If you are not sure how to start a blog or feel intimidated by the process, check out my beginner-friendly guide below. It will take you step-by-step through the process of starting a blog

• How to start a blog the right way

1. Blogging Can Help You to Explore Your Passions and Interests

By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavour –Ray Bradbury, Writing Quotes

If you feel disengaged in your life and you wake up feeling unmotivated to face the day, it could be because you are spending your life following things that other people are chasing and not necessarily what you truly want.

But you can turn yourself around. You can get in touch with who you really are.

How you can use blogging to explore your passions, interests, and desires

There are several ways you can use blogging to aid you in exploring your passion and interests.

#1. Use blogging to help you grow towards who you want to become

Don’t just let your business or your job make something for you; let it make something of you. – Jim Rohn, Entrepreneur Quotes

What you do every day shapes what kind of person you eventually become. When choosing your life’s work, you need to examine whether it will help you become the person you have always wanted to be.

You can use blogging as a personal journal to explore critical questions that can point you in the right direction. For example:

• What have you always wanted to do that you have neglected?
• What are your values?
• What are you willing to do for money and what are you not willing to do?
• What skills and strengths do you possess that you can use for the benefit of others?
• Who do you want to become?

#2. Use blogging to help you choose between different interests

Trying to choose between your different interests can be confusing. To make a living doing what you love, you have to have the right balance between your passion, your skills, and your ability to be useful to others.

Blogging can help you narrow down your options in several ways

• Gauging interest. If you spend a few months writing about a particular subject, you will quickly know whether you have sufficient interest in it.
• Immersion. A blog forces you to immerse yourself in a niche and this can help you find out if you can compete favorably with others in your space.
• Testing. A blog can show you whether people are interested in what you have to offer.

#3. Use blogging to help you earn a living from your passion

This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts, Entrepreneur Quotes

A major reason why people don’t pursue their passions is that they don’t see how they can make a living from it. As a result, many people work in jobs they dislike because they need a stable source of income.

85% of people in the world hate their job- Gallup Poll ^[1]

When you spend your life building someone else’s dreams instead of your own, you can easily become frustrated and resentful. However, with a bit of creativity and a lot of effort you can make a full-time or part-time income from your passions.

2. Blogging Can Help You Earn a Living Online

Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life. – John Wooden, Entrepreneur Quotes

Venturing out on your own and trying to make a living from your passion can be scary. However, the internet has opened up so many opportunities that were not there before. It has also reduced the risks associated with starting your own business.

There are many examples of ordinary people who have started blogs based on their interests and have succeeded in making a decent living online. If you want to know more about them, check out my list of blogger income reports.

You can also start a blog to document your personal development journey and make money from it. For example, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner started her blog (Making Sense of Cents) to document her journey in paying $38,000 in student student debt.

The blog has gone to earn her millions of dollars. In 2017, she was making $139,000 a month from her blog.

Why is blogging so great for making a living online?

Starting a traditional business comes with a lot of hurdles that make it difficult for many people to transition from employees to entrepreneurs. However, blogging has many advantages that can help make the transition easier.

#1. You can do blogging part-time

Unlike most other businesses, you don’t need to quit your job to blog. In fact, it is not advisable to quit your job before your blog is bringing in a stable income.

The fact that you can keep working even as you grow your blog provides you with a safety net should things not work out. This removes a lot of the risk associated with starting an entrepreneurial venture.

Read: Should you quit your job for full-time blogging?

#2. Blogging can give you starting capital

Blogging, if done the right way, can bring in a significant amount of money monthly (see blogger income reports). You can use this money as starting capital for a more traditional business if you wish.

For example, if you have a passion for baking, starting a baking blog will cost you less than 50-100 dollars a year, while starting a bakery can cost you over $70,000 ^[2]. You will need to spend on costs like licenses, furniture, equipment, staff, lease, marketing, and design/repair.

Blogging, therefore, helps you to start working on your passion much faster.

#3. You can monetize obscure hobbies and passions

With a traditional business, it can be difficult to make money from obscure interests and hobbies, especially in small towns. With blogging, you have access to a global audience so you can tap into a much larger pool of customers.

There are several examples of bloggers who have obscure and niche hobbies.

A good example is Cassidy Tuttle who makes a full-time income from her interest in succulent plants.Her blog, Succulents and Sunshine, made over $100,000 in 2016 about three years after she started it ^[3].

While success like Cassidy’s is not guaranteed, her story shows that blogging can turn your passion into profit if you employ the right strategy.

 

Read More: Is blogging worth it for making money online?

3. You Can Contribute to Other People’s Lives through Blogging

You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want – Zig Ziglar, Entrepreneur Quotes

You probably have interests, skills, knowledge, talents, and experiences that you can use to make other people’s lives better. Someone out there is in desperate need of the kind of help only you can offer.

Sharing your gifts will not only give someone else joy but also fill you with a sense of purpose.

Why it is easier to make an impact today

In the past, it was difficult to make a meaningful contribution beyond your local town or city. The internet has now made it much easier for ordinary people to make an impact.

• The internet has reduced the prohibitive costs or barriers of reaching the masses. Before the internet, you either had to be in the newspapers or on TV and radio to reach a significant number of people.
• You can learn anything on the internet mostly for free. Even if you think you have nothing to offer, you can learn a useful skill online cheaply.

How can you enrich other people’s lives with your blog?

The key to success in blogging is to understand what people want and give it to them

#1. Share knowledge and expertise to help solve people’s problems

It is in our DNA to share. It is why we give advice to our friends and share information on interesting products and deals. It is why we review products on Amazon.

To solve people’s problems, you need to understand their wants and needs. This requires some detective work as well as some level of empathy.

#2. Entertain others

Do you have interesting stories, jokes, facts, or experiences that you can share with others to make their day a bit brighter?

People’s lives are full of challenges and they need a way to escape, at least for a while. You can bring a lot of joy into people’s lives by being a source of escape.

#3. Promote causes and values that may be important for the well-being of others

What would you like the world to be? If you have a vision, you can inspire others to take action to bring that vision to life.

For example, you could promote the use of green energy to combat climate change or highlight what people can do to ease poverty in their communities. Think of the values you hold dear.

#4. Comfort and encourage others by sharing your personal experience

You have probably gone through several difficult personal life experiences; bereavement, heartbreak, failure, or sickness. Through it all, you have learned valuable lessons that you can share with others who are going through the same thing.

When people go through difficult times, it is hard for them to see that light at the end of the tunnel. You can provide that light.

4. Blogging Can Help You Gain Marketable Technical Skills and Knowledge

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. – Robert Greene, Entrepreneur Quotes

If you want to increase your income, then you need to increase your knowledge and skills.

Benefits of skills acquired through blogging

Not all skills are created equal. Some skills offer a much higher return on your investment.  Blogging can help you acquire many of these skills including writing, copywriting, SEO, graphics design, editing, web design, and email marketing.

These types of skills have many unique benefits such as:

• They are in high demand with potential employers.
• They are highly transferrable meaning you can work in vastly different industries.
• They are moat-building skills. These skills create a barrier to entry because take time to master. You can cut down on your competition by getting good at them.
• You can use these skills to employ yourself as a freelancer.
• You can work remotely from anywhere in the world.
• You don’t need a formal 4-year degree to acquire them. You can learn them on platforms like Skillshare where you can have access to thousands of courses for an affordable monthly subscription.

Marketable skills you get from blogging and how much they pay

You don’t have to starve or be perennially broke when there are some money-making skills you can learn. Here are some examples of lucrative skills and estimates of how much you can earn from them.

#1. Web design

With advances in tools and technology, creating a website or a blog is now a breeze.

Even if you have never created a website or blog before, if you follow the step-by-step process I show you in this article, you should be able to create a blog in 20-50 minutes.

How much can you earn from your web design skills?

• If you were to get a web design job, you can expect to be paid anywhere between $38,000 and $76,000 a year ^[4].
• If you were to offer your web design skills on Fiverr, you can charge about $200 for a 5 page WordPress website. If you get 10 orders a month, that’s $2,000.

#2. Graphics design

Some of the graphic design services you can offer include designing book covers, logos, infographics, and social media images.

These days, you don’t have to be a designer to create attractive designs. You can easily find tools that offer many attractive templates that you can edit for free. For example, you can quickly make charts, infographics, logos, or social images for free using atool like Visme.

How much can you earn from your graphic design skills?

• If you were to get a graphic design job, you can expect to be paid anywhere between $35,000 and $66,000 a year ^[5].
• If you were to design an infographic on Fiverr, you could charge about $50 per infographic. If you get 20 orders a month, that’s $1,000.

#3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Some of the SEO services you can offer include: Keyword research, competitor research, link-building services, and SEO audits

All you need to get started is a good keyword tool and learn how to use it. You can use tools like Semrush . Get started with a free account and then check out their free SEO courses here.

How much can you earn from your SEO skills?

• If you were to get a search engine optimization job, you can expect to be paid anywhere between $36,000 and $65,000 a year ^[6].
• If you were to offer keyword research on Fiverr, you can charge $50 per job for 200 keywords and research 10 competitors.

5. You Can Use Blogging to Land Your Dream Job

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Theodore Roosevelt , Entrepreneur Quotes

Many people are either jobless or in jobs that do not suit them. According to Payscale, 46% of American workers consider themselves underemployed ^[7]. As shocking as that statistic is, the situation is probably the same or even worse in other countries.

What does it mean to be underemployed?

You are underemployed if you have a job that does not make use of your education, experience, or training. You are also classified as underemployed if you are working in your field of specialty but you are only able to get part-time work despite wanting a full-time job.

How blogging can help you get your dream job

If you are locked in a job you hate or a job that does not make full use of your creativity and skills, blogging can help.

In the previous section, I talked about how blogging can help equip you with marketable skills that can make you more employable. However, blogging can also help you land your dream job in several other ways:

#1. It will help you demonstrate and expose your expertise to a wider audience

If no one knows about you, you have a slim chance of getting your dream job, especially in a competitive industry. You need to have a way to tell others about who you are, what you stand for, and what value do you bring to the table.

When you consistently write accurate, thoughtful, and well-researched original articles in your field of specialty, people will start to notice you.

They will contact you for your opinion on various issues. You will get featured in other blogs and sometimes even in the mainstream media and this will help you to raise your profile in your industry.

#2. It will help you build trust in your industry or community

When you consistently deliver great quality advice, people begin to trust you. People begin to feel like they know you personally. This has several benefits:

• People will be more likely to act on your recommendations and advice
• People will want to collaborate or work with you
• People will be willing to recommend you to others

When people like and trust you, getting a job or consulting opportunities becomes much easier.

#3. It will help you build professional networks

When you build up a sizeable audience in a particular niche, you will start getting invites to conferences, seminars, and workshops. You can use these opportunities to connect with other players in your industry.

Having a blog with a sizeable audience can give you leverage in seeking collaborations with influential people in your industry because these people will want to have access to your audience.

6. You Can Use Blogging for Emotional Support

The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise, I might suffocate. – Ann Frank, Writer Quotes

At some point in your life, you are likely to encounter some kind of emotional trauma through a breakup, loss of a loved one, sickness, loss of a job, or bullying. If you don’t find a way to deal with this trauma, it can start to affect other parts of your life.

Writing down your thoughts and feeling can go a long way in helping you sort through all kinds of emotional trauma. Journaling has been effectively used in different types of therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) ^[8].

Why is journaling so effective for emotional healing?

There are several reasons why journaling is so popular for emotional support.

• It can serve as an emotional release, especially when you have no one to talk to. With writing, you can say things that you would be ashamed to tell anyone else.
• It can help you think clearly about things. In the heat of the moment, it can be challenging to put things into perspective. Writing slows things down enabling you to process your emotions in a better way.
• Journaling helps you see through your cognitive distortions and biases. A lot of mental suffering comes from poor thinking habits such as catastrophizing, mind-reading, overgeneralization, and filtering among many others.
• You can document inspiring people who have overcome difficult situations. Such people can serve as an inspiration to you and others.

Why blogging is a great journaling tool for emotional support

Here are the most obvious reasons why using a blog as a journaling tool may be better than a traditional pen-and-paper journal.

#1. Convenience, security, and flexibility

Blogs act as electronic journals and they, therefore, inherit all the advantages of electronic journals such as:

• You can access it anywhere and on any device. With the traditional diary, you either have to leave it at home or carry it around and risk losing it.
• Better security. If you hide your diary under the mattress, anyone can find and read it. With a blog, you can secure it with a password so that only you can access it.
• You don’t run out of space. With a normal diary, you are limited by the number of pages on it. If you want to write more, you have to get another journal or attach additional pages.

#2. Others can benefit from your experiences

If you decide to make your blog public, other people going through the same problems can benefit from your insight on how to handle difficult emotional problems. You can also get advice from people who have gone through a similar problem.

For example, the excellent stoic book, Meditations, by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD), started out as a diary and was not meant for publication. It has, however, impacted so many people over the centuries.

#3. You can blog anonymously

It is possible to do blogging completely anonymously. This is an advantage because, on one hand, you want others to benefit from your experiences but on the other hand, you don’t want to experience stigma that may come from sharing some personal information.

Such information could lead to repercussions in school or your workplace or could be embarrassing to your family or friends. If the thought of making your blog public is nerve-racking, there are ways you can blog anonymously and maintain your privacy.

7. You Can Use Blogging to Accelerate Learning and Boost Memory

Higher intelligence is not necessarily something you’re born with or genetically predisposed toward. In fact, most instances of above-the-ordinary intelligences are usually acquired through superior learning techniques- James Morcan, Entrepreneur Quotes

Learning is one of the most important investments you can make in your life. However, for most people, learning is a chore and many only learn what they need to get by.

How would your life change if you could learn faster and remember more?

Learning, especially self-learning, has the potential to radically transform your life. You gain knowledge, experience, and skills that can open all kinds of doors.

However, to be a good learner, you need to learn in a way that is efficient and enjoyable.

One of the legacies of formal education is that you come out feeling dumb and inadequate especially if you do not meet the required grades. Self-learning, however, is enjoyable because it is largely driven by curiosity and passion. This can accelerate the rate at which you learn things.

How does blogging help accelerate learning?

There are many reasons why blogging is great for accelerated learning but a few important reasons are:

#1. Blogging facilitates the application of knowledge

One of the reasons why people stop learning after school is because they do not see how acquiring that knowledge will help them better their lives. With most formal learning in schools, theoretical knowledge is divorced from the practical application of knowledge.

You have probably forgotten 80% of what you learned in school because you do not use the knowledge you gained daily.

Blogging, on the other hand, integrates the application of knowledge. Many people start blogs to find solutions to their problems for example: get out of debt, fix a relationship or find meaning in life.

When you learn intending to apply what you learn to make your life better, not only are you motivated to learn but you also become creative in your learning.

#2. Blogging facilitates immersion

To have a successful blog, you need to have the best content on a particular topic. This forces you to constantly read and research your topic. You may need to:

• Hang out and ask questions in groups and forums
• Talk to industry specialists
• Read books, research papers, other blog posts.
• Watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts
• Experiment and test things yourself

When you are immersed in a niche, you can get expert-level knowledge on a topic within a relatively short period. Through blogging, you can learn and make connections in a way that is not possible with surface learning.

#3. Blogging facilitates learning from others

There are some things that you cannot learn from books or information that is already online. Such knowledge can also be found by interacting with people who are in your industry or niche. Many of them do not have the time to put down their knowledge in a blog post or a book.

The advantage of seeking such people out is that you get unique knowledge that is not available to others. You also get a chance to preserve their knowledge for posterity.

How do you get access to such people? In many cases, they will seek you out. When you blog about a certain topic, people with more experience than you will write back or comment to correct an error or give more context on a topic. You can use this chance to create a relationship with them.

8. Blogging Will Help You Develop Your Capacity for Critical Thinking

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. – David McCullough, Entrepreneur Quotes

If you find that you are constantly making wrong decisions in your life or your business, perhaps it is time that you change how you make your decisions. Developing critical thinking skills can help you with this.

Critical thinking helps you make better decisions by enabling you to process information in an orderly and systematic way.

Why is critical thinking important?

There are many reasons why you should seek to improve your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking helps you to:

• Become an expert problem solver by learning how to get to the root cause of problems. Solving your problems and those of other people is a critical ingredient for success in life.
• Become an independent thinker by enabling you to avoid the traps of group-think. You can easily be influenced wrongly or get conned if you outsource your thinking to others. If you don’t trust yourself to make correct decisions, then train yourself on how to make good decisions.
• Overcome personal biases so that you can make better decisions.
• Overcome the fear of making decisions because you know that you have a solid framework for making good decisions.

Critical thinking, just like any other skill, gets better the more you practice it. Blogging can help you train your brain to think clearly.

How does blogging help you become a better thinker?

There are many ways that blogging can help you improve on your critical thinking skills but some of the most obvious are:

#1. Blogging helps you to learn how to collect and evaluate data

The ability to collect reliable data is critical to good decision-making. In this age of fake information and information overload, being able to quickly find data but also discriminate useful data from fluff can give you an edge over many people.

Wrong information is the foundation of wrong decision-making.

#2. Blogging helps you to organize and digest your thoughts and ideas

Ideas are plenty but not everyone can take those ideas and use them to create a better life for themselves and others.  Thoughts and ideas tend to be fleeting, jumbled up, and contradictory. To make good use of these ideas, you need to capture, organize and think deeply about them.

Blogging forces you to untangle diverse and contradictory ideas and helps you fit them within an existing framework. People make better sense of new ideas if they are nested within what they already know.

#3. Blogging can help you overcome your biases

Overcoming biases is critical to good decision-making because biases will lead you to discount useful information that does not fit into your narrative. Discounting valuable, helpful, and factual information in decision-making is just as bad as having the wrong information.

Blogging can help you look at issues from all sides of the argument and it trains you on how to play the devil’s advocate. Blogging also facilitates instant feedback through comments or email thus enabling you to benefit from a diverse range of views.

9. Blogging Will Help You Unlock Your Creative Powers

The creative adult is the child who has survived. – Julian F. Fleron, Entrepreneur Quotes

Creativity plays an important role in our well-being and our ability to have an impact on the world.

Why is creativity important?

Creativity has some pretty life-changing benefits including:

• It enables you to come up with innovative solutions to problems.  When you think creatively, you can make connections between different ideas and ways of thinking. This enables you to take advantage of opportunities that others are unable to see.
• It will keep you engaged in your work.  Engaging in creative activities puts you into a state of flow. This is a meditative state where you are so engaged in your activity that time passes very quickly. This can help you boost your level of happiness.
• It will help you come up with original work in art, music, or writing. You can make a good living by selling your creative works. If you are perennially broke, discover how to develop a creative activity and make money from it.

Are you a creative person? The surprising truth

We tend to think of creativity as something fixed at birth. You are either born with it or not. But everyone is born with some level of creativity -you just have to look at young kids at play.

In 1968, George Land and Beth Jarman conducted a research study to test the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from three to five years old. They found that 98% of them had genius-level creativity. When he re-tested the children at 15 years, only 12% had genius-level creativity. When the same test was administered to adults, only 2% had genius-level creativity.

What this research suggests is that we are born with high levels of creativity but lose it over time. As we grow older as we mold ourselves to fit in with others and avoid doing things that make us seem different. As a result, we don’t get a chance to exercise our creativity.

But we can regain our creativity and develop it even further. And blogging can help with this.

How can blogging help you to become more creative?

Blogging can help you unlock your inner genius in the following ways.

#1. Blogging enables you to express different creative styles.

Blogging allows you to express your creativity in different ways to add value to other people’s lives.

The activities associated with blogging such as writing, graphic design, web design, photo-editing, or coding tap into different creative centers of the brain, enabling you to engage different thought processes.

#2. Blogging facilitates the capture and storage of ideas

How many brilliant ideas have you forgotten over the years? How successful could you be if you could harness all of them?

So many great ideas are lost because people wrongly trust their ability to remember them. The best use of your brain is to use it as a tool for processing information rather than a tool for storing information.

If you blog, you are motivated to capture all the great ideas in your field so that you find material to use in your blog.

#3. Blogging facilitates cross-pollination of ideas

Blogging will help you tap great ideas from other people. When you blog, you become like a magnet for people who are interested in the topics you are blogging about. These people can be a great source of ideas. When you combine your ideas and theirs, you come up with even better ideas.

Often, the most creative people are those who ‘steal’ ideas from others and improve on them.

10. Blogging Will Make You a Better Communicator

Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life. –Brian Tracy, Entrepreneur Quotes

We are living in a time where it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out and be heard. Learning how to communicate is fast becoming a super-power that you can use to set yourself apart.

Why is becoming a good communicator important?

• It can make you seem smarter than you really are. Many people seem smart simply because they can articulate their views clearly. If you feel that you are not as smart as others, you can give yourself an edge by training yourself to become a better communicator.
• It will help you to influence others. People need to be persuaded into greatness. If you can be the one to guide them on their journey to achieving their dreams, you can open many opportunities for yourself as well.
• It will help you open doors in your professional and personal life. People are in great need of people who can persuade and influence others.

If you are not born with a natural talent for communication, the good news is that it can be learned just like any other skill.

Writing is the foundation of good communication

When you think about it, all good communication begins with good writing. The greatest speeches in history, the most engaging TV shows and movies, and the top hit songs were all first written down. Learning how to write well can train you to think better and talk better.

How does blogging make you a better communicator?

If good writing is the foundation of good communication, regular blogging allows you to practice writing. But blogging does much more than teach you how to write.

#1. It teaches you how to attract attention

Blogging teaches you how to attract attention through crafting attention-grabbing headlines. The headline will determine whether people will read your blog post. In fact, 59% of people share headlines without reading the content (Blogging Statistics). If you can grab people’s attention, you have a chance of getting heard.

#2. It teaches you how to be persuasive

To blog is to sell. You are either selling your ideas and causes that are dear to you or you are selling products and services. If you want to be a successful blogger, you have to become good at persuasion.

Blogging will teach you how to use various powerful persuasive techniques such as:

• Storytelling
• Social proof
• Appeals to emotion

#3. It teaches you how to present your information clearly

To be a good blogger, you have to keep practicing how to present information in a clear and engaging way. If you don’t do this, many of your visitors will leave your site without reading your content, even if you have valuable information.

Blogging will teach you various tricks to present your information clearly such as:

• Formatting your work to enable easy scanning of your writing.
• Using a writing style that most people find easy to understand.
• Using correct grammar.

11. Blogging Will Help You Acquire Crucial Life Skills

What you get by reaching your goals is not nearly as important as what you become by reaching them. – Zig Ziglar, Entrepreneur Quotes

One of the best ways to find out who you are is to undertake a challenging goal. It takes a storm to reveal our real strengths and weaknesses.

Your level of strength depends on whether you consistently take action to strengthen yourself. If you want a strong body, you have to consistently hit the gym. If you want a strong spirit, you need to consistently undertake challenges.

Not taught at school

Entrepreneurship is a school of hard knocks and the lessons it teaches can only be found by getting in the game. Making money through blogging, like most other entrepreneurial activities, is a challenging task.

However, compared to other entrepreneurship opportunities, blogging is one of the most beginner-friendly ways to get into entrepreneurship. Much like training wheels, it can help ease you into the challenging world of entrepreneurship.

The most important life skills you get from blogging

The great thing about attempting to make money through blogging is that you not only sow the seeds of long-term wealth but you also sow the seed of a strong resilient spirit. You become a different person because of the life skills you pick up. Some of the most important life skills you get are:

#1. Learning to be consistent and self-disciplined

Consistency is probably one of the important indicators of whether a blog will be successful or not.

To earn good money from blogging, you need a critical mass of content but this requires that you have the self-discipline to sit down and write every day, especially on those days when you don’t feel inspired to write.

Blogging every day is like exercising every day. It requires commitment. The more you blog, the better you get at finding strategies to motivate yourself to keep writing.

#2. Learn delayed gratification

The Stanford marshmallow experiment conducted in the 1960s showed that people who were able to delay gratification as children become successful as adults. But delayed gratification is a learnable skill ^[9].

It can take a while before you start seeing results from blogging and during this time, you need to put in the work hoping that you will reap the rewards of your effort in the future.  You need to be willing to forgo gratification now so that you can have a greater reward in the future, even in the face of uncertainty.

#3. Learning how to fail

The failure rate in blogging can be quite high and the people who manage to create successful blogs have had to push through failure. The path to success is through failure so it is important to learn how to fail. Some of the lessons you can learn from failure in blogging are:

• How to plan ahead because success is not guaranteed. You need to know what you are going to do when you fail.
• How to pivot. When you get into blogging, you learn so many other interesting paths that you can take. What you start with is not what you will end with.

Check out my article on dealing with failure in blogging for more on this topic.

12. Blogging Can Help You Meet Like-Minded People

In the face of a true friend, a man sees as it were, a second self. – Cicero, Entrepreneur Quotes

Finding friends who understand and appreciate you can be difficult especially if you are not interested in mainstream interests and hobbies. You may feel like you don’t fit in and this can lead to feelings of isolation.

Why you have no friends

Friendships, whether personal or professional, are important for success and happiness in life. When you have no friends, it could be because:

• You are surrounded by people who don’t  share your values making it difficult for them to understand you
• You are surrounded by people who don’t share your interests and passions
• You are in a small town where the probability of meeting someone like you is difficult

Why blogging is great for making friends

Blogging has several advantages when it comes to meeting and making friends. With blogging;

#1. You increase the probability of meeting someone with similar interests

There are several reasons why blogging can increase the chances of meeting someone similar to you.

• Since you get readers from all over the world, you increase the probability of meeting people who share similar interests to you. A blog widens the net, so to speak.
• When you share ideas online, you are more likely to be yourself and say what you truly think and feel. This increases the possibility of meeting people who share your thoughts.

#2. It is easier to approach people and get approached

Meeting people online has several advantages, for example:

• It takes the awkwardness out of those first encounters since rejection online, for many people, may not be as hurtful as in person.
• You can control the level of engagement. For example, you can start by sending each other emails and if you click, you can progress to Skype or zoom calls and then finally face-to-face meetings. Throughout this process, you can weed out people who would not fit in your life, and by the time you meet, you can be comfortable in each other’s company.

#3. You benefit from the halo effect

If you offer helpful and valuable content through your blog, people are more likely to view you in a positive light. You don’t have to work too hard to sell yourself. This can be an advantage in several ways:

• When you make contact with people who have interacted with your work, they are more likely to be amiable and helpful.
• People are more likely to recommend you to other people they know because they can gauge what kind of person you are from what you write.

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13. Blogging Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. – James Clear, Entrepreneur Quotes

Being able to set and achieve your goals is critical to your success in life. However, it can be quite difficult to stick to your goals for various reasons.

Blogging can be quite effective in helping you stick to your goals and many bloggers have harnessed the power of blogging to do so.

A good example is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents. She initially started her blog in 2012 to document her progress in paying off $38,000 in student loan debt. Five years after starting her blog, she was making over $139,000 a month from her blog ^[10]. (Check blogger income reports for more)

So, if you are having trouble sticking to your goals, choose one goal (such as paying off debt, losing weight, starting a business, or exercising) and start a blog about it.

Why is blogging a great tool for helping you achieve your goals?

The reason why blogging is so effective at helping you achieve your goals is that it helps you set systems and environments that will support the achievement of your goals. For example:

#1. It helps you to track your progress and document your journey

One of the reasons why people quit their goals is because they do not look back to see how much progress they have made. Progress, no matter how small, can be quite motivating. There are also several other things you can document such as:

• Challenges and problems encountered
• What worked and what didn’t work
• Major lessons learned

Documenting these will increase your chances of success because you can learn from your mistakes.

#2.  It provides positive peer pressure through accountability partners

One of the most powerful methods to ensure that you follow through with your goals is to find accountability partners. This strategy leverages the power of positive peer pressure to motivate you to stick to your goals.

If you don’t have access to accountability partners, you can use blogging to find them. When you provide regular progress reports in your blog, people naturally get invested in your journey.

This can provide that extra pressure to keep making progress on your goals because you don’t want to let your audience down.

#3. You can build a community of people with the same goals

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together– African Proverb, Entrepreneur Quotes

When other people look at your journey and see the challenges as well as the successes, they may get inspired to start a journey of their own.

This can help you build a community of people pursuing the same goals. This can be very helpful in motivating you and others to stick to goals.

#4. You can tap into the wisdom of experts

A blog can help you connect to people who are either experts or people who have successfully overcome the same challenges you are trying to overcome. You can tap into their knowledge and skills to ensure that you are successful in your quest.

Many of the people who identify with your journey will be glad to offer their advice for free. Others would have charged you hundreds if not thousands of dollars for this advice.

Final Thoughts

There is still time to take control of your life and point it in the right direction. Hopefully starting a blog can give you an additional tool in your arsenal that you can use to craft a strategy that you can use to get unstuck.

Investing your personal development is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. The journey of self-transformation is not easy but the rewards are huge.