5 Things You Should Know Before You Start a Blog

Hi there! If you’ve never been to my blog before, I’m Lena and this is my blog about everything under the sun related to being a mom and managing a household (well, except for decorating, because I’m not good at that) 🙂

I write quite often about starting a blog, and I get lots of questions from women who are just about ready to take the leap and start a blog of their own, but aren’t quite sure how it will all work. They usually ask me very specific questions like “How do you get ads on your site?” and “How do you get people to look at your blog posts?” They are concerned about earning extra money from their blog…..

I always answer their questions, but what I want to really say is that they’re going about all of this in the wrong order! You need a foundation of blog posts before you start earning a significant amount of side income, and you need to prepared for working solo in a way most have never experienced before.

Since I get these kinds of emails all the time, I thought it was about time for me to write an entire blog post dedicated to the things you should know about blogging that aren’t necessarily related to the technical side of things or income strategies or anything like that.

Related Reading:

How I Make $5,000+ per Month from My Blog

How to Start a Self Hosted Blog on Bluehost

How to Choose a Blog Name You Won’t Regret

How I Find Time to Blog as a Busy Mom

WhatMommyDoes Income Reports

The 1st Thing You Should Do After Installing WordPress

My Ultimate List of Blogging Resources

5 Things You Should Know Before You Start a Blog

There are several things that come way before actually monetizing your blog and getting tons of visitors. Things that are true for just about every successful blogger out there I know.

I wish I had known these things before I ever started blogging. If I had known them, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache over the years!

1. You will have to learn as you go. Blogging is a relatively new field, so we are all kind of learning as we go. Everyone does it differently, too! Whereas I like to focus on Pinterest, some bloggers spend their time promoting on Facebook. Where some are into Facebook, others are on Instagram. Everyone sort of has their specialty. But that’s the fun of it! You can kind of make this work all different ways, depending on your interests and strengths. What you must do once you start a blog is figure out where your strengths lie and then learn as much as you can about the social platforms and types of content you want to produce. If you love to make videos, you will probably be knee deep in YouTube and Facebook. If you love to write more than anything else, then focusing on Pinterest and search engines will be your jam. All of this might not make sense to you at the moment if you’re just starting out, but like I said – it’s a learn as you go kind of thing! 🙂 As soon as you get going, then you can start learning! I aim to make one small improvement per day….either read an article that will help me, watch a YouTube tutorial that can help me, or even learn how to do one new thing on my blog. Every small improvement helps and a bunch of little improvements will add up to something substantial over time!
2. Eventually, passive income will be possible, and it is soooo rewarding! If you can figure out a system that works for you, you will be able to build a blog that earns money not tied to the hours you put in. Meaning, you are paid on results and not the number of hours you showed up. This is my favorite part about blogging. I do my work primarily at night, but I am able to check my email and see affiliate commissions being earned throughout the day as I take my kids to the park or volunteer during lunch hour at school. I don’t know many other jobs that are as flexible as blogging. Related Post >> How My Blog Made $1,000+ the Week We Had the Flu
3. There will always be something MORE you can do. I think the toughest thing about blogging is knowing when to put the work away. In a sense, once you figure out how to earn money from your blog, it will feel as though every time you sit down at a computer, money comes out. I kid you not. I can tell you right now that every single blog post I write will add at least $10 per month to my bottom line (and that’s a conservative estimate). That’s $120 per year for every post. That’s essentially $60 per hour (since they mostly take me 2 hours to write, edit, create images, and publish) in the first year! I know this because after over 450 blog posts, that’s what the average has worked out to be in recent months. So that hardest thing for me is to sit down and watch a movie when I know I could be earning $120 instead. Is that a weird way to look at it? At any rate, that’s how it works out on paper.
4. Success takes time. Remember how I said each post I now write will earn me no less than $10 per month? It wasn’t always that way. Before I found my voice, figured out how to create pretty images and research keywords on Pinterest, or network on Facebook, and add the proper ads/affiliate offers to my posts, that number was more like 50 cents per post. Hardly worth my time! But without those first 100-200 posts full of trial and error, I would have never gotten to post 400 where I know what I’m doing! That’s just how it works. The bloggers who see the most success aren’t the lucky ones. They’re the ones who have been with it over the long haul, aim to make each post better than the last, and always serve their readers.
5. Your biggest gains will come through networking. For over 3 years, I blogged all alone at night, didn’t tell anyone about my blog, and didn’t network with other bloggers. It was a long, lonely road. Actually, I took off a good 6 months twice in that time, so you could say I wasn’t really doing it right at all. I just kept getting discouraged! It wasn’t until I attended my first blogging conference that I realized there were hundreds of bloggers just like me and thousands more out there I hadn’t met yet! It was so encouraging to meet other bloggers in person, and it was extra nice to connect with them online after meeting them in person. Since then I have become more active in Facebook networking groups for bloggers and attended several more conferences. I now feel like I have a network of bloggers I can count on to cheer for me, collaborate with me, and just in general support one another as we go on this journey. If you start a blog, this is my hope for you – that you won’t wait nearly as long as I did to find your own blogging friends!

My hope for anyone reading this post is that you now have a glimpse into the journey of a blogger who went from doing it all alone when no one was reading to working with others as a team and being able to create the job of my dreams.

How to Start a Blog: Detailed Tutorial

If you haven’t taken the step of starting a blog, I have you covered in my detailed tutorial here:

For Experienced Bloggers

If you already have a blog but are looking to grow your traffic, then I also have something just for you! My latest traffic guide is here! Click here to find out how Traffic Transformation will improve your blog traffic! >>