Social Media - Do you have niche?

When I first started blogging it was about baking and I titled my blog accordingly and all my social media channels were named accordingly. I only followed other baking accounts and joined in foodie group chats on social media. 

Which was great at the time. However, things change and people change and grow and it's hard to stay within a niche. It's hard to put limits on creativity and it's hard to stay within the boundaries of that niche, to live in a box.

It's not hard I suppose if you don't grow or change.

A few years back now I attended Food Blogger Connect and one of the workshops I attended was all about blogging, not about food just blogging and why we blogged. At the time it felt like there was a simple answer, I liked blogging because it was my little corner of the internet were I got to share something I was passionate about. A place were I could express myself and put words down where someone might actually read them.

But within the confines of baking.

When I posted anything besides a recipe or it got half the views of the ones that did. However, having had a few major things in my life change and my "passion" for baking ebbed my blog has pretty much gone on the wayside.

I spend most of my time now on Instagram and it's there that I now mostly share images of books and follow loads of book lovers and take part in daily photo challenges with prompts all to do with books. It's weird to remember that actually I started blogging not with this blog, but a book blog, one my sisters and I wrote together along with our cousin (pagesofthemind). We stopped blogging about books but, our love of books didn't go anywhere. We just stopped fitting into the niche of "book blogger."

I still read as much as I was baking, but it wasn't always something I shared or talked about because I felt like I couldn't mix the two. It's a little like that now on social media, if you don't have a niche or a theme for your page then you might as well forget it.

Which is so hard as no single person is just one thing. We have many things that we are passionate about or that bring us joy. I love books and I love the bookish community I have found online. I also still enjoy baking, but as I have stated recently and more then once, I just don't bake like I used too.

I still buy and devour cookbooks and that's the one thing I feel like I can share here because it fits in my niche of baking and food. If I couldn't tie in baking or cake or food I thought it would automatically be rejected.

However, it's was pretty presumptuous of me to assume that I had enough regular readers to care. According to my analytics my bounce rate was high, people would pop into my blog via a link or google search for exactly what they were looking for and then leave again. Nothing keeps them here. And that's okay too.

In today's world there is a lot of quick information and once that need is satisfied it goes again and it's not something I am immune too.

It was just a topic I have been thinking about a lot lately. Does my blog have to be just one thing when I myself am not one thing? I am a mother, artist, expat, book lover, plant killer, and I love musical theatre.

I am not just a baker and cookbook addict.

Both of which I still love, but I don't love them more or less then the other things I enjoy. The last few years haven't been easy ones and I felt like I no longer had anything to say. This post was relevantly easy to write harder to decide if I would share it or not.

Point of all my ramblings is that the idea of having a "niche" is restricting, but to be honest it helped when I was starting out. It's just now I don't know where to go or how to change the blog and that's not easy. It's hard not to wonder where my blog would be if I hadn't put myself in a box?