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Sneaker blogging is no joke. It may seem like you can just sign up for a Wordpress account and start typing but you'd be a fool to think that. To be successful you have to be knowledgable, consistent and have a certain level of grammatical skills. And even if you have all of those things going for you, you still gotta deal with some seriously lame sneakerheads, hypebeasts everywhere and those wonderful people on the Internet with nothing better to do than try to bring you down. The final product might look simple enough, but as any sneaker blogger will tell you, it takes a lot of work. Check out Why Sneaker Blogging Is Harder Than It Seems and think twice before you jump into doing your own thing.
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Realizing that there are people who work in the industry that don't know or love sneakers the way you do.
Not everyone in the sneaker industry is into sneakers. To some, it's just a job-they'd just as soon be doing PR (or designing) for a company that makes jeans or headphones or booze. Some of them probably do. So when you ask a question and get a wrong answer—or no answer at all—it can be disheartening. Welp, best get used to it.
You have to deal with trolls every day.
Imagine logging onto Instagram and seeing comments left on photos from a year ago, telling you to do things to yourself that are anatomically impossible (to the best of our knowledge, anyway). It happens more than you think. Then there are the Twitter trolls who would never show their face in real life and if they do, they pretend to not know anyone then go back to the Internet to talk shit about all the people they were scared to talk to.
People sit waiting for you to make a mistake.
"The more eyes on it, the better." Well, that is true but when you make a typo and have thousands of people correct you on it, it's tiring. Even worse, a simple factual error can do immense damage to your credibility—and your credibility is all you have. And the worst thing is that it's impossible to not make mistakes—some of which won't even be your fault. You'll see what we mean.
And you will make lots and lots of mistakes.
Because even when you do get the information right, someone will change it on you.
People steal your ideas and act like it was their own.
Staying ahead of the ever-increasing competition doesn't mean coming up with good ideas and then sitting back. Because the second you come up with something good, someone else is going to do their own variation of it, which means you'd better have a second idea that's just as good to follow it, and so on and so on. We'd say that this is a marathon, not a sprint, but even marathons have finish lines. This is more like a sprint that never, ever ends.
Sometimes brands send you ugly sneakers.
Getting free sneakers must seem like Christmas every day to some people. And, to be honest, it usually is. Opening boxes from sneaker companies is something that should never, ever be taken for granted. However, there will be times when you open that sneaker box and...yikes. Do you really have to Instagram THOSE? Well, unless you want to seem like an ingrate.
Everyone pretends to be your friend because they think you can hook them up.
If it's not a sneaker connect, it's something else. Imagine getting text messages out of the blue, congratulating you on a job well done when that person talks shit behind your back to your friends. Yeah, we see you.
Being first doesn't mean being right.
Once a new sneaker image goes up on Instagram or a message board, it's a race to see who can post on it first. This is fine, although being first often comes at the expense of being right. Fact-checking isn't really prevalent, and as noted, even fact-checking doesn't guarantee correctness. Got them pageviews tho.
There is no such thing as sneaker-reference.com.
Think finding information on new sneakers is hard? Try and find information on a pair that was released more than five years ago. There isn't any sort of official (or unofficial, for that matter) resource for release dates or prices, other than whatever you can put together yourself. And that had better be from memory, because the ol' internet isn't always reliable. Magazines like KICKS and Sole Collector are a help, but unfortunately most of the most comprehensive publications were only ever published in Japanese.
You have to be able to spot fake kicks even when they look real.
God forbid you ever run a photo of a fake sneaker on an article about a real one. And whilst everyone and their mom can tell the latest Air Jordan/Air Max mashup is as fake as Tara Reid's breasts, the newest "variants" are looking awfully good. Source very carefully.
By the time a hyped-up sneaker comes out you're sick of looking at it.
There's the first look, then the closer look, then the official photos, then the release date post, and then the release reminder, not to mention the recaps and the roundups. By the time a coveted sneaker finally releases, you've looked at literally hundreds of photos of it, and you probably don't even want it anymore.
People think you're supposed to know everything about every sneaker.
"Oh, you write about sneakers? What were those that Doug E. Fresh was wearing on that album cover from 1986?" "I don't know. Some kind of Ballys but..." "You don't know? And you're supposed to be the sneaker expert?" "But..." "Yeah, whatever."
