If you’re looking for a side hustle, blogging might suit you perfectly. However, it isn’t a good fit for everyone. In this post I’m going to explore what makes a good blogger… hence, whether or not blogging might suit you.
The bad news for many people is that blogging doesn’t work out well. It’s a tough thing to hear, but it’s best to be honest about this.
Blogs fail every single day, even though most bloggers begin their journey full of optimism and with a high motivation to succeed.
Oftentimes the reality of what it takes to start a blog and maintain it going forward doesn’t hit home until a few months in.
This is understandable because as with anything, the proof is in the pudding: we simply can’t know the reality of something until we try it.
Don’t get me wrong, my goal is not to deter you from starting a blog.
It’s just I’d rather be honest with you about what it takes, so you can decide whether or not you’re 100% able to meet the characteristics that make a good blogger… well at least as I see them!
Good Bloggers Make Time
Blogging requires your time… and lots of it!
From setting up your blog to writing content and promoting it, you’ll see pretty quickly how much time it takes.
If you have free time and you’re able to set some of it aside to write posts, there’s no reason why you can’t start a blog.
The more time you have to dedicate to it, the more opportunity you’ll have to make it a success.
But most of us don’t have much free time and that’s a challenge.
A good blogger makes time for blogging, even if it’s in short supply.
Patience Makes Bloggers More Likely to Succeed
It’s great if you have the time to spend to work on your blog right now, but you’ll need to keep up your output over the long term.
By most people’s reckoning it takes between 6 – 12 months before you’ll start to see visitors on a regular basis.
This requires some patience and resilience to maintain your posting output throughout this period.
Many people without patience quit around the 3 month mark when they don’t get the results they were expecting or they realize it’ll take more time and effort than they want to spend.
I totally understand this. I’ve quit blogs before because my mindset wasn’t right.
I expected to see fast results and became frustrated and demotivated when that didn’t happen.
Having a patient attitude, especially in the early days of your blog will help you ride out the potential for disillusionment.
Good Bloggers Have Commitment
Time and patience hand in hand with commitment.
Remaining committed to your blog will help get you over any bumps you encounter in your journey.
A lack of commitment is one of the major reasons why blogs fail.
People often start a blog fully committed but lose momentum along the way. The result is they deprioritize the importance of their blog, leading to:
- Decreases in the frequency of posts.
- Deterioration in content quality.
- Carelessness in presenting their content.
- Diminishing effort in promoting their content.
- Failure to properly run their blog admin tasks.
Once you lower the priority of your blog, it’s easy to lose focus and ultimately give up.
However, if you are able to remain committed to your blog, you protect yourself against losing motivation to proceed with it during challenging times.
Commitment makes bloggers good!
A Good Blogger Can Self Motivate
If you’re an employee, your objectives and responsibilities are often dictated to you. While many people feel uncomfortable about dictates, they feel motivated because of the responsibility they have to their paymasters.
When you’re a blogger working for yourself, you don’t necessarily have the same external motivations… you have to rely on yourself.
This can be tough.
If you don’t (or can’t) motivate yourself to meet personal blogging objectives and responsibilities, you’ll struggle to get through the activities you need to grow your blog successfully.
You’re Not Expecting an Easy Ride
On paper, the life of a blogger sounds extremely desirable.
It gives you a certain degree of freedom. You can work when and where you like. There’s no-one looking over your shoulder checking you’re doing what you should be. There’s no cap on your earning potential.
However, the reality of a blogger’s life is somewhat different than you might imagine.
- Things rarely go smoothly, especially when you’re starting out.
- Working on your own at home can be deceptively lonely.
- That person monitoring you as an employee is motivating you, even if you don’t like it.
- There’s no guarantee you’ll make any money, let alone become a gazillionaire!
If you’re expecting an easy ride as a blogger, you’ll get a very rude awakening.
As long as your prepared for hard work, a blogger’s life might suit you very well.
You Don’t Expect to Become a Millionaire Any Time Soon
This is very strongly linked to the time it takes for your blog to enjoy lots of visitors… when I say a lot, I mean thousands of visitors every single day.
Of course you don’t necessarily need thousands of visitors to make money from a blog.
However, the income reports of those bloggers who are killing it so badly they’ve inspired you to start your own blogging journey, are very likely generating thousands upon thousands of pageviews every single day.
They have not built this traffic up overnight. It will have taken most of them years to reach the position they’re in now and they would have passed through very lean times when their blogs regularly earned them absolutely zip.
A long term mentality towards making money sets good bloggers apart. If you’re thinking about the long term, you’re thinking in the right way.
You Enjoy Social Media
Anybody serious about making a success of their blog will have to spend time using social media.
Building up a following on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook or any other social platform will help to increase your brand reach, strengthen your credentials and help drive traffic to your blog.
Since building a large following in social media also takes time, patience and commitment, it makes sense that you enjoy pinning, tweeting, posting etc.
The less you like being involved in social media, the more difficult it will be to grow visitors to your blog.
A good blogger understands the value of social media and works in the most effective way to identify and leverage the benefits each platform provides.
Good Bloggers Are Prepared to Learn
If blogging is something new to you, you’re going to have to be open minded about learning.
You’ll need to be prepared to learn about your blogging platform, SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, content writing, search engines… the list goes on!
A positive to learning, an inquisitive personality and a growth mindset are an absolute requirement for any field as far as I’m concerned.
If you enjoy learning, you’ll have lots of opportunities to satisfy your inquisitiveness!
Being Technically Minded Helps
This one is a little controversial!
If you’re not technically minded it doesn’t mean your chances of becoming a successful blogger are slim… far from it actually.
However, if you are technically minded I believe it gives you an edge.
You’ll be able to troubleshoot technical issues causing your blog problems no matter how big or small.
You may not be able to fix them, but if you are technically minded enough to understand how your blog works, and more importantly why it doesn’t work when there’s a problem, you’ll have an edge over some of your competitors.
Understanding how search engines work also requires a technical appreciation. Since you’ll need search engines to get eyes on your blog content, being able to understand how they work and why some sites rank above others will help you to work more effectively in optimizing your blog for search.
As I say, there are many super successful bloggers out there who will unashamedly tell you they’re non-technical: being technical is worthless if your content sucks or you don’t know how to market your blog.
You Love Writing
This is probably the most important reason why blogging will be a good fit for you.
Since blogs are designed to present content, if you enjoy the process of writing you are far better equipped than those who hate it.
You’re going to need to write a lot of content over a sustained period. So if writing is something that bothers you, it will become a mountain for you to climb.
As with anything, if you enjoy what you do it’s not work. It’s stimulating and energizing. When you do something you enjoy, time flies.
Conversely, as you’ll know, if you don’t enjoy something it becomes a tedious chore requiring willpower to get through.
Summary
There’s no doubt that a number of things combine to make a good blogger and there are of course other factors than the ones I’ve listed here.
However, combining if you can harness the 10 characteristics I’ve listed here, you’ll be on the road to becoming a good blogger too!
Thanks for reading.
Paul
I’d love to hear what you think. Why not leave a comment below so we can talk more about it?
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