Back in my post about having my blog for 6 months, I went through some mistakes and struggles I’ve experienced...but I want to go into more detail about a few things. I think many people out there before fully starting their blog have done some research or watched some YouTube videos and I thought “Hey, this isn’t so bad”. Well, it isn’t that bad but today I’m gonna go through some expectations I had with blogging before I pressed publish to anything.
It’s an easy moneymaker
Boy, I was so wrong. Now I am aware that you can make blogging a full-time career but after watching videos about “ This is how I made $6000 in my first month of blogging!” or even “This is how you can make $100 with your blog in the first month”.....I’m here thinking...well if they did that, seems legit. I had the impression that I could create a blog, write awesome posts, promote it on social media, apply for ads and get paid. I honestly don’t think persons don’t talk about the amount of money you need to invest in your blog, to make money. Whether it’s for your domain name, hosting, extra gadgets or social media schedulers. Not many may have the money at the time to afford all of those things. Right now, I’m not really bothered about not making money right now. I had Google AdSense on my blog before but I had to take it off when I changed my domain name and it’s been bothersome to sort it out. I tried another ads service but at the moment I disabled it. I just going to continue building up my blog and also enjoying the experience, I’m honestly not in a rush. I even had a post that has affiliate links but I took out the links because it didn’t feel genuine, didn’t want to seem like I wrote it just because I can earn money from it.
It's easy to be a blogger
Long story short, it's not. It's not just writing posts, publishing and gaining thousands of views every month. You're gonna spend a few hours a day sorting out stock photos to use, maybe doing some technical stuff for your website, have to be promoting your content every day, making drafts of blog posts...yeah, I think you get it. This is basically a lot of hours in front of a computer which isn't the best thing. Also, taking a break can be difficult especially if you’re brand new to it. If you can a few visitors consistently and you take a break, those may go down since you might not be promoting your site at the time. Even though blogging isn’t a piece of cake, it’s still a fun thing to do particularly if you enjoy the process. I might spend hours at my laptop but after finally putting my post out there, doing some promotion and getting some feedback..it makes it worth it.
Image from Ivory Mix
Using social media for blog promotion
So for this, I thought you can just make posts and you’ll get traffic….yeah no. You can literally post stuff on your social media but that doesn’t mean anyone is gonna click on the links. I have a confession haha when I started my Instagram for my blog...I was a bit spammy. I was just posting and having very annoying captions with no substance. After a while, I deleted some posts and started fresh with a different kind of outline. I’m not the best at Instagram, but I learned a lot from my spammy behaviour because no one was checking out the blog posts. One thing about social media, there are many rules on how to use them. For each of them, you have different strategies for them and it can be overwhelming. For example, Twitter can be working well for you because of the great blogging community but you can’t get the hang of Pinterest because you can’t get clicks on your pins. I feel like I’m at a good place with social media, Twitter has been great for me and I think I’m getting the hang of Pinterest after joining a few group boards. I don’t have thousands of followers but I'm just focused on making a presence on my social media.
I can write about whatever
No, no just no. Again, I thought I could just write about anything in any way and people will read it. When I started my blog, it was filled with posts about my thoughts and feelings. Even though it was nice to read back some old posts to see how much I changed, I can understand why no one was reading them. I don’t know the chance of people reading a stranger’s feelings or them even caring about them. Since then I’ve maintained myself being genuine with my posts and still expressing my thoughts but making them in a way that could be retable or helpful for persons...so they can leave with something from my writing. Surprisingly, my very honest writing has been doing well with the feedback I get so I’m not changing up my style anytime soon but I don’t want to make it all about me.
So, looking back at these, they really don’t make any sense to me anymore after going through it haha. I think it’s normal to have thoughts like this about anything new you start...always having some expectations. I’m truly falling in love with blogging and learning everything about it. I’m not a pro but the experience has been amazing. I’m pretty sure many bloggers out there have similar expectations so as always, I got a question for you, what were your expectations of blogging? Maybe you had some different expectations from mine.
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I hope you're at your happiest if not, it's okay...I hope you're starting or working on reaching the highest peak of happiness.
- Anissa (TheQuietGirl)
Photo by David Bartus from Pexels
