5 Things You Need To Be Prepared For When Starting A Blog

So, you want to start a blog?

Becoming a blogger can be an adventurous and exciting endeavor. The entire process can be an adrenaline rush as you think about all of the visitors and ad dollars that will be coming your way. It sounds like the perfect career. While blogging can be a printable profession, there are however a few things that you need to be prepared for when you start blogging.

Let’s take a look at the top 5.

1. Guest Post Rejection

Every blogger will tell you that you need to write guest posts to attract more viewers to your site. While this is true, it can be difficult for a new blogger to be approved for a guest post on a larger site. If you get rejected by a big blog, don’t take it personally. Keep trying! You can always write guest posts for small and medium sized blogs. This will give you examples of your published works that you can show to bigger blogs. Eventually the larger blogs will open up their doors to you as well.

2. Delayed Monetization

There are lots of bloggers making money online. Most of them have been blogging for years and know exactly what it takes to monetize a blog. Most of the successful bloggers that I know learned a lot through trial and error. Finding out the best way to monetize your website takes time. Your blog may do well selling ads or it may be more suited for affiliate marketing. The only way to figure out what works best for your site is through experimentation. Don’t obsess over making money the first month or two. Spend that time figuring out your monetization strategy.

3. The Give Up Moment

Every blogger faces that moment. It’s the time when you ask yourself, why am I blogging? You get tired of writing posts day after day that no one reads. You start slacking off on your posting and blogging becomes less and less important. Your blog isn’t bringing in any money and you just want to give up. This is the moment that separates the bloggers that will make it from the ones that won’t. The key to surviving the give up moment is to push through and keep churning out content regardless of how you may feel at that moment. If you give up, you will never know how things would have turned out.

4. Traffic Plateau

Another obstacle that bloggers face is hitting a traffic plateau. It’s exciting to see your blog growing and gaining new readers. There comes a point when every website will experience a lull at some point. When this happens to you, you need to come up with creative ways to boost your traffic. You can try hosting a blog carnival, sponsoring a cash giveaway or making deal with similar blogs to cross promote posts. You can take time everyday and comment on different blogs which will help bring traffic to your site. All of these are great ways to give your blog a boost.

5. Content Criticism

One of the things that comes along with building a successful blog is criticism. You will be criticized as you grow your blog. Some readers will leave comments disagreeing with and even criticizing your posts. Other bloggers may criticize you for trying to duplicate the success of another blogger. These are all good things however because it’s all traffic to your website. If someone comes to your website to criticize you, it means that they are reading your posts. A little criticism can do wonders for increasing the popularity of a post.

Final Thoughts
These are all experiences that I went through when I first started blogging in 2008. You will be prepared to deal with many of these blogging hiccups by knowing what to look for in advance.