​A Future in Blogging: Can You Turn a Hobby into a Career?

After constantly seeing people take up blogging as a career option, you finally muster the courage to quit your full-time job and start your own blog. You pour your heart and soul into every article, hoping to get people interested in reading your posts. But after blogging for weeks, months, and maybe even years, you find that you can’t seem to grow your audience beyond your mother and circle of friends. After a while, you can’t help but think that maybe blogging just isn’t the right career for you.

When blogging started becoming a thing, it was just a hobby for many. As the medium grew, it began incorporating entrepreneurial activities that allowed the bloggers to profit from their posts. Naturally, more and more bloggers started expressing their thoughts and opinions in the hopes of building a career out of the activity, and as the medium’s profitability potential was realized, bloggers became a dime a dozen, with many doing the same stuff that everybody has seen before. So how could you possibly make it in an oversaturated industry?

Your attitude towards blogging

One thing to keep in mind as you attempt to make a career out of blogging, is that very few bloggers are actually able to fully support themselves in the process. For every successful blog site, there are likely tens of thousands that never fetch their writers a single penny. So before you even consider a career in blogging, you need to evaluate yourself and identify your exact views about blogging.

Indeed, the people who succeed at blogging treat writing as a passion, but at the same time consider it a serious business. If this is your attitude going forward, then you’ll start to see obstacles offering less of a challenge, because you’ll do whatever it takes to overcome them.

Aside from the right attitude, you must also have the right set of skills, which should include not only writing skills, but search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), and the willingness to learn and stay abreast of current trends, knowledge and techniques in your chosen vocation.

And with that, here are pro tips on how you can turn your passion for blogging into a career.

Have a goal and business plan

If you plan to earn from your blog, then it can be considered a business, and any commercial endeavor requires a business plan. Identify your goals, brainstorm with your team (if you have one) and decide your short-term and long-term goals. Understand that running a blog site requires the investment of time and money on your part, and unless you’re a one-man marketing show, you need to hire professionals to help you out with the business side of things such as branding, website hosting, accounting, and domain subscriptions, among other considerations.

Of course, you may do just fine using a cloud hosting service and simply churn out article after article without bothering about how they look or how they will reach your target audience, but is that the kind of blog you want to have? To have a quality blog site, you need your behind-the-scenes operations to function smoothly and hassle-free, that’s why it’s worth having the above-mentioned services in place. Think of it as outsourcing the little things so you can focus on the more important aspects of your business.

Know your audience

If you haven’t already, take inventory of your blog’s audience. Try to identify your niche and demographics. Getting to know the people that you want your blog to reach can be very useful in increasing traffic, getting people to return to your blog, and profiting from it. To establish a relationship with your audience, you can try:

• Running surveys – let visitors tell you what they think in the form of surveys to gain feedback on what they’re looking for and how you can improve your blog.

• Engaging with people – it can be disheartening if you don’t get any feedback for your posts. This is why initiating contact with people in the comments section, on social media, and even via email is critical. It may be time-consuming, but it’s essential to offer something to your audience first so they will feel more inclined to reciprocate by becoming followers of your blog.

• Making it personal – the best writers write from a place of confidence and authenticity. If you can make people believe that they are reading something from a real live person, they will be more likely to pay attention. Don’t be afraid to write in the first person and let people know what interests you, and what peeves you off. You don’t have to go overly obnoxious, but don’t go skirting around hard truths either. You need to fight for what you believe is right.

Remember to engage with your readers to promote positive interactions and boost your blog’s popularity.

Post consistently

Once you start a blog site, you need to create a regular schedule for posting. Consistency in terms of volume is critical to keep your followers engaged. Once you’ve established a schedule, make time for yourself to write, and respect that time if you want to turn your blog into an income source. When you are able to build momentum with consistency, readers will come to expect your posts, and eventually, you can create a body of work that may start to attract paying clients and customers.

Develop new skills

While writing is the primary skill that you must hone to further your blog, it’s crucial for you to develop other talents as well. The best blogs contain not just text but also images, videos and even audio. The pages themselves are designed in an appealing and creative fashion, and most of all they are unique. And with that, you need to think of other skills that you can use to make your blog posts stand out. Avoid using stock photos and videos, and learn to take your own. Learn how to code, so you don’t have the same website theme as other bloggers. Developing skills—from photography and video production to coding and web design—can give your blog the edge it needs to be competitive and draw more people in.

What if it doesn’t pan out?

Doing all of the above doesn’t guarantee that your blog will be successful. It’s not the same for everyone, after all. Should your blogging efforts not yield the results you want, you can always re-enter the workforce. Our resume writers can help you update your old resume or create an entirely new one. They can also help you with cover and thank you letters that will open up ideal job opportunities and interviews.