I wish I had known
these things before I ever started blogging. If I had known them, I could have
saved myself a lot of heartache over the years!
1.
You will have to learn as you go. Blogging is a relatively new field, so we are all kind of learning
as we go. Everyone does it differently, too! Whereas I like to focus on
Pinterest, some bloggers spend their time promoting on Facebook. Where some are
into Facebook, others are on Instagram. Everyone sort of has their specialty.
But that’s the fun of it! You can kind of make this work all different ways,
depending on your interests and strengths. What you must do once you start a
blog is figure out where your strengths lie and then learn as much as you can
about the social platforms and types of content you want to produce. If you
love to make videos, you will probably be knee deep in YouTube and Facebook. If
you love to write more than anything else, then focusing on Pinterest and
search engines will be your jam. All of this might not make sense to you at the
moment if you’re just starting out, but like I said – it’s a learn as you go
kind of thing! As soon as you get going, then you can start
learning! I aim to make one small improvement per day….either read an article
that will help me, watch a YouTube tutorial that can help me, or even learn how
to do one new thing on my blog. Every small improvement helps and a bunch of
little improvements will add up to something substantial over time!
2.
Eventually, passive income will be possible, and it is soooo
rewarding! If you can figure out a
system that works for you, you will be able to build a blog that earns money
not tied to the hours you put in. Meaning, you are paid on results and not the
number of hours you showed up. This is my favorite part about blogging. I do my
work primarily at night, but I am able to check my email and see affiliate
commissions being earned throughout the day as I take my kids to the park or volunteer
during lunch hour at school. I don’t know many other jobs that are as flexible
as blogging.
3.
There will always be something MORE you can do. I think the toughest thing about blogging is
knowing when to put the work away. In a sense, once you figure out how to earn
money from your blog, it will feel as though every time you sit down at a
computer, money comes out. I kid you not. I can tell you right now that every
single blog post I write will add at least $10 per month to my bottom line (and
that’s a conservative estimate). That’s $120 per year for every post. That’s essentially $60 per hour (since they
mostly take me 2 hours to write, edit, create images, and publish) in the first
year! I know this because after over 450 blog posts, that’s what the average
has worked out to be in recent months. So that hardest thing for me is to sit
down and watch a movie when I know I could be earning $120 instead. Is that a
weird way to look at it? At any rate, that’s how it works out on paper.
4.
Success takes time. Remember how I said each post I now write will earn me no less than
$10 per month? It wasn’t always that way. Before I found my voice, figured out
how to create pretty images and research keywords on Pinterest, or network on
Facebook, and add the proper ads/affiliate offers to my posts, that number was
more like 50 cents per post. Hardly worth my time! But without those first
100-200 posts full of trial and error, I would have never gotten to post 400
where I know what I’m doing! That’s just how it works. The bloggers who see the
most success aren’t the lucky ones. They’re the ones who have been with it over
the long haul, aim to make each post better than the last, and always serve
their readers.
5.
Your biggest gains will come through networking. For over 3 years, I blogged all alone at night,
didn’t tell anyone about my blog, and didn’t network with other bloggers. It
was a long, lonely road. Actually, I took off a good 6 months twice in that time, so you could say I wasn’t really
doing it right at all. I just kept getting discouraged! It wasn’t until I
attended my first blogging conference that I realized there were hundreds of
bloggers just like me and thousands more out there I hadn’t met yet! It was so
encouraging to meet other bloggers in person, and it was extra nice to connect
with them online after meeting them in person. Since then I have become more
active in Facebook networking groups for bloggers and attended several more
conferences. I now feel like I have a network of bloggers I can count on to cheer
for me, collaborate with me, and just in general support one another as we go
on this journey. If you start a blog, this is my hope for you – that you
won’t wait nearly as long as I did to find your own blogging friends!
My hope for anyone
reading this post is that you now have a glimpse into the journey of a blogger
who went from doing it all alone when no one was reading to working with others
as a team and being able to create the job of my dreams.
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