8 Things to Consider Before Dropping Your 9-5 to Start a Blog
Are you looking for alternatives to your 9-5 job?
The average person spends up to 50 hours of their week working, so it’s understandable if you want to look for an alternative source of income. This is often the practice for people who don’t want to dredge through the hours and tire themselves while working.
This prompts people to look for these kinds of alternatives on the Internet. To their joy, they often discover that the Internet itself is the answer. Most start a blog and generate an income soon after.
However, there are things to consider before you drop your 9-5 job to write a blog. Read on to know what to expect when you’re starting a new blog.
1. Building a Blog Isn’t Easy
A common misconception people have when it comes to blog writing is that it will take off as soon as they write their first blog. When this happens, they’re stuck at home wondering why people aren’t checking out their posts. This then leads to a net loss in income as they don’t have any way of generating it.
You’ll need to make a blog website first before you can upload your blogs. This serves as your platform for blogging. You will need a good web host to ensure people can visit your website.
Good hosting means that your website won’t experience any downtime. This is important since you don’t want people to not be able to access your website at any time.
What’s great is that once you find a host, building the website can be a breeze. This is thanks to the many CMS platforms on the Internet. These will help you create a website fast thanks to their many intuitive features.
2. Things Can Go Wrong Fast
There are many things to worry about when you start a blog. Website crashes are frequent, especially with new ones. This is because website creators don’t know how to handle their websites when they first make one.
A common reason for crashing is mishandled storage and overloaded memories. These slow down the server enough to cause it to crash. When this happens, you can lose a lot of your data and even all the blogs you posted before, too.
This makes it important to backup your data whenever you can. Doing this allows you to restore what you lose should your website crash.
3. People Won’t Pick up on Your Blog Right Away
Most aspiring bloggers don’t realize that people won’t pick up on their posts right away. This leaves them discouraged since they’re not getting enough traffic on their posts. What they don’t know is that starting a blog is always slow at first.
This makes it important to implement marketing strategies before you start your blog and during. This will help you increase the traffic going into your blogs. The more people read your blogs, the better your SEO score will be.
4. It’s Hard to Find an Audience
While your marketing campaign is active, you may see that the bounce rate of your website is increasing, too. The bounce rate is when someone visits your website and immediately leaves. This is often because they don’t find the contents of the website interesting.
This can lower your SEO score, so it’s important to market to people who can relate to your blog. You can do this with the help of targeted marketing.
You can do this by targeting your ads to people who search for keywords on the Internet. Certain platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow you to target ads to only relevant audiences. This way, you won’t have a problem with your bounce rate anymore.
5. You Can Get Tangled up in Legal Issues
Another thing with blogging is that it’s easy to come across copyright strikes. This is often because your content may contain words that match other blogs, causing plagiarism dings. This is a serious issue in this line of work, so it’s best to avoid them.
This also comes when you have images on your blog. The owner of the images you use may not agree to you using their images on your blog. It’s best to ask permission first before using any image you find on the Internet.
The best way to avoid these issues is to create original content. Everything from the blog to your images is best if they’re all original.
6. Monetization Comes in Different Forms
Beginner bloggers often have trouble monetizing their blogs. What’s great is that there are many ways for you to do this. The best and easiest way is to monetize your blog through Google AdSense.
While it’s a great way to monetize a blog, exploring more ways allows you to increase your income. Different methods like affiliate marketing and subscription plans are great for this.
7. Blog Followers Come and Go
You may notice that your number of readers will vary from time to time. This is often because people come and go throughout the life of your blog. This rise and fall in viewership are often because you’re not consistent with your blogs.
Consistency is key when making a blog. You need to stick to a topic you know about and write more blogs about it. While others may not find it interesting, doing this will help you build a loyal following later on.
8. It’s Not a One and Done Deal
Once you create your blog, the important thing is that you must always create content. Failing to grind out content can make your audience forget about your blog. It also lowers your SEO score since bots will think you’re an inactive website.
Post at least one blog a day to keep your audience engaged and reminded about you. Doing this also increases the likelihood that people will become loyal followers. They will always look for a professional figure to follow, and daily content can help you with this.
These are the things you must consider before starting a blog. Here’s a beginners guide to blogging to help you through the rest of the process.
Drop Your Job and Start a Blog Today
If you want to start a blog, there are things to consider before you drop your job. Check all the boxes on this list to help you transition to blogging today!
Do you want to learn more about blogging? Keeping an active blog is harder than it sounds, so you need all the help you can get. Check out more of our guides and articles to learn all you need to know today!
Author: Ester Adams
