Blogging is not easy. If you want to make money from your blog, be prepared for a tough learning experience.
Majority of bloggers never see success with any of their blogs. Successful bloggers often have many failed blogs.
Though the concept of blogging is easy to understand, executing it is hard. There are five steps in creating a blog that makes money. But a single step may take you a year to master.
On average, bloggers take three to five years of consistent learning for them to start making money consistently from their blogs. Of course there are exceptional people who see success in way less time.
But for majority of beginners, it will take a few years of work before they start seeing success.
In this article, I will share with you why blogging is not easy and then give you tips of how you can make it easier.
Reasons why Blogging is Hard
1. The Technical Aspect of Setting up a Blog
A blog is a website. Setting up a website requires one to have some technical knowledge about computers and the internet.
When you venture into blogging, you will encounter technical terms that may take you time to understand what they are.
The first year of blogging may pass when you are still getting familiar with technical terms.
You will encounter terms like domain name, web hosting, domain name servers, plugins, SSL certificate, hyperlinks, backlinks and many more.
These technical terms slow down your learning. Some of them are critical to the running of a blog. You can’t put them aside to learn in the future.
You will have to understand how a domain name is linked to your server. You will also learn different types of servers, their advantages and disadvantages.
The technical aspect of a blog has a lot to it. In fact, there are full time careers of managing the backend of a website. We have server administrators and database administrators whose work is to deal with the server that a blog runs on and managing the data of a website respectively.
As a beginner blogger, these technical terms can be discouraging to learn.
2. Blog Market Research
Once you have managed to set up a blog and it is live, the next tough part is deciding what you will write about on your blog. In blogging, it is called keyword research.
Deciding the best topic to write about is hard because you have to balance between competition and traffic.
Generally, topics that have many readers have stiff competition. Topics with less competition have few readers. If you go for high competition topics, it will be difficult to compete against established blogs. If you go for low competition topics, you risk getting few or no readers at all.
Different topics also come with different strengths and weaknesses. It is easy to make money in some topics compared to others. I have written an extensive article that goes into detail about how to find topics to blog about.
3. Writing Blog Posts
After you battle the first two steps in blogging, one of the hardest steps in the blogging journey comes next. Unless you are naturally a writer, writing blog posts will prove to be a hard nut to crack.
Majority of bloggers give up because of this step. The unfortunate thing about blogging is that you need many articles for you to start seeing success.
A few bloggers become successful with few articles on their blogs. But majority have to have a few hundred articles before they start seeing significant traffic coming in.
Writing blog posts has two aspects to it; passing the right message to the reader and being optimized for search engines.
Any article you write on your blog must have a balance between passing the right message to the reader and being optimized for search engines.
An article that passes the right message to the reader converts readers to customers who will make you money. An article optimized for search engines is responsible for attracting readers from search engines.
Balancing the two aspects makes blogging hard. Some bloggers are great at writing articles that their readers enjoy but those articles never get any readers because they are not optimized for search engines.
The fact that writing in itself is a hard skill to learn, add to it the balance you have to strike in each blog post and then the fact that you have to do that for over one hundred articles for you to see any success and you quickly realize that blogging is not easy.
Many bloggers struggle with consistency in writing articles. Even experienced bloggers also struggle though not as much as beginners.
4. Marketing a Blog
As if the previous reasons are not already too hard, marketing a blog takes the difficulty in blogging to a whole new level. If writing articles was a nightmare, marketing them is the mother of all nightmares.
Unless you naturally find marketing easy, blogging won’t be easy for you. The first difficult hurdle you have to overcome is deciding where you will market your blog.
There are tens of social media platforms where you can market your blog. Since you can’t be on all social media platforms and market effectively, you have to decide on one or a few.
Then you have to learn the algorithm of that social media platform. Some have strict rules on self-promotion. You have to find your way around those rules.
Once you have a grip on marketing on social media, you have to live with the fact that out of the thousands of people who will see your social media, only a few will come to your blog.
You will also get a bunch of nasty comments and being reported as a spammer once in a while. As a blogger, you have to live through all that.
5. Monetizing a Blog
Even after you have battled such many hard steps in blogging, the last step can still stop you from becoming a successful blogger.
Blogs are not ATMs that spit money once they start getting readers. You have to set up ways of making money from your blog readers.
The simplest way is to put ads on your blog. But you have to regulate the number of ads that show on your blog or else your readers will hate your blog.
More ads earn you more money but at the same time they annoy your readers. Balancing between making money without annoying your readers is not easy.
Some blogs have loyal readers but they struggle to make money. Others have awesome ways of making money but readers abandoned them for being pushy in their articles.
As a blogger, you have to manage your greed.
How to make Blogging Easier
If you want an easier blogging journey, you need to follow a proven strategy. There are many bloggers on the internet that share their blogging strategies that earn them a full time income.
Some of them sell blogging courses. If you can afford a blogging course, pay for it. You will save yourself a lot of trouble.
Make sure that you pick one strategy and remain loyal to it. Jumping from one blogging strategy to another is one of the reasons that cause blogs to fail.
All the best!