Whether you’re a new blogger, considering starting one, or planning to become a full-time blogger soon, there are certain crucial things you should know that other experienced bloggers steer clear of discussing.
First off, let me say that I have been a full-time blogger for more than 15 years. I have made a tonne of mistakes in that time, some of which have affected the income from my site. Since my blog was my primary source of revenue, I had to depend on it for those years to cover both personal and business expenses.
Though many bloggers advise starting your own blog, gaining readers, and producing material for a niche you love and are well-versed in, I would advise against it. Blogging is not simple; it may get costly, frustrating, and difficult, and you may have to spend hours or days looking for the solution. Sometimes you might even have to conduct your own trials and watch your revenue decline as you look for the best methods to make even more money.
Creating original, search engine optimized, and excellent content that draws readers takes a lot of work, even if blogging can bring in anything from a few pennies to millions of dollars. If you can’t afford a web developer to keep up your blog, you’ll have to learn everything there is to know about SEO, Core Web Vitals, optimizing server settings, installing the most crucial plugins, compressing your photos and converting them to WebP or AVIF formats, and so much more.
Blogging is not an easy way of making money, and many full-time bloggers will agree with that.
1. Blogging can become expensive
Two elements are required of a blog: a domain name and a web hosting (server). At $5 to $20 for a popular domain extension like.com,.eu,.co, etc., domain names are reasonably inexpensive. Contrarily, web hosting packages might vary greatly depending on the business and the services it offers. Though most new blogs can begin with hosting their content for less than $100 a year, the more traffic and size they receive, the more resources the server will require to operate.
That implies you will need to spend more money on servers that are more robust as your blog grows. Dedicated servers presently house the majority of heavily trafficked websites; others, however, choose cloud hosting, which is faster but more costly. Thank goodness, a lot of excellent web hosting providers provide flexible pricing, so you may easily upgrade your hosting as your website grows.
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I covered selecting the ideal web hosting for your requirements in a sample post, but before making a decision, you should find out all there is to know about the CPU, RAM, disk space, bandwidth, and inodes that a hosting provider offers. Do thorough investigation since certain businesses may have restrictions that force you to upgrade your plan earlier than necessary.
Keeping that in mind, one of the most well-known web hosting businesses in the world, Hostinger, offers some of the least expensive WordPress hosting options. Their optimized plans allow customers to enjoy the newest LiteSpeed technology and quick websites that require less resources than regular web hosting. Their plans are all adaptable as well, which makes upgrading to a larger plan simpler than it was in the past.
The least expensive options from Hostinger allow you to essentially launch a robust and polished blog for less than $100 annually, which is very cool. Make sure you have selected the correct plan and paid for at least two years to receive an even better monthly price because the organization is renowned for offering cheap prices to its new clients. Check it as well; the same hosting package can also come with a free domain name.
With a few exceptions, a premium theme will cost you between $30.00 and $60.00, and you’ll also get a few months or a year of free support from the theme’s developers for theme-related issues. You can start with a free theme, but most of them lack features, support, and advanced optimizations.
Our current maximum spending limit for a domain name, a premium theme, and inexpensive yet quick web hosting to launch a blog is $160.00.
Next, you may not have enough time as a website owner to learn everything about search engine optimization, which raises the question of whether you have enough time to start with the best possible SEO-optimized blog. In such case, you will need a few key plugins. Rank Math SEO is arguably the best SEO plugin for WordPress, and if you plan to use all of its conditional, that will cost you around $6.99 per month (billed annually and excluding the VAT).
As Google has stated, Core Web Vitals are now a ranking indication and something developers should take seriously, hence speed is also vital. Speed optimization plugins like FlyingPress ($60.00 for the first year, $42.00 per year after) and WP Rocket ($59.00 annually) are available; both offer a CDN service for even faster speeds, but at a higher cost.
We now have a $300 minimum spending limit for launching a new blog, without including the possible $5,00 to $10,00 monthly cost of a CDN service. That is the cost of starting on your own, so you can estimate how much it will cost to hire a skilled web developer to create your new blog. Spoiler alert: It will be expensive.
Depending on your requirements, you might also need to include the logo design, extra premium plugins, pro versions of SEO tools for your marketing plan, and more to your overall budget.
2. Investing in months of work is crucial
For the first seven months, I had to write two blog entries every day and up to nine hours every Sunday before I could start a business out of my blog. I started off monetizing all of my material with affiliate links, and after I published my first forty posts, I submitted my site to Google AdSense, which began to show ads a few days later.
The site paid for its own hosting, domain name, and everything else I needed for it, including premium WordPress plugins and themes, so in the first seven months it brought in €25.57 from Google AdSense and nearly $300 from affiliate sales. As affiliate sales plummeted to $68.00 in total earnings in the second year, the blog began to generate between $300.00 and $450.00 each month from AdSense.
The fact is, simply because your material is new and lacks backlinks or mentions, Google, Bing, and other search engines won’t start boosting it in their results or even showing it in high ranks. Indeed, excellent, search engine-optimized material is treated the same. Keeping that in mind, you will also need to invest a great deal of effort in developing social networking sites, basic pages and categories, and designing and personalizing your blog.
Make sure you have writing and publishing guest blog posts to other similar blogs on your to-do list if you want to improve your SEO even more. Though I am aware that guest postings are expensive, external backlinks from websites in the same or related niche will raise your ranks.
Expecting to start off making money from blogging takes a lot of time. You never know who would be interested in buying what you recommend, therefore that shouldn’t stop you from monetizing your material right away. In fact, I made my first affiliate sale in the first month of beginning my blog. Starting with affiliate marketing sometimes makes more sense than expanding your daily traffic in order to start raising the money you receive from displaying adverts.
3. Blogging can be stressful for full-timers
One crucial feature of blogging, which full-time bloggers cannot dispute, is that it can get extremely stressful. If you consider that you work as a full-time blogger, your blog is your only source of revenue. Rent, energy, other home or personal bills, hosting, domain name, other blogging tools you use, and necessities like food, the gym, hobbies, etc. are all paid for using this money. You can also be a parent, which raises your monthly costs.
Consider now that your revenue has dropped by 70% in the last seven days alone. That is seriously awful. Possibly some of the adjustments you made a week ago? Perhaps your new advertising or the adjustments you made to your existing ones are the cause. Maybe this is just a low-income week and fewer people searched.
Whatever it is, you alone will have to figure out what the heck is going on and why your blog is losing money. And trust me, you’ll need to double-check everything to be sure you’ve found the correct answer. Ignore? Good luck locating a specialist that won’t charge you an arm and a leg for all of their labor.
Then there is the traffic, which can easily drive you insane. Consider a 30 day period of abruptly declining traffic; this indicates that something is most likely amiss and that your revenue is also less than it should be. And yet what? Perhaps an algorithmic update? When you go to the Google blog, nothing much has changed. You next look for lost positions in your search results, keywords, and analytics, but none of them have been impacted.
Is it a decline from your social media accounts, or are you seeing less referral traffic than you did during the first 30 days of the previews? What ever it is, you need to identify the problem and take quick action to fix it. And things may become really frustrating when you can’t find a solution, particularly if the poor traffic is costing you money.
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4. We write mostly about popular topics that get clicks
One of the most crucial things when you blog full-time is to watch your numbers continually rising. Organic search—that is, traffic from Google, Bing, and other search engines—is more significant than social media sharing and promotion of your content. Even with the greatest, most brilliant, original, and sophisticated blog entries in the world, nobody will read them if they are not found.
Most of the time we are incorrect about the things we believe others will start reading and genuinely care about. You can quickly realize that fewer individuals are searching for your niche than you might have assumed by just checking Google Trends’ most popular queries. And that is a serious issue if you want to profit from your blog since more visitors equates to more revenue.
If you’re just getting started, consider beginning with the subjects that are currently hot in your field. By doing that, you ensure that the most popular articles in your field have already been published, and you may then continue to write fresh articles by covering everything else. Make sure you have produced and released original, high-quality material for the most searched keywords in your niche. Pay attention to what most people are looking for.
If you write about food, for instance, begin with the most searched-for and well-liked recipes. If you are a travel blogger and have visited five places already, find out which nation receives the most searches, what questions are being asked, and other pertinent details. If you write app evaluations as a tech blogger, start with the most downloaded and widely used apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
You can begin investigating what’s hot in your sector and use a plethora of tools and platforms to simplify your life considerably. For fantastic tools that perform amazing things, see the Tools & Resources tab on TechWise Insider.
5. Sometimes you’ll have to start over
You read daily from a majority of full-time bloggers who, in one way or another, struggled during their learning curve. There are those among us who have failed multiple times, and that’s OK since it means you become more adept at what you do and advance your abilities. I had failed with three blogs before, and maybe some more, but it didn’t stop me from persevering and eventually succeeding by launching my own business.
“Maybe it would be better if I just started over and deleted everything,” a client suggested to me during our appointment a few weeks ago. Starting over would be so much simpler, you know? “I now know exactly what I have to do to start the right way and not go and edit anything from the beginning,” she said.
If I hadn’t failed a couple of times before, I doubt I could make a passive living from my newest sites. And while you can definitely avoid making the same mistakes as the majority of us made and go right to building a professional and profitable blog on your first try, don’t be afraid of failing; the experience and information will help you go ahead.
What happens, though, if you already have a blog with a tonne of published content but it just isn’t growing the way you would like? Then you have two options: either go on to another blog or start looking into and verifying every problem with your present approach. I am delighted I erased everything and started over from scratch because, as I mentioned, I failed with my first three posts. I felt better about myself somehow after learning all those new things from the blog, and starting over seemed like a better option.
You will have to think about a lot of things. Should you decide to maintain your present blog and material, you should definitely review your marketing plan. Furthermore, you should check in Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools for any typical mistakes, duplicated problems, or anything else that could keep your pages from showing up in search results or result in lower rankings to ensure that your blog is operating properly.
If you choose a personal blog, blogging can be generally inexpensive, quick, and simple. Things could get a little more difficult, costly, and time-consuming if you intend to make money and become a full-time blogger.
Worth it, really? Indeed, as the bulk of professional bloggers will attest. You can meet and work with other content producers, get better understanding of how websites operate, hone your writing abilities, and even begin working with advertising businesses by blogging.
What do you believe is the hardest aspect of blogging, and what were your initial mistakes? Kindly share all about your experiences and ideas in the space provided for comments at the bottom of this page.