have the high number of followers that some bloggers enjoy.  And, that’s ok.

Why do I blog?

I write for me, I don’t do it to become infamous or win any popularity contests.  Sure, I am flattered that people read my blog, and leave comments.  More importantly I enjoy feeling part of a community.  But, I do one day hope to to have a steady stream of paid work.  Fiction or nonfiction, I want to write and earn money from it. Not lots of money, not enough to stop working.  I would see that as the ultimate validation, that my writing is something people would pay to have, and that will mean I will have to become comfortable with self promotion at some point.

At the beginning of this post I said that I didn’t like the idea of selling myself.  I recently tried to open a stripe account for my buy me a G&T link.  They refused, as they decided I was ‘selling pornographic materials’ and they do not accept adult sites.  I did argue that I was not selling a product at all, but they would not budge. There are other ways to have these funds paid out and at some point I hope I will receive sufficient donations to require it, on the other hand I may not. Time will tell on that score.

I have toyed with the idea of having subscription content; posts that are only available for a fee.  But, I just can’t bring myself to do it.  For one thing I am not sure my work is good enough that people would want to pay to read it, and then there would be the added pressure to create specific content.  In the meantime I have my lingerie wishlist, so if you want to support my work with some lingerie, there are ways for you to do so.  If you are not in a position to do this, know I am equally grateful for each like or comment that I receive.

Sweetgirl x

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