One of the most overlooked aspects of making money with a blog is your mentality.
You can follow all of the steps to monetizing your blog, but if your mentality isn’t in the right place, then you won’t get very far.
Because a blog is something that you usually do at home, people tend to treat it like a hobby. With a hobby, you aren’t pressed to get things done.
You can take your time, and you don’t evaluate the results. If you want your blog to succeed you can’t do that. You have to treat it like a business.
Your Blog Is Your Second Job
Many people get into blogging because they are tired of working for someone else.
They hate the idea of waking up, getting dressed, and sitting at a desk while someone else gives them orders.
Well, guess what? That’s exactly what you need to do with blogging!
You need to wake up consistently, get dressed like you mean business, sit at a desk and take orders from your new boss, you.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the idea of waking up whenever you want, wearing whatever you want, and doing whatever you want whenever you want.
And that can happen but only after your blog has seen some success.
If you aren’t used to working for yourself, then you might not realize how important a daily routine is to the success of your blog.
Here are some tips to ensure that you treat your blog like a business instead of a hobby.
1. Set a Schedule for Yourself
If you’re still working a full-time job, going to school, or raising children, you are going to be tired at the end of the day. Furthermore, at the end of the day is probably the time when you plan on blogging.
Because you’re so tired, you can tell yourself that you’ll get it done tomorrow.
That’s not the best approach.
Instead, take a look at your day and find the right time where you can devote your energy to your blog.
That might mean you need to wake up a little bit earlier in the morning. Perhaps you can cut out your TV time.
No matter what you do, you need to set a schedule for yourself and stick to it.
Remember, this is your new job, and your job doesn’t allow you to randomly show up and disappear.
One of the toughest things for new bloggers is building momentum.
Remember, everyone else has a head start on you, so taking 10 months to ramp up because you can’t stay consistent with your writing is only going to set you back further.
2. Think About How You’re Going to Make Money
Because this is your business, you need to have an understanding of the different ways your particular blog can make money.
If you decide that you’re going to focus on advertising and affiliate marketing, then you know you need to gain a lot of traffic and probably write a lot of content.
Knowing how you’re going to make money gives you an idea of what kind of work needs to go into your blog.
If you know for a fact that you’re going to write a book down the line, then that will allow you to plan your posts around your book’s topic.
Don’t go into your blog journey thinking that you’ll figure out how you’re going to make money at some point.
You can always change your mind later and make adjustments; however, I recommend going into this adventure with an idea of how you are going to make money.
3. Understand the Value of Customer Service and Your Brand
Bad customer service can completely ruin the reputation of any business.
This is no different with your blog even if you aren’t selling anything.
When you start a blog, you should have everything in place to create an email list.
Nothing is worse than signing up for a mailing list and not hearing from the blogger for 6 months only to get some random offer in your inbox.
Pople don’t like when this happens. I know I don’t. When that happens, it’s a big hit against your brand, and when it comes to your blog, your brand is all you have at the beginning.
If you learn how to stay in constant contact with your audience, you’ll find that you get significantly more value out of them than when you just randomly drop by.
The more you talk to them, the more they begin to associate positive feelings with your brand.
4. You Have to Spend Money to Make Money
It’s going to be hard to get anywhere with your blog without spending some money on things. It’s inevitable, and it shouldn’t be something that you actively avoid.
You don’t want your blog to go down because you skimped on hosting.
You don’t want to lose out on passive income because your free mailing provider doesn’t have the ability to offer email funnels.
You don’t want people not to take you seriously because your blog’s theme looks cheap and dated.
There are just some things that you’re better off spending money on with your blog.
While you don’t need to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars right away, you’ll find that when you want to grow your blog, you’ll have to open up your wallet for some things.
5. Track and Measure Everything
One of the worst things that you can do for your blog is not to measure anything.
It’s going to be hard to grow your blog if you don’t understand what makes it grow and to do that you need to measure things.
What blog posts are doing well and which ones aren’t? On what pages are people signing up to your mailing list? What Pinterest designs and titles seem to do the best?
This means you will have to get familiar with Google Analytics or another similar analytics application, but this is the price of running a business.
You never want to be walking around in the dark taking random guesses at what works for your blog and what doesn’t.
Blogging Is Business
Once people get a real look into all of the things that are required to make a blog successful and keep it running as a successful business for a number of years, they understand the importance of treating their blog like a business.
If you want your blog to be a business you can no longer treat it as a hobby. It’s time to dress up, get serious, and be your own boss.