If you wonder whether you should write a blog or not, keep on reading. There are quite some questions worth asking yourself before starting that deals with motivation, skills, time and expectations, Let’s get started!
To write a blog is enjoyable. If you do not like writing and if you do not like putting your thoughts down on paper, then you can almost for sure stop reading write away. Without passion, without a desire and without inspiration this will in 99% of all chances not succeed. But, if you have a little writer inside of you, or if you think you might have a writer inside of you, then keep on reading because here comes some more advices!
Motivation for writing a blog
Are you motivated to write? Do you have a dream inside of you sharing what is on your mind and what is in your head and heart with entire mankind on the internet? If you lack motivation before you start, then that is probably a sign that you should not even start. But, if the thought of writing and sharing with the world makes your heart beat faster and you feel like you just want to get it going, then that is a good sign.
Still you need to investigate your motivation a bit more. What is your goal and what is your vision for writing. Maybe you enjoy cooking and you simply want to write down your recipes and results in a blog so that people interested can take a look and see what’s going on in your kitchen. This is a nice motivation and something that can be built upon. If you want to write your thoughts on world politics you can easily start to do so as well. If your motivation is to share your heart, that is easy. Visit a site offering free blogs (Blogger, WordPress etc…) and get started. There is no risk and the worst thing that can happen is that you stop writing in some months from now on (without loosing anything on that).
If your motivation is to turn famous, rich and into a celebrity… then you need to keep asking yourself a lot of questions before starting. Because blogging is a nice hobby, but if you want to make a living out of it, it requires lots of time, studying, skills and then even more time and time! If you want to read more on this subject, I can warmly recommend the following article claiming that “Having the vision is the first step to success!”
A blog needs lots of time
If your motivation is only to share your thoughts with friends and family there is no pressure and no requirements dealing with amount of updates, design and social media. For those who have higher goals and want to write a blog making a difference there are lots of things to be aware of before starting! You might be a professional in your area or you might simply have a strong interest in a subject. Still you need lots of time to gather information needed for your blog writing and you need lots of time to write your thoughts down. To get a popular blog you need content, but not only content, you need good and useful content. You need content that people are interested in and content that gives answers to questions people might have. It is not enough with good content once a month, but you need to keep your blog frequently updated with such good and useful articles which will make old visitors return and which will draw new visitors to your site all the time.
If you think that sounds easy, keep on reading! Because content is only one part of the circus. You need to get your blog known on the web and to make it known you need lots of time. The best commercial is for sure people who have visited your blog and who shares your blog with other friends. But, before this happens you need to attract visitors in the first place. In today’s world social media plays a very important part in making your blog known, but you should watch out, because spamming social media with your links and articles will make you unpopular. There are of course lots of things that can be done to spread the word about your blog on the world wide web, but I’ll get back to that in another article some days from now.
Do you have the skills to write a good blog?
Again, if your motivation is to share your thoughts with friends and family and nothing else, just write… skills doesn’t matter. The worst thing that might happen is that your family wan’t read it! If you want to create a blog that influences and which draws visitors to it, then you need to have some skills and the ability to write about things people are curious about. There are millions of articles already out there on the net dealing with how to breastfeed small children, how to start a new business, how to turn into a billionaire and similar topics. What makes your blog idea interesting? What do you know and what do you have that will make your writings more interesting than the others already out there?
If you like travelling there are lots of blogs out there about travelling. What kind of insight will your travel blog give its readers that other blog don’t? Do you have the skills to write in an interesting way that will make people read all your words and keep coming back to read other articles later? It is not enough to have skills and insight in your area, you also need to ask yourself the question if you are a good writer or not! Are your writings full of mistakes and errors? This might not be lethal, but it is still a very important question to consider before starting your new blog.
What are your expectations?
„The higher the expectations, the bigger the fall.” This is true in many situations. If you have high expectations you will easily fall. But, without high expectations and a dream, you will never get anywhere. The key is endurance and patience, and lots of time, work and consistency. I remember a website I launched in 2008. I worked a whole lot with it and wrote articles, made pages with information and tried to spread links to it through forums, link catalogues and other sites on the net. I worked a lot, but no matter how much I worked, I could only get 25-50 visitors a day. It felt really annoying and you might almost feel like giving up as you see those numbers. Still, I hung in there and kept on producing content and working with the page and after years the amount of visitors rose and today the page has a bit less than 1000 visitors a day. Most visitors come from the search engine Google, and somehow Google likes old pages a whole lot. The domain name gets a higher value and often articles and posts located on that domain will rank higher than brand new articles on brand new domains. Thus you need to hang in there, because the article you write today might turn popular sometime next year, at least if it has content that will remain interesting in one year from now.
Time to start blogging?
These were just a few advices concerning whether you should write a blog or not. It is finally all up to you if you want to start writing or not, but I believe some of these advices are worth taking into consideration as they will help you out a whole lot in the start process and in the planning process.
If you have found this article helpful and have decided to start writing a blog, why not post a comment and share what your blog is about and where it can be found. Would be so happy to check it out!
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