11 Harsh Reality Checks You’ll Encounter as a Blogger

You’ve just completed a course or research on what starting a blog entails and are ready to get started. You have a plan and goals you intend to achieve in your new blogging venture.

But what you haven’t really braced yourself for is the challenges that you’ll face in your blogging journey. With that in mind, I want to share with you 11 challenges that you’re bound to come across over the next few months or years while blogging.

Everything you’re about to read is from my personal experience. If you’re lucky, things might be a little bit easier for you but harder if your life is jinxed like mine!

My hope is that the knowledge I’m about to share will help you avoid some or easily overcome these challenges.

1. Coming Up With Unique Content Is Harder Than It May Seem

Depending on how other bloggers have covered your niche, coming up with original ideas that’ll stand out from the rest can be tough.

For instance, this blog is mainly about blogging. There are thousands if not millions of bloggers out there who write about this niche. Whatever topic that I may write about has already been written many times.

What you’ll have to do in this case, is strive to write better than everyone else out there. To compete you’ll have to be consistent in regards to quality and relevance.

The following niches/topics are some of the most competitive on the internet. You have to go ‘several extra miles’ to be able to stand out from the competition.

• Personal finance
• Major sports eg. football, basketball, etc
• Digital marketing
• Travel
• Blogging
• Cooking
• Photography
• Fashion
• Cryptocurrency
• Pets

Those are just a few examples of competitive niches but it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in them. You could find a sub-niche within these niches and focus on them to have a realistic chance at making a profitable blogging career.

2. The Technical Side of Blogging Can Be a Headache

Whether you’re tech-savvy or not doesn’t matter. You can easily obsess over how your site looks. The harsh truth is that you’ll most likely never be satisfied with how your site looks.

For this reason, you’ll find yourself tweaking away on the appearance of your site even when it looks perfect to your audience.

Just stop it and focus on your writing! All your audience cares about is if they’re able to read your content without any distractions.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” as a wise man or woman once said. Go for the simplest theme you can find, tweak it a bit, and leave it at that.

You have no idea how many hours you may end up wasting tweaking things that don’t matter at all. Hours that could’ve been better spent writing content.

Also, constant tweaking especially involving code increases the probability of breaking your site. A broken site means both lost time and losing some traffic.

Always strive to stick to one look no matter how tempting the urge to change something gets. Another solution to this challenge is setting aside a particular day in a month to work on your website’s design.

This approach ensures you don’t waste valuable time that you’d have rather used to write and promote your content.

3. Blogging Is a Real Job With No Pay at First

Success isn’t a guarantee in blogging especially if done part-time. You’ll have to put in many hours for months or even a couple of years before you can start seeing progress or profits.

If you have a day job and intend to pursue blogging as a career—you have to find the right balance to ensure you don’t get burnt out and grow your blog at a steady pace.

You’ll have to come up with a working schedule that you can follow to have fresh content on your blog as consistently as possible.

Remember, your blog will most likely be unable to pay your bills in the initial stages. In fact, it’ll even be an additional expense that’ll eat into your monthly budget.

Having a strict schedule that’ll allow you to build your blog will ensure it starts becoming profitable as soon as possible especially if your plan is to transition into blogging full-time.

4. Blogging Is a Lonely Venture

If you value human interaction, brace yourself! You’ll spend hours per day working alone without talking to a soul when working on your blog.

Blogging is an indoor job – if you aren’t careful, you may easily find yourself working for days or weeks without talking to or interacting with anyone. It happens to me all the time. I may go for up to a month without physically meeting anyone.

To counter this problem, I’m planning to have one day per week when I can carry my laptop to a different location like a friend’s house, the library, or a cafe and work from there for a few hours.

You can also do the same. Regardless of what some people may say, humans are social beings and we need to meet up physically and talk once in a while.

5. You May Go for Months With Zero Traffic

Imagine putting in hundreds of hours into something and no one takes notice or gives you credit for it. Yes! That’s normal when you’re starting out as a blogger.

It took 7 months for the first real visitor to stumble upon and read a post on my first blog. And even when I started getting multiple visitors it was just two or three per day for around two months.

I must admit, I temporarily gave up on blogging during this period. I still don’t understand where I got the spirit but I kept pushing on until I could finally see hundreds of visitors land on my blog each day.

I’m still waiting for the numbers to hit at least five hundred or a thousand per day as I’m writing this post.

Resilience is the most essential virtue in this business. You’ll have to grind it out for months before you see the smallest signs of progress.

6. Writer’s Block Is a Real Thing and It Happens All the Time

Most blogging niches need some level of creativity to keep on churning out great content. It becomes harder to produce many posts if you’re working on a narrowed-down niche.

For this reason, you’ll often find yourself stuck when trying to come up with fresh posts. You have to come up with an effective strategy to generate ideas as regularly as you can.

My recommendation would be to set up some time within a day or an entire day every week dedicated to coming up with content ideas.

Having ideation as part of your schedule ensures you’ll always have something up your sleeve to keep your audience engaged. Remember more posts mean more traffic, and more traffic almost always translates to profit.

7. Making Money Takes Time—a Long Time

To make money in the blogging industry, you need significant traffic—the larger your engaged audience, the higher the earning potential.

So don’t expect much in the first year. You have to work on building a huge audience first.

The easiest ways to monetize your blog include display ads and affiliate marketing.

Display ad income depends on both traffic and the ad network you chose. For instance, Mediavine will in most cases earn you more than Google Adsense.

I’m currently on Adsense and my goal is to one day to get accepted into the Mediavine program for this blog. I need to hit the 50,000 sessions per month milestone over the next few years first.

Affiliate marketing can be lucrative if you have a loyal audience regardless of how small it is. In this case, making thousands of dollars with a few hundred visitors per day could be a real thing.

You need to focus on content creation and growing your traffic before you can start thinking of making money. Keep grinding and you’ll eventually start reaping the rewards.

8. Not Everyone Who Starts Blogging Will Make Money

At any point in time, there’s always someone who’s starting a blog with the goal of making money. But the ugly truth is that only a small percentage of these people will ever make a buck as bloggers.

Blogging is competitive and you must be in the very best shape possible in terms of content to be able to stand out and end up with a check every single month.

Hard work is the basic requirement for anyone to become a successful blogger. Besides that, you have to be smart, consistent, adaptable to changes, and have an element of luck to have an edge over your competition.

9. Finding the Motivation to Write Is Hard Sometimes

It happens to me all the time and I’m sure you’ll have to face it in your blogging journey. You wake up knowing that you have the whole day in front of you to write a post or two – but before you know it, a week or two have passed without writing a thing!

This problem is common in the initial stages of blogging where you’re constantly facing new challenges and feel like you aren’t making any progress in regard to traffic.

It becomes a bit easier when people are reading your posts and giving you feedback but it takes time to get to this point. If you’re lucky, you’ll be making some extra cash at some point – this is the best motivation to keep you going.

But it all takes time—you have no option but to utilize your intrinsic motivation in your early days as a blogger. There’s no other way around it!

10. Being Consistent Is Hard

All the challenges that I have mentioned above make it harder to create new content. As a result, finding a consistent rhythm in your writing becomes tough but not impossible.

Writing one quality post is already a challenge by itself—coming up with a fresh one every other day is even harder. You really have to push yourself to be able to find a consistent rhythm.

My advice is to take a little pressure off yourself and work on 2 or 3 posts per week. You don’t have to write every day. Weekly posting is also a form of consistency.

Work with a schedule that’s best for you. It could be daily, weekly, or even monthly. Sticking to regular posting is the best thing you can do whether you decide to post daily or monthly.

11. You Might Suffer From Imposter Syndrome

This problem depends on your personality. If you’re 100 percent confident in yourself, you don’t have to worry about Imposter Syndrome being an issue.

However, if you’re like me you may find yourself doubting your work—and wondering whether your work is really good enough, or whether you deserve to have a say in a given topic.

For instance, this blog is about blogging and I try to teach my readers about the business by sharing my knowledge and experience. Truth is, I haven’t made significant success yet to consider myself an authority in the field.

These thoughts make me sometimes wonder whether I’m in a position to help anyone trying to get into the industry (I’m sure I’ve exhibited more than one symptom of imposter syndrome already).

Nevertheless, I’ve come to understand that all these concerns don’t matter thanks to the feedback that I receive from most of my readers—including you hopefully.

My confidence is growing by the day, and I know that’ll be the case with you if you haven’t started out yet or are just getting started.

How Do You Overcome All These Blogging Challenges?

I must admit I still struggle with most if not all of the issues I’ve mentioned above. But I’m slowly finding out that it gets better in time.

Reading and watching the experiences of other bloggers is a good way to cope with these challenges. But you have to take it with a grain of salt—people are diverse and some are better at dealing with certain issues than others.

Being resilient and hardworking despite the challenges is the only way to survive the harsh realities of the blogging business.

Also, remember that experience is the best teacher in these instances. Keep your head up and keep grinding. It gets better in time!