Curating A Meaningful Online Presence

I have had an online presence now for about 15 years. It all started with Yahoo chat rooms which lead to MSN messenger which lead to Myspace, then Facebook and social media has pretty much snowballed from there. Having an online presence for me was intoxicating. I could chat with people who weren’t in my school and I could curate an aesthetic that I felt was “me”. This was usually in the form of very poetic usernames and that one alarming time I had sparkling ecstasy tablets as my background on Myspace.

As I got older I realised I could use the internet to make money. I sold second-hand clothes, I did online surveys, and I even made a pretty good living as a Mystery Shopper. Diving even deeper into the online world, I used the internet to study. I studied online to become a Health Coach in 2015 and I finished the last half of my Bachelor of Behavioural studies online. To say that online feels like my home is an understatement.

As I started to go through some pretty radical changes in my life ranging from giving up alcohol to oil-pulling, I wanted to share my journey. This lead to my first website. From memory, it was a free website that I named “spread my wings and soar.wix”. No-one read it, but I was obsessed with designing it and personalising it. Furthermore, my online studies as a Health Coach encouraged me to further spread my online presence and to make a living as a Coach. I was determined to do this, and I was certain that after I finished my degree that this was going to be my calling.

Things didn’t exactly go to plan. I did everything my business coaches had taught me. I had free opt-ins, plenty of generic blog posts that contained information like “five ways to hack your sleep”, I had testimonials, images of my face to show people what I looked like, and I was running myself ragged making sure that I kept up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, and Google Plus.

After about a year of this, as well as offering free coaching sessions, I knew I had to change things up. I had been working as a freelance writer at this time and it all finally clicked that I could merge the writing skills that I had gained during my studies with my passion for health. I decided to advertise myself as a content writer for holistic health businesses.

After some re-branding and sending hundreds of cold emails I did gain a lot of clients. But the work was really hard. Even though I was working with a lot of health companies, it didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to pay me on time, respond to emails, or not ask for the impossible. A lot of people wanted me to write like other bloggers, saying things like “can you please sound like Zoe Forster-Blake”.

I was finally making enough money to pay my bills, but I felt empty and depleted. I missed coaching, but I didn’t miss desperately trying to get clients and figuring out free things to do to lure people in. I missed writing for my blog, but I didn’t miss the feeling I got when I would see that one person had opened my newsletter email. And I missed Instagram, but I didn’t miss constantly scrolling through the Tribe app trying to find brands that would pay me to do a post.

I felt icky and wrong and I found myself wondering if my online presence was really doing anyone any good. Furthermore, is it possible to have an online presence when everything has already been done and better? Is it possible to reach people without sales funnels? And most importantly, is there any room online for my voice when there are so many people talking?

So, I did the only thing I could think of and that was to minimise. I shut down all my social media accounts except Facebook and Instagram, I simplified my website, and I unsubscribed from most of my email newsletters. I stopped signing up for online programs and I stopped feeling like I had to buy something every time I saw someone on Instagram using it.

I stopped obsessing about having the perfect Instagram feed and I stopped replying to messages from people wanting me to join their network marketing groups because I was afraid of acting rude. After taking almost all of my online presence away I got to sit back and think about what I was really doing online. I realised I still had a story to tell, I was just going to tell it in a way that felt good to me. I am now devoted to writing because I enjoy it as well as trying to not give a fuck if no-one reads it. To seeing what will come on my online presence rather than trying to desperately make money. To carefully curate what I add online as much as I would when adding to my wardrobe.

So here I am. Writing without expectations, open to everything, but not afraid to say no to what doesn’t feel right. What a freeing way to create.