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5 Realities You’ll Learn in 6 Months of Blogging

(Do you have Pinterest? Pin this for later!)

Welcome back passive income friends!

After 6 months of trial and error, failure and success, going through a step-by-step blogging course, and a roller coaster of experiences, we’re here to tell you what it is like to be a newbie blogger!

It’s been an exciting and extremely fast few months. We’ve made it far, yet there is a far road ahead.

If you are interested in becoming a blogger, or are fresh to blogging, you’ve made it to the right place!

Being a new blogger is fun, but can also be tiresome and can cause burnout.

If you’re more experienced, we’d love to hear about your experiences down in the comments! Let’s help each other grow and succeed!

5. You Are Not Perfect (And Neither is Anyone Else!)

Many newbie bloggers seek out affiliates to earn start monetizing their blog!

One of the most popular, and easiest to be a part of, is becoming an Amazon Affiliate.

After blogging for a handful on months, we applied to be an affiliate (since every article out there tells you that it’s the right affiliate to start with)…and got rejected.

So disheartening!

This was a huge slap in the face, but also a motivational tool after the initial shock.

We chatted with fellow bloggers on a Facebook group chat and discovered that we weren’t the only ones! In fact, many bloggers don’t work with Amazon.

(UPDATE: We eventually did get accepted, but Amazon just doesn’t prove to be a good option for earning from blogs like this one!)

When you have a blog, it’s like your new child. It’s created by you, it thrives off of your care, and it has endless potential.

Yet, when you go through a downhill, like a rejection, it makes you feel like you aren’t good enough.

Admit it, you’ve gone through Pinterest and have seen pins and designs that make you think, “Wow, I wish I could create something like that!”.

Or, maybe you’ve read an article that’s had thousands of reshares and thought, “I wish my blog could be like this! Why isn’t my blog as successful?”

It’s about perspective. It’s about getting through the highs and lows. It’s about working hard through the the times when you want to give up.

Yet, it is far easier said than done!

One important thing to remember is this: You are not perfect. Your blog is not perfect. And, neither is any one else!

Yes, there are other blogs out there that make more money and get more visitors. But, your blog is unique and you are fully able to get there one day.

Remember that, when you are struggling with blogging, that you are not alone! Every successful blogger has gone through the same trials!

You just need to be okay with adjusting, editing, changing, and moving forward!

4. It is a Side Hustle

Read that title again!

If you are coming into blogging, expecting for an easy ride, you may be surprised! We certainly were.

Don’t get me wrong, blogging really is fun. It is a creative outlet, a never-ending journey of learning, and can be very rewarding.

Yet, it is indeed a side hustle.

Depending on your goals, you may end up staying up way into the late night, putting out your fourth article of the week. You may spend your evening finding new ways to market and to reach more of your audience. You may even spend time away from friends, just to get pins scheduled, or to watch videos of how to better use Pinterest.

Like any side hustle, blogging will take time to learn and excel at. After only 6 months, we absolutely do not think we’ve excelled at it! There is always more to change, edit, and to make better. Unfortunately, there is also only so much time!

You’ll always find other webpages that look better, other pins that get more pins, and other bloggers who somehow figured out the secret to success sooner.

But the one piece of advice that we always stuck to: Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle!

Consider Your Family:

Above everything, blogging simply takes time.

It takes hours to create a post, and hours on top of that to create a website. You will spend time to learn social media and how to promote, learn about monetizing and affiliates, SEO, Pinterest, plugins, coding, the list goes on!

But, we’ve learned that, although it takes what seems like forever to learn everything, once you learn it, you know it. Every time you read another article about, say, Pinterest marketing, it’ll only build on top of your knowledge.

It is important to keep your family in mind throughout all of this!

Let them know ahead of time about your blogging venture, and what is expected of you to make it profitable.

Do Your Research…Often:

After a month of spending 8-hour days to make the “perfect” homepage, templates, color palettes, etc., we felt proud of our work.

Therefore, we didn’t want to look up more ways to improve. Why? Everyone has different methods to how and why their blogs became successful.

After spending forever on building a blog, why go in and change everything in hopes that it will be better?

If there is one piece of advice that we hope you’ll understand is this: The designs you come up with at the very beginning will take a long time. However, you are very likely to change it all once you gain experience.

For us, that was 4 months in.

We learned more from our favorite blogging course by Create and Go, and changed up nearly everything about the blog. And, we are sure that it will only continue to change!

Unlike our worldview from before, we are now excited to do our research about how to improve!

One day a week, we intentionally look up a few articles on Pinterest to improve our methods. Whether this is regarding Pinterest, Tailwind, affiliates, marketing, emails, or another topic, it helps to always want to improve!

Some topics you can research today to improve your blog:

• How to write descriptions in Pinterest to improve your Pinterest SEO
• How to organize your articles to increase the time readers are on your blog
• How to properly place advertisements or affiliates
• How to create appealing graphics for Pinterest

3. The Blogging Community

We are glad that we learned about how awesome fellow bloggers are!

Why not go through this experience with someone else who is doing the same thing?

We’ve compiled a short list of ways we reached out to the blogging community over the past 6 months. We believe it has helped up to connect, learn, and grow. It is worth checking out!

Commenting:

It is great to comment on other articles!

Express your enjoyment of an article or give a piece of lighthearted advice! This will show your interest in others, especially if you’ve been following a certain few blogs on Pinterest or other social media.

Facebook Groups:

Many courses come with Facebook groups that you can connect with others on.

This has been a good opportunity for us to learn from others and help answer questions for other new bloggers, based on our experience. There are also groups out there that are free to join!

Do your searching and get connected!

Guest Posting:

One quick way to make a connection with another blogger you admire is to guest post!

This usually includes you writing a post that is similar to your niche, for another blog. Some people compensate, many don’t. Doing this not only helps your blog by getting new readers to your site, but also helps a fellow blogger out.

It’s a win-win!

Some bloggers will do a post-for-post trade, where you’ll write an article for them, and they will do the same back.

We’ve published guest posts on our blog, and it has helped others get traffic to their blog. Definitely worth checking out if you have some extra time on your hands!

2. Your Audience May Not Be Who You Expected!

This was interesting to learn over the past few months!

You start off a blog, thinking you’ll attract a specific audience, and end up finding that people don’t like reading the topics you enjoy writing about.

Hmm. That’s frustrating.

For example, our passion is helping other women to learn to save, budget, and discover how to invest money for a successful financial future.

Yet, here we are, writing an article about how to blog.

Now, this does fit within our category of “passive income”, which directly correlates with helping our target audience reach financial freedom, but this is just an example of how much we’ve changed to fit our readers!

Unfortunately, not many women are interested in reading about stock trading, mutual funds, how to get into real estate investing, and so forth.

We can pin as much as we want, with perfect graphics, but won’t get many female millennial over to our blog by writing about those topics!

As stated above, you’ll go through a ton of trial and error throughout your first few months blogging!

A few ways to find your perfect audience:

• Ask your readers to comment! This is a great way to get feedback or to see if people are actually reading your content!
• Create numerous pins per article post. Use different templates, colors, pictures, and titles. If none work, you may try adjusting your next article topic! Pay attention to what topics work and which never do. Once you find one that gets a handful of visitors to your blog, make a similar article and see if it also works.
• Check out who follows you on Pinterest or your other social media! Your analytics will tell you the gender and average ages of who checks out your content. This is super helpful to start adapting your material to your specific audience!

1. You Don’t Need to Buy Everything for Success!

Email & P.O. Box:

Many will argue about this!

Now, if you are coming in as a new blogger, you may be surprised at the pricing to send out emails. At least we were very surprised!

Seriously, go do your research on this. If you plan on growing to a huge blog, you’ll be paying out a ton of money to be able to email to all your subscribers!

We did not get ConvertKit like every person out there says. We didn’t due to the fact that many of the bloggers who “give advice” to beginners bloggers get a chunk of money as affiliates, and we felt too many people were advertising just to monetize, rather than to genuinely help.

As a new blogger, we started with a free service with MailChimp. Once our subscribers grow past 2000, we will potentially move to ConvertKit.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed MailChimp, and it offers a clean platform with easy-to-use email services!

To be honest, we couldn’t imagine paying out $30/month, (plus a required P.O. Box!) at the beginning of blogging, without any subscribers. Especially without any opt-in or freebie to offer at that time!

But you may see it differently, and that’s okay!

For those of you who use other email platforms, you may be happy to pay out that much, but for us at the 6-month mark, we still don’t need it! The free service does everything we need at the moment.

So, do you need to set up an email before you launch? Many say yes, we say…eh, maybe.

The thing is, you won’t get many people at all over to your blog at the beginning!

Others argue that you’ll need to get those first people over to your blog into your subscriber list! Yet, we got maybe an average of 10-20 people per day in the beginning. It wasn’t worth it.

Our articles are a lot different now, and considering our email conversion at the moment, we doubt that would have been the same 6 months ago.

If you need to wait a month or two, that is fine! You don’t have to do everything in the exact order that others suggest.

You do you!

Paid Courses:

Did we need courses to start the path for successful blogging?

Were we informed that we “needed” to buy courses in the first few months blogging? Yes.

Did we listen to that advice and buy courses? Yes.

Did we need to buy those courses to get any of the monetization or success we had? Maybe…

So, should you spend the $100+ per course to boost your chances of making money from blogging?

This is tricky, because we have definitely not experienced the thousands of courses that bloggers offer to help others out. There are definitely courses out there that will give you  secrets to becoming a six-figure blogger in no time at all! 

If you are very tight on money, the simple answer is that you do not need to buy courses. You can find all the information you need by searching around on Pinterest.

After reading through a handful of articles from Pinterest, we were able to find the same information that we had paid for. It was just less convenient to access.

Now, if you want to save time and you have some money to put toward your new blog, then sure! Go learn about how to excel at Pinterest, and learn how to market affiliates. That’s all great stuff!

But do know that with the insane amount of bloggers out there, the information can almost always be found for free if you search!

Tailwind:

Before diving into this topic, feel free to check this detailed post about this great service!

So, were we told we needed Tailwind to be a successful blogger? Yes.

Did we get Tailwind right at the beginning? No.

If you are an absolutely brand new blogger, you don’t need Tailwind. You need to do your research (see above information) and you need to write.

Now, every article out there on Pinterest that promises you will “gain 1000 followers overnight” or something of the similar is most likely going to promote Tailwind to you.

I get it. It is an awesome service that will save you incredible time!

Yet, everyone and their mother is an affiliate for it, which makes it hard to find realistic and honest opinions of it!

Therefore, here is the down and dirty about *our opinion* of what a brand new blogger should consider:

• First figure out your net worth, here,. Map out your projected expenses for your blog this year. Put a year of Tailwind on that list.
• Create a Pinterest account, make a handful of boards, pin a handful of pins. (There are plenty of articles out there to help you with all of this!)
• You do not need Tailwind right away. Give it a few weeks or a month. Get your blog up and running before trying to schedule 50 pins/day. Because, honestly, you won’t have tons of pins to pin at the beginning!
• Do your research to learn how to make pins that get attention. (There are also plenty of advice to help you with this out there on the Internet)
• Join Tailwind after you’ve created the blog, written some articles, and began designing pins. Check out the advice in this post for all of you new bloggers!
• Then, join Tribes on Tailwind and start growing. It will take time to gain followers. There is not guarantee that you’ll have the insane results that many promise. Everyone and every blog is different!

All in all, we need Tailwind to keep the blog going on Pinterest.

If you don’t already know, Pinterest is the holy grail for blog traffic, so you’ll need to plan to get Tailwind sometime in the future! But just realize that we didn’t need it right away, and you most likely won’t either.

Let’s Summarize!

• Thanks for being a part of our new blogging experience! Don’t forget that you can always learn something new today!
• No blog is perfect. There will always be ups and downs, trial and error, and hard times. Find ways to stay motivated and keep moving forward! It will be worth it if you keep to it!
• Be cautious about your purchases (like buying tons of courses early on) and keep your budgeting in mind!