Things To Know Before You Start Your Blogging Journey
Blogging is a great tool to express yourself to the world, and better yet, make money online. But few really tasted the kind of financial success the blogosphere promised. Below a list of things that I hope will help make you more prepared of what to come before starting your blogging journey.
1. Be realistic – Don’t expect overnight success. It hardly happens. Of course there are few exceptions, but you don’t want to compare to them. These people not only have the skills and knowledge, but also got the timing right. It’s better to set a more realistic goal, break it down into stages and work on your plans.
2. Don’t quit your regular job – The blogosphere is full of enthusiastic people. The promise of financial success can lure people to make silly decisions, like quitting your day job to focus on your blog. This is a big mistake. Blogging takes time to take off. If you quit your day job, you’re putting yourself into a big risk, when you don’t need to. Sure, sometimes this risk pays off. But it doesn’t happen to everyone. A better option is to spent a few hours each day on your blog, after work.
3. Enjoy what you do – Only if you truly enjoy blogging will you be able to stick to it and make it work. If you’re in it just to make money, you’re not going to be able to keep your enthusiasm going when you don’t see the dollars pouring in like you’d envisioned.
4. Finding your niche – Having a niche is important. Most blogs that fare well are those that talks on a specific topic. It can be anything from religion, personal development, etc. The main reason for having a niche is so that your readers will know what to expect from you. This is important because if your topic is something that they find interesting, they most likely will subscribe to your blog, of course provided that they find your articles useful.
5. Knowing that patience pays – Blogging is a great opportunity to make money, don’t get me wrong. But there seem to be a wide misconception when it comes to money, and blogging. Blogging provides platform to make quick and easy money. If that is what you have in mind, stop. Like any other things in life, if you don’t put effort, and have patience, chances are, you’re not going to make it. And that applies to blogging as well. I’d say, give yourself 2 years.
6. Spend some money – There is a lot of free hosting provided out there, though I won’t recommend it for people who inspired to make money from their blog. For around $70 dollars a year, which I think is cheap, you can get your own self hosting services and domain.
Blogging is not hard if you know what you’re talking about. The learning curve is not steep, if at all. It does however, takes some time to take off. So don’t make the same mistakes others make, and success will eventually come to you.
Nik Imran is the author of IMakeABlog, a blog that provides guide on how to make a blog. If you are interested in building your first blog, you can check out his guide on how to choose domain name. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.