What are the pros and cons of blogging? Blogging is a very cheap way to do marketing which can, over time produce some fantastic results. There’s also millions of bloggers out there too, which means there’s a lot of competition. If you’re choosing a topic which is very competitive, it can be more difficult to get traffic to your blog for free from the search engines.
Still, blogging is a very good way to attract visitors to a website or business. Should you do blogging as a means to making an income? It can take some time to build enough traffic to make an income from blogging, but it can be done. Whether you achieve it or not will depend on how long you keep going for and the topic you choose to blog about.
If you enjoy blogging, there’s no reason it can’t be turned into an income if you wish it to be. Lots of people do make money from their blogging, but not all!
Pros And Cons Of Blogging: It’s Cheap
Yes blogging is a very cheap way to generate traffic to your website. By creating and uploading regularly to a blog, you can encourage the search engines to index your website and you can get found for your blog post topics on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.
It’s also very easy to build a blog and you can even use a free website builder or blog platform such as Weebly or Hubpages. So you don’t even need to pay a thing in order to get started blogging.
You can even monetise a free blogging platform and make money from blogging through selling affiliate products or advertising. See how to make money with Google Adsense without a website.
It’s well worth building your own website however, if your’e serious about blogging. Having your own domain and hosting gives you more authority with your visitors and with the search engines too.
Pros And Cons Of Blogging: Time Consuming
Blogging is time consuming. So if you’re not into writing on a regular basis it can be too much. If you don’t know your topic too, you’ll need to research every blog post you write! So if you don’t have the time to do blogging, you’re better off using another strategy if you intend to earn from the internet.
It can take a huge amount of time and effort too; building up enough blog posts to draw a good amount of visitors for free. Because blogging is so easy, it also means that there’s a huge amount of competition in the SERPS. This means getting visitors to your site from blogging is going to take some time. Depending on your topic, it can take months or even years before you see enough regular visitors coming to your site to start generating an income from it.
AI writing tools are a boon to bloggers who want to save time. But their presence also means that more content can be created more quickly and easily. This means more competition for bloggers.
Blogging Should Be Fun!
Blogging should be fun and ideally choose a topic you have a passion or at least an interest in. If you’re blogging in a topic you have no interest in, it can be difficult to sustain the necessary effort over the longer term to make it work. If you want to make money from blogging, you’ll need to keep at it for some time in order to build enough traffic to make it profitable.
So don’t choose a topic you hate, just to make money in with blogging! You’ll likely find, as I did, that you can’t sustain the necessary work needed for long enough.
I built a blog website around the topic of mushroom harvesting because I found the keyword I thought I could rank on Google. It did rank but I lost interest in the topic and the site fell off the search results pages. It was a lesson to only focus on a topic I could sustain an interest in over the longer term.
If you find your passion, you’ll keep going for longer when the other people quit. There’s lots of bloggers out there who also want to rank their content on the search engines and this means it’s tough! It’s much easier to write about a topic you love for several months or years, than one you hate!
Blogging Might Not Pay
Another downside of blogging is that even after a lot of work, you may earn nothing from a blog. If earnings is your goal, find something which is enjoyable about the process. That way you’ll keep going.
It took me a long time before I was earning consistently from blogging. Only after I had built up months worth of content did the sales start coming in more regularly. Before that sales were sporadic.
This can be hard, especially at first. To sustain yourself during the drought period you need to keep your belief high in order to keep going. Once I started seeing the proof that blogging was in fact a viable way to earn online, it motivated me to become a more consistent blogger. But as a beginner, I worked sporadically always looking for evidence that it worked! This can hold you back if you don’t believe in what you’re doing.
To earn from blogging you need a lot of content and a way to monetise. This can be done through advertising or affiliate marketing. See what is affiliate marketing for more on this topic, and Adsense vs affiliate marketing.
Blogging Is Flexible
Blogging is a very flexible way to earn an income once you start making it pay. You can blog from anywhere and on any subject. So if you like writing, and can find a way to monetise blogging and write about a topic you love, it can be an awesome way to earn a living.
The downside of the flexibility to blogging is that you need to be very disciplined to maintain a blogging habit for long enough to make it pay. If you are only dabbling with your blogging, you shouldn’t expect much income from it. But if you get disciplined and turn blogging into a long term habit, it can give you a huge amount of freedom for doing something you love!