Things You Should Learn Before Starting a Blog

Being a blogger can be a highly enjoyable hobby, or even career path, for many people.

Blogging gives you the freedom to create your own content, use your own voice, spread your own ideas, and distinguish yourself as a leader in your field.

Not only can it be fun, but if you’re successful, also highly lucrative. That’s why blogging is also more popular than ever before.

According to an infographic published by WPVirtuso.com, the Internet is currently home to more than 152,000,000 blogs worldwide. Not only that, a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half second, with the majority of consumers reading at least one blog per a day.

Did you also know that businesses who blog at least 20 times per month generate five times more traffic than those businesses that post a blog fewer than four times per month? That’s some serious blog power!

However, achieving numbers like that takes a lot of hard work, and requires the tenacity and determination to stick with it. That may mean dealing with opposing points of view, a lack of creativity or writer’s block, negative feedback, exposure of personal information, and more.

Maintaining enthusiasm as your blog grows and develops can be hard. Before you start blogging, here are some things you need to think about:

It’s a Blog-Eat-Blog World Out There

There are 172,800 blogs being launched each day.

While blogging isn’t meant to be a competition, it often is – vying for exposure against other competitive blogs can be extremely difficult, leaving you struggling to attract traffic to your blog.

Unless you’re blogging just for fun, making an income from blogging takes a lot of hard work, and can require a lot of time to become an established name in your field of choice.

Mark’s Daily Apple is a blog about primal living that was started in 2006. In 2014, eight years later, Mark’s Daily Apple has finally become a household name for those following the paleo/primal lifestyle. It wasn’t without a lot of diligence on the part of Mark Sisson, the blog’s author.

Maintaining a blog can also take a psychological toll on a person. Blog comments can often be cruel (or rewardingly positive), as there’s often a lot of jealousy associated with blogging. If you want to gain a following, you have to share personal details, which will garner both positive and negative readerships.

Before starting a blog, taking into account the mental energy required – as well as the physical work – is an important consideration.

Why Are You Starting a Blog?

Something that you should absolutely know before you start blogging is why you are starting a blog in the first place.

Are you starting a blog to make money, provide free advice, showcase your writing abilities, tell stories about your life, make a political statement, establish yourself as an expert in the field (like social media or fashion), or something else entirely?

Whatever your reason for starting a blog, it should be a reason that you’re passionate about. If you’re not passionate about it, then taking the time and effort to make your blog what it could be might require more than you’re willing to give.

A Blog is Great for Business

If you’re a business owner or businesses marketer, keeping a blog is a must.

Blogging is great for business and can drive more traffic to your website, attract more customers, be critical in retaining clients, result in more leads, and overall increase your business profits.

It is also one of the key aspects of a great search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Search engines like Google love business blogs, and keeping an updated blog for your business will help search engines be able to find you quicker, meaning that you’ll get higher search engine rankings and more website traffic.

Being Able to Write isn’t the Only Skill You’ll Need

A lot of people assume that if they can write well (following conventional spelling and grammatical constructions), then they can blog. On the same note, a lot of people assume that if they can’t write well (can’t spell or aren’t grammar gods), they can’t blog.

Neither could be further from the truth.

In addition to writing and editing skills, a great blogger is creative, funny, clever, motivated, innovative, forward-thinking, and self-motivated.

Blogs that make it are those maintained by authors who aren’t afraid to think outside of the box, know how to market their blogs well, are artistic or otherwise graphically inclined for website design, and know how to use social media to promote their blog.

If you don’t have writing and editing skills, you can always hire an editor to help you out. If you aren’t creative or motivated, though, there isn’t much that will help your blog thrive.

Blogging is a Fun (and Free!) Hobby

Blogging can be a fun hobby that doesn’t cost you a dime.

It can improve your writing and communication skills, give you an outlet to express yourself, allow you to stay in touch with friends and family by writing about your life, and give you something to do that’s productive and worthwhile if you have a lot of free time.

Who knows, if you become great at it, you may turn yourself into a popular blogger that’s worth following.

How to Start a Blog

The last thing that you need to know about blogging is how to actually start a blog. Starting a blog has been made incredibly easy by free services like Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.

Make sure to take into consideration the things mentioned above.

Blogging can be highly competitive, so know your purposes for starting one. It can also be great for your business, but it requires an extensive set of skills.

In the end, blogging is both fun and free (at least for personal use).