Lately I’ve been wondering is blogging worth it. Especially since many in the online business community I’m a part of are using paid ads. Paid adverts can get your business running much faster, but it still takes time and of course money. Blogging on the other hand, is free! The downside of blogging, compared to paid marketing is that it isn’t scalable. A blog post from several years ago can make me a sale, but I’ve no way of repeating that success on a large scale. But once you master paid marketing, you can scale up by increasing your budget.
I’ve been a blogger for several years now and it is how I started out online. Over time, I’ve come to enjoy writing, and it’s brought in a number of high ticket sales now too. But maybe you’re starting out wondering the same: “is blogging worth it?”
Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Sales System
Depending on how you decide to monetise a blog, it can take between several months and several years for it to provide you with an income. Blogging doesn’t work immediately and in the first instance it can be a little frustrating. Google especially doesn’t give new blogs much in the way of traffic. It usually sandbox’s them for several months. This means you don’t get traffic from Google, but there’s other search engines you can get traffic from: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com.
You can also promote your content yourself throughout social media. There’s a number of plugins for WordPress which help you automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
As traffic comes to your blog, you’ll want a strategy for monetisation if you intend to earn from it. How you do this will go a long way (or not) to your income generation. Using affiliate marketing high ticket items and subscription affiliate programs has made a huge difference for me. Before I found such programs I was promoting low value physical products from my blog and I made a pittance for the same amount of work!
So before you build a blog and start blogging, it’s worth learning the different affiliate marketing business models and the affiliate marketing commission rates if you decide to monetise with the affiliate model.
It’s also worth building an email list from your blog. An email list allows you to collect visitors details and maintain contact over a longer period of time. This helps with sales too. See the power of email marketing.
Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Topic
Some bloggers simply pick a topic they love and enjoy writing. With this kind of spirit, it’s much easier to sustain your blogging habit over the longer term required to make an impact. If you can choose a topic you love, and align it with an affiliate resource you can get onboard with, or with your own business/product, then so much the better.
Writing a blog about something just for the sake of money will often mean it’s much more difficult over the longer term. Plus, each piece of content needs to be thoroughly researched – so it takes longer.
I chose a topic I knew nothing about and spent several months writing about mushroom harvesting! It was a bad idea and I eventually burned out and gave up. The trouble way I had zero interest in mushroom harvesting. I was only looking to make money from the site. I utterly failed with it although it did reach top of Google for its main keyword terms! But monetising was a problem and the site was eventually ditched.
Writing about a topic you enjoy is a different story. If you can find something you love writing about, you’re on to a winner.
Don’t Look For Results – Look At Your Activity
One of my business coaches once told me, don’t look at results when you’re starting out. Look at your activity. When you start out blogging, it can be easy to look for signs of traffic and sales. You write a blog post and the very next day are looking for sales! Unfortunately it takes much longer than this in most cases. If you base your actions on your tangible results it’s likely to hamper your enthusiasm and motivation. Ah, no sales today, should I bother!? Well yes, you should. But expect to be writing for several months before you see the signs of your hard work. Celebrate a click to your website. Celebrate a lead on your email list. But don’t get too far ahead of yourself looking for massive results with a long term strategy like blogging.
In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits he shows the plateau of latent potential (shown above). This relates to blogging very well. When you start out, you look for results but none are visible. Some will quit because of this but those who continue for long enough will break past the “valley of disappointment” where nothing happens. Over time though, if you stick with it, you’ll see an exponential increase in your traffic. This might take months or years depending on the niche you choose to write your blog in.
One way to overcome the desire to look for results too early, and therefore get disillusioned, is to choose a long term goal for your blog.
Is Blogging Worth It?
Only you can decide whether blogging is worth it depending on your ultimate reason for blogging. It’s most definitely a long term marketing strategy, but it does work. Just don’t expect overnight wonders! To get the most from blogging choose a subject you enjoy and find a way to monetise your blog which aligns with your passions, interests or hobbies.
Some people just like blogging and it can be a rewarding way to spend your time even if you’re not doing it for the almighty dollar! But if you enjoy writing and have a business or product to sell of your own, blogging is a great way to increase your online presence and sales over time. If not, you can monetise with a number of affiliate products which you can find online.
There are affiliate products available to promote in pretty much any niche. So choose your niche wisely if you’re planning on blogging for the longer term.