"Maintain Continuity, Uniformity and Consistency" – Ishika

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1. Tell us about your background and journey.

I, Ishika, am a PGPM student staying in Bangalore and pursuing my Master degree in Business Administration. If I talk about my journey, I have been into this blogging career or Instagram blogging for the past four to five years. And since then, I have been creating content on Instagram regularly and have grown positively. I have quite enjoyed this new journey of mine.

2. When did you first decide that you wanted to create content and how did you start?

As I said, I had decided to create content four to five years ago. I had a really common, small and infamous account at Instagram where I used to upload my daily pictures. The real content started after I won a giveaway from Huda Beauty, a well-known brand. 

The winning of beauty products worth Rs. 60,000 in a giveaway was a kick start of content creation on one of my makeup pages on Instagram and that is actually a different page from my blogging one. Then I started uploading beauty content on that page and afterwards, I shifted here and this all have been started since then.

3. Is blogging and content creation a financially sustainable career?

In my perception, for financial sustainability I think the creator knows when he starts creating content that how well-known or viral his content is going. One can definitely earn from blogging. The initial investment is needed to be made after which you start gaining popularity in what you create.

Once you are on the track you need to continue with your content after which the brands start recognising your work and are ready for collaboration. It is kind of up to the bloggers how’d you communicate with the brand and only after reaching a certain number of subscribers or followers only then Youtube starts paying us. 

In beauty blogging, it’s mostly bartered collaboration if there’s a new launch or a new brand that’s coming up they approach you for promotion or collaboration post so yeah in that way it’s kind of healthy.

You find your investments justified. It kind of becomes easy when you communicate with the brand and ask if that’s barter or a paid collaboration and you can come to certain terms. There are a lot of brands that only paid collaboration. So yeah there is much financial sustainability in blogging but you need continuity and innovation.

4. Who is your favourite creator and why?

If I talk about Indian bloggers, Shreya Jain and Debasree are my favourite creators because their content inspires me a lot and I have been following them for a long time. If I were to tell my favourite International beauty bloggers, then there is Victoria Lyn and Nikkie Tutorials. 

All of them are my favourite because they constantly create innovative content on Instagram. There are a lot more people who try to gather up and catch on to those trends. But as we know the trend does not last long, so people should probably try to catch up with the new things and try to recreate the content.

5. How and where do you find inspiration to churn out content?

As I mentioned earlier, the winning of the giveaway organised by Huda Beauty was my biggest inspiration and from there only I started churning out content on makeup on Makeup Page. And from there I shifted to this blogging page as well.

6. What does your typical day look like?

As of now my day literally starts with the online classes due to the current pandemic. After attending these classes, I also have an ongoing internship. I finish my work at 7:30 or 8. And after that probably I edit the videos that I had shot on the weekend as I make sure that I shoot something new every weekend.  

This is my current routine actually, else before the internship I used to shoot on every alternative day and there is a lot of editing needed. If I shoot for two consecutive days then I prefer editing for the next two consecutive days as editing takes a lot of time that is about three to four hours.

7. Which is your favourite book and why?

Actually, I don’t have any favourite book of mine currently because I don’t read books now. I used to read books but I have lost my habit of reading due to this tight schedule I literally don’t get much time to read stuff.

8. What piece of advice would you like to give to future and aspiring creators?

To all those future and aspiring creators, I would suggest maintaining consistency in creating the content and keep yourself inspired by others as well. There are a lot of fellow content creators and we just need to pull up other people’s efforts by reposting their work. Try pulling everybody up and get inspired by everybody who is trying to make a change or cut in the content creating community on Instagram. 

It’s all about continuity, uniformity and consistency. Try to keep churning out the trending content or recreate something new and innovative. Initially, as a beginner, you have to have a good phone camera else a professional camera. If you are a beauty blogger, you probably need to have some beauty products and if you are a fashion blogger you need to have some trendy outfits. 

You don’t need to always invest a lot of money if you have the basic things. I would say, gradually change your equipment or investment size after getting the needy response. But yes, initial investment might be there, where you have to just put on the necessary things and try to keep your initial investment lower.

Interview by - Himanshi