Believe it or not, blogging is an actual paying actual job if done correctly. It’s probably not a job that you’ll see in the classifieds, but that’s because most bloggers own their own websites. Like any other venture, bloggers face their fair share of challenges in the early days. In this article I’ll mention 6 challenges new bloggers face in the beginning of their journeys.
6 challenges new bloggers face
Here are some common challenges new bloggers face. These are challenges that I dealt with in the beginning of my blogging career, and some I still deal with.
1. Learning to be a writer
The average person starting a new blog isn’t already a writer, I wasn’t. As long as you have some formal education, a grasp on the English language, and can strong words together pretty well, you should be able to learn as you go.
Your first articles will be embarrassing to look at a year later, because you’ll improve as you go. Even though they vastly improve their writing skills, some people never enjoy writing. However if you’re going to be a blogger I think you should at least be able to tolerate writing an article every now and then.
Once you become adept at writing for your own blog and bringing in traffic with your content, you can think about outsourcing.
2. No traffic early on
This is the challenge that stops more bloggers than any other, the fact that you don’t get traffic from Google for a really long time. Most people don’t believe it will ever happen and think they have been wasting their time, so they just give up.
If you just wait it out and commit to at least a full year of blogging regularly before you throw in the towel, you’ve greatly increased your chances of success.
3. Comparing yourself to others
I was very guilty of this. Actually, I probably still am. Comparing our sites to someone else’s is something that we probably shouldn’t do though. There are too many variables involved in everyone’s websites and strategies. Someone else may be getting traffic much sooner than you only because their new site is seasonal. When the peak season is over, your site may be getting more than theirs.
It’s so easy though when you see someone making the amount of money you wish you were making, or getting the amount of traffic you wish you had. I used to set mini milestones in the first year or so, and scour YouTube and the internet trying to find out how long it took various people to reach that milestone. I did this, but I should have spent that time publishing content to my sites.
4. Getting through the plateaus
This isn’t just in the beginning as a new blogger, but this is pretty common for a website owner in general. For one site I own, the traffic plateaus every year from around July pretty much all the way through January. But then in February things start to pick up, and by April traffic has exploded.
In this site’s first year I didn’t know about this plateau, and thought my site was a failure. I stuck it out with that site and kept publishing to it, now that site alone is a five figure/month earner. Blogging is full of plateaus and peaks.
5. Burning out
It’s easy to get burnt out in this industry. I think you have to have a certain type of relentless mentality to get through some of the challenges I’ve listed here. The process of publishing articles to a blog can really become a grind, and wear you out mentally.
For me, having multiple sites helped with this to a certain extent. If I got burnt out on writing about one of my blogs I could just hop over to another one that was about something else.
Write as much as you can in the early days of your blog, but not so much that begin to hate the prospect of being a blogger full-time one day. Or even having a blog at all.
6. Your own expectations
Managing your own expectations can be a major challenge for new bloggers. If you go into the blogging and affiliate marketing world thinking that it’s going to be easy, you’ll have to face the fact at some point that this isn’t the case.
If you go in with realistic expectations of how long it might take to reach whatever you deem success to be, then you can avoid this blogging challenge altogether.