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Should you start a blog? There are many things about blogging I wish I had known to better set myself up for success. In this lesson, I'm breaking down the truth about blogging that no one tells you to help you set expectations to prepare yourself for ultimate success.
You're probably like me. You've been seeing these gorgeous pins and amazing success stories of people making $100-$500k (some even $1M) from blogging. The more pins you see, the more intrigued you get. The blogging income reports are drawing you in and that's all you can think about. You go into your day job each day and think maybe there's something else out there for you. Your ideas are fantastic and you love a good challenge. You want to work from home and travel.
Who's been there? THIS GIRL!
Trust me. I get you.
In fact, I'm still right there with you.
Why Did I Start a Blog?
About 6 months ago, I started seeing these amazing success stories about blogging. (I know, I know, I'm late to the party) I had never been a big “pinterester” or social media person. I also have a demanding, but wonderful, day job so my life is my job, man, hobbies, and friends. I've lived a wonderful life for years like that. In fact, I still do. However, I was intrigued by these online success stories and have always wanted to start a business teaching other women about career and finances. Therefore, I decided to ease into it by starting a blog!
My Blogging Expectation Was Wrong
I expected to design a beautiful website and have others flock to it immediately. In fact, I wanted to help other women with career and finance topics so badly that I couldn't wait to get my site off the ground!
I truly feel as though my content is helpful and can really assist others with getting out a debt to start living their dreams.
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I expected traffic to start pouring in from Google and Pinterest.
But it didn't. I checked my Pinterest Analytics and Google Analytics every hour for weeks. 0 impressions, 0 clicks, 0 saves. In fact, there were only a handful of visitors to my website in the first 2 weeks.
The other bloggers had made it sound so easy so why was I failing?
I love the blogging world and think it's incredible that so many people have done so well for themselves blogging. Let me tell you, after starting it myself, I have SO MUCH MORE RESPECT for all of these amazing men and women that have designed a website and earned money from their blog. What they don't always tell you is, this is very hard work.
Like really, really hard work.
I know that's not as fun to read, but it's the truth. I consider myself to be pretty smart with a Masters degree and jobs at multiple Fortune 500 companies over the past 10 years.
Even I am astounded by how hard blogging actually is.
However, the goal of this post is not to discourage you, but to properly set expectations to avoid frustrations down the line. One blogger once told me that 99% of bloggers give up in the first 6 months.
I believe the reason others give up is because the expectations weren't properly set. I'm here to help with that!
If you're wondering if you should start a blog, some of the truths about blogging that I've uncovered will help you set expectations.
What You Should Know Before You Start a Blog
As I mentioned above, blogging is NOT a get rich quick job. I know some bloggers mention that exact sentence, but they don't expand upon it because they usually want to sell products. Therefore, I was thinking they meant that blogging for a few months will result in a steady $1,000 paycheck to start and would only grow from there. LOL. How many of us thought that, ladies? Come on, be honest! I can't be the only one.
I break down 5 truths about blogging no one tells you below.
The Truth About How Long it Takes to Set Up A Blog Website
Oh my word! This is something that other bloggers don't seem to mention at all. Maybe this stuff just doesn't come natural to me, but I've worked in the tech industry for 8 years, so I tend to think I'm more tech savvy than the average person.
However, I had NO EXPERIENCE with building a website, didn't even know what a “hosting company” was and had certainly never heard of wordpress, plugins or anything else for that matter. I had no idea what it took to start a blog. I was truly a green newbie (and still am).
I've learned everything I know by researching and reading other blogs, which I'm so incredibly thankful for. However, I do find that bloggers make it sound very easy to set up.
I will say that technically they are right in that you can start a blog in minutes to an hour, but they are forgetting to mention the rest of the things that are essential to your blog functioning correctly. It is “easy” to get a hosting company, a domain, and wordpress installed, but after that, there's quite a lot that needs to be done. Now, I do have a very demanding full-time job so my time isn't fully devoted to my blog, but it is actually all quite intimidating.
It took me several weeks to figure out how to get my site to look nice, lots of tutorials, etc. Once I figured out that an import of a theme makes it so much easier, I was ready to go in one night.
However, what they don't tell you, is that after you get your basic blog set up AND write 20+ posts (something that took me over a month by the way), you then have countless steps of https, SEO, plug-ins, social sharing, rich pin setup, Pinterest learning, disclosures, legal pages, learning about alt text, meta descriptions, how to use wordpress, how to use elementor, how to use canva, cacheing, site glitches, google analytics, keywords, and oh my goodness, I could list 1000 more things. It truly is like drinking through a fire hose.
With that being said, if it wasn't for all these wonderful bloggers sharing their success stories, I would have already given up or would have never even started in the first place. BUT I DIDN'T GIVE UP. I'm still here 2 months after starting the blog (4 months after starting it). It really took much longer than I thought to get set up and I know I will always be learning.
I still am not even close to having the hang of it, but I'm learning, I'm making mistakes, and I'm trying. The most important thing is that I'm not giving up.
I believe in the content I share and truly want to make a difference in the world.
The Truth About How Long Writing Blog Posts Takes
I read so many pins on “Making Blog Posts in an Hour” or “Make 3-5 Posts a Week Quickly”. Ummm…what kind of magic fingers do these people have!?
I am a VERY FAST typer. In fact, my colleagues always mention they can hear my fast typing through our skype calls. I've been in a corporate job at Fortune 500 high-demand companies for 10 years now so I have to work quickly to get things done so that my nights aren't completely taken over with work. Needless to say, I learned to type fast.
Let me tell you though. My blog posts do not take one hour in the morning. In fact, on average, they each take about 8 hours for me to write.
Now, I imagine I'll get better at this as time goes on, but for now, it's actually quite time consuming. I do have several very long posts because I want to produce quality content and am speaking from the heart. I'm not just researching other blog posts to see what I can push to my readers to make money.
My goal of this blog is to truly make a difference in the lives of other women and to help give coaching on career success and achieving financial freedom. Therefore, it's important to me that I make posts that are either solving my readers' questions and problems or are things that helped me get ahead significantly in life that I know would benefit my readers.
I do hope I can get to a point where I can bust them out quicker, but for now, this is my reality.
The Truth About How Long it Actually Takes to Make Money from Blogging
You see these Pinterest headlines that say “How I Made $30,000 Blogging this Month” or ” How I Made $350k Blogging Last Year”. WOW! My eyes were always glued to these posts. I'm sure yours are as well! These are FANTASTIC success stories!
I even read a post that said he writes 30 posts on a blog over 1 month and then makes $7,000 each year without touching the website again. WOW, I thought. If he can do it, I can do it!! How hard could it be?
Ha! Funny again, Lisa!
The truth is, many of these bloggers you see on Pinterest have significant blogging experience, marketing experience, website building experience or have been blogging for 3-5 years before they saw even a little bit of income. Yes, there are many exceptions and people that have made money much quicker. However, I've realized that they are the exception, not the rule.
Through a lot of research and interviewing current bloggers, I've gathered that the key to blogging is sticking with it. The longer your blog is SEO optimized and the Google bots are trolling it, the more trusted your website will become. The more trusted your site is, the more it will show up in search engines. This is a fact.
You see stories of people selling their “small blog for $50,000”. That's wonderful and a big congratulations is in order for them! However, if you look into it more, you find that the blog had been online for 3-6 years! Holy smokes! Am I the only one that assumed that “small blog” meant they started it a few months ago, wrote a few posts, and then sold it for $50k? Maybe it's just me. It's still an incredible story! However, keep in mind that it actually took years for the site to gain enough visitors to be sold for $50k. It's definitely not a get rich quick kind of thing.
The other common thing I noticed is that many of these successful bloggers had previous marketing, SEO, or website experience. They learned all of these skills at a corporation and then applied them to blogging. That's amazing!!
However, I don't have the background that can assist in any of that. I assume the majority of us don't. I have a background in accounting, finance, sales, Big Tech, and consulting. Those are things I can write about on my website, but they certainly do not help me in making an optimized website that drives visitors. I had to learn the hard way, but I share the mistakes I made so that you can avoid them.
Feel free to visit my recommendations page to see the FREE plug-ins and other free resources I recommend getting once you start your blog. I also list other paid recommendations for things I ACTUALLY use and recommend. However, my goal right now is to keep blog expenses as low as possible so I only recommend the essentials!
The Truth About How Bloggers Make Money
I've seen incredible headlines like “I Made $70k from TikTok in 1 Month” or “I Made $3 Million from Blogging This Year” or “I Made $3000 in My First Month of Blogging”. Wow! While these are amazing success stories and I'm so proud of these women, the headlines are a little bit misleading.
When you click on them, you find that these women didn't make the money from blogging necessarily. The TikTok bloggers didn't make money from TikTok. They drove visitors from TikTok to their website. On their website, they made their money from selling courses or coaching to those TikTok visitors. That is fantastic and such an amazing success story in itself, but the money didn't come from TikTok technically.
Bloggers that mention making thousands their first month blogging or millions each year are also usually not making money just from blogging alone.
When you click on those headlines, you'll find that they are making money from some blogging (affiliate links, ad revenue, sponsored posts, etc), but that the majority of their income is coming from selling courses, ebooks, and shopify items. These are ALL STILL AMAZING things and these bloggers are INCREDIBLE!! However, I do find some of these headlines to be a bit misleading.
As a new blogger, I was naive enough to think that they truly did make that money from blogging (affiliate marketing and ad revenue). I realize that their income is a result of the traffic they gained from driving visitors to their blog, but selling shopify items, courses, and ebooks is what earned them the amazing income they have. Again, these are incredible stories and amazing people that I certainly look up to, but they aren't just making money through affiliate links and ad revenue on their posts.
I believe the word “blogging” is evolving. It's transforming into a new meaning that combines a plethora of things (ebooks, courses, items to sell, etc) driven from website traffic to a blog . That is perfectly OKAY. I just had no idea. =)
The Truth About Pinterest Driving Blog Traffic
This is another one where I had no idea how hard it would be to drive Pinterest traffic! I've been actively pinning both manually like a mad woman and on Tailwind for 2 months since my blog launch.
Yes, I know that's not a long time, but I truly thought I would get 10-20 clicks and 50 saves right after pinning a new pin and that it would grow from there. HA! That's cute, right?
I mean, maybe it does happen for some people. However, for me, I've pinned 1,654 pins in 2 months. Sadly enough, I can pretty much count on two hands how many clicks I've had to my blog with ALL of those pins combined. Granted, not all 1,654 pins are MY pins. Many of them are repinned from other people.
However, I've pinned about 150 pins of my own and repinned them over and over. The traction is slow (if I can even call it that). I've taken some Pinterest courses now, but I'm learning that I have to be patient as Pinterest traffic will take time, just like SEO.
I know some people do have overnight viral pins, but the more I learn, the more I realize they had luck on their side. They pinned the right thing at the right time and had the right person repin it to set it off on a viral trail. NOW, that can happen to ANY OF US, including me. However, it hasn't happened to me yet so I can't speak to that experience. (Sending good hopeful vibes!)
Don't get frustrated though is all I can say! Keep with it. We're in this boat together. I just started this journey so let's ride into the sunset together!
In fact, I have a Facebook Group for brand new bloggers to learn from each other. Feel free to join the party by clicking here. Hint: We share random tips you'll need to know. We are all learning every day!
Should You Start a Blog? The Truth About Blogging No One Wants You to Know
The morale of the story here is not to discourage you to start a blog. If anything, it's to help you set expectations upfront so that you don't get burned out and defeated like I did and give up before ever really starting.
A blog can be a wonderful passive income source or a hobby to help enrich the lives of others. Whatever your passion may be, it's important to set expectations up front so that you don't compare yourself to others (mistake I made) or get down on yourself in the process (also me!). You can do this and you've got many people that are glad to help you on your journey when you do start a blog! =)
Feel free to visit my recommendations page to see the FREE resources I recommend getting acquainted with as well as the paid resources I actually use while making sure I spend as little as possible while getting this blog off the ground. You can start creating your website by first signing up with a website host. This is the one I use and recommend.
I'm still learning every day and yes, there are days that I need to stop because after working 12 hour days at my corporate job, I'm exhausted and need to force myself to relax with my friends and family. I also don't want to burn myself out again or get discouraged so it's definitely a balancing act.
If you want to start a blog or have started one and are running into the same challenges, please let me know in the comments or join my Blogging Newbies Facebook Group to let me know I'm not alone!
I haven't read any blog posts with this type of information so I'm actually wondering if anyone else is also realizing just how hard blogging actually is. Let me know and feel free to ask me any questions. I'm happy to share my experiences! =)
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