When you look to the glamorous photos on a blogger’s social media account and read the content they create, you think what an amazing life they have. How great it is to have companies send you freebies while you spend the day writing a couple of posts, in between holding a cocktail or traveling the world, right? This is the image of a blogger, fueled by media and Carrie Bradshaw, but the reality couldn’t be more different.
Having a successful blog is not easy. You need to work a lot and the number of freebies you actually receive is really small, not to mention this happens once in a blue moon. Here are the unspoken realities of being a blogger.
Competition takes the best of us
There are many blogs out there and most of the successful people in the industry know each other. While we do make friends and ask one another for guest posting articles, we are always competing for traffic. Yes, we might be two beans in the world of fashion blogging, but we are also trying to live off that blog, while pursuing our passion for fashion. The same principle is valid across all the countries, across all the industries: no matter if you have a travel or a fashion blog, you still need to stay on top of the game and you are competing with fellow bloggers.
It’s how we write that keeps us all floating. When several people write on the same topic, their unique perspective is what keeps the reader engaged. At the end of the day, the number of engaged readers is what makes a blog successful and enables each of us to have our own audience.
Blogging and money
Bloggers start their websites from passion, but this doesn’t mean they don’t invest a lot of time and money in their blogs. In time, we get to make money from our blogs, as the investment starts to pay off. But yet, there are many people out there who don’t think bloggers should make a living out of their own site. They claim that bloggers who make money are not honest. As a blogger you have to get editorial links, write sponsored posts and get products to test in order to write reviews. Making money out of the blog is normal, because we also need to eat and pay the bills and we also need money to invest in the blog. While most of us balance the blog with a job, we still need the extra cash from the blog. So, yes, I do feel I am entitled to monetize my own blog.
Comparing your blog to others can get ugly
One of the ugly sides of blogging is that you always compare your own blog to others. While this keeps you updated with the latest trends in web design, it can also be very destructive. When you see a more successful, more beautiful blog, you become jealous and your motivation drops. Your confidence can easily drop as well and before you know it, you start postponing the next article. The idea of closing the blog slowly starts to bloom in your mind, as sadness is taking over each time you look at your own blog.
The pressure for being perfect
Picture-perfect social accounts draw the crowds. Your posts need to be grammatically perfect and when you do get out in the world for a blogging event you need to look perfect. The amount of pressure put on a blogger to be perfect is tremendous. But we are still humans and we can’t be perfect all the time. The pressure can become too much from time to time and when this happens, the perfect blogger disappears and the real human starts to show up, along with their own flaws.
Coping with hate is hard
The internet is full of free hate and a blogger gets to face that hate daily. There are soo many people who choose to spread their mean words on your blog, without knowing you, without knowing how much work you’ve put into each post. For them, it’s a pleasure to start a fight online. At times, your competition also joins the haters and you are suddenly trapped in a blogger’s fight you have nothing to do with. After all, no one is supposed to agree with your point of view nor they should judge you for your passion. But hateful comments are always there, as haters try to reap your energy and your motivation.
All these things can make blogging hard and it can bring you to the point where you are asking yourself if it’s worth doing it. The answer is always yes! No matter how painful or ugly it can be, bloggers are fueled by their passion for life, for their own blogs and the topics they love to write about. At the end of the day, we can’t help to blog about the latest awesome thing we saw/did and we love the support we receive from the bunch of people who respect our work. And this is everything for us, bloggers!
Contributed byhttps://trafficbox.org/
