This is a guest post by Harshit Singhal.
The popularity of blogging has recently erupted in the last few years and many new bloggers are coming on the scene. However most of them have a lot of misconceptions about blogging, probably because they have only heard about the success stories of probloggers, while never really bothering to delve into some ground realities of blogging.
So let me share with you the five most common misconceptions newbie bloggers have about blogging. The purpose of this article is to make you aware of the common pitfalls that are associated with blogging, so that you can avoid them and come out on top in the end:
Blogging is Easy Money
This is undoubtedly one of the most common misconceptions, not just about blogging but about about any other online business as well. This generally happens when people come across income reports of successful bloggers and get lured into thinking that they can emulate the same without any apparent difficulties.
However what they don’t realize is that the so called probloggers that they read about all over the internet have also gone through many struggles in their blogging careers and have had many ups and downs in their journey. If there is one thing in blogging that you can be sure of, it is that you will have to persevere through many difficult periods and not let the circumstances get the better of you.
Blogging Doesn’t Take Too Much Work
Well to be honest, when I was starting out, I too used to believe that blogging is a piece of cake, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could start a blog and make money from it. However, the reality couldn’t have been any different! Not only did I find it extremely hard to keep churning out quality content on a regular basis in the initial period, but the lack of visitors also dampened my motivation to continue on.
Now that I’ve been blogging for almost half a decade, I’ve come to the realization that nearly every blogger jumps to the scene holding this misconception, which eventually makes the difference between their success and failure later on.
Your Writing Skills Don’t Matter
This is another popular misconception that plagues the mind of aspiring bloggers. Although writing seems to be an easy task, anyone who has to write on a regular basis would tell you how difficult it is to produce quality content on a daily basis, since writing involves a lot of background research as well, and you need to know exactly what you are trying to convey by your post.
Not only that, you need to be well aware about the topic that you are writing so as to do full justice to it and give quality information to your readers. Also it’s important to maintain a regular posting frequency so as to increase your readership and give people a reason to keep returning back for more quality content.
Visitors Will Start Flocking To Your Blog
Most newbie bloggers presume that as soon as they start adding some content to their blogs, traffic will automatically start flowing in, without the need for anything extra on their part. If it were this simple, then every blog would have been averaging thousands of visitors a day, but it just doesn’t happen this way.
The traffic takes time to start coming in, and for the initial few months, all you should expect is a trickle of visitors, if anything at all. However if you keep working on the other aspects of blogging consistently, such as building backlinks, networking with other bloggers and interacting with your readers, and keep repeating the cycle without fail, then you will eventually reap the rewards of your hard work.
Design Is More Important Than Content
While most new bloggers tend to refrain from spending money on their blogs, especially in the initial period, there are quite a lot of bloggers that treat the design aspect to be more important than content. As a result of this, they spend a good amount of money in ramping up the designs of their blogs while ignoring the importance of quality content.
Let me give you an example of one of my friends since it seems apt to be discussed here. He started out with a catchy domain name and spent hundreds of dollars in buying a premium theme and then customizing it as per his taste. Since he had a limited budget, he ended up spending all of his saved money in the first year of blogging itself, never worrying about creating quality content instead. Eventually he lost every penny in his pocket and still hadn’t made any income from his blog, so he decided to quit.
While this might sound like a sad story of an aspiring blogger, the truth is that there are so many examples of bloggers who followed the same route and failed to make it big. No wonder why experts say content is king!
