The Very First Thing You Should Do Before Starting a Blog…

Go ahead and ask yourself…..WHY do you want to start a blog?

It may sound simple, or even a little silly – but it’s really the very FIRST thing you should do before starting a blog. Because your answer will decide which direction you go next.

Let me explain.

GET RICH QUICK…

Let me go ahead and say it and get it out of the way…..

If your ONLY reason for starting a blog is to ‘get rich’…… forget it. You will most likely fail.

You have to be passionate about your writing, and really, truly LOVE your topic – or it will just turn into another job.

Blogging is playing the long game.

It will take days, months, maybe even years … before you see your very first penny. With my blog, it took well over a year before I saw my very first check from Google – and that was only for $100.

I don’t know about you, but $100 a year will not pay my bills. So don’t go quitting your job and start blogging just so you can make a lot of money. It just ain’t gonna happen!

It takes some serious work, time, and commitment to make a blog profitable. And if your only reason is to make money, you’ll probably give up long before that happens.

So just get this out of your system right now.

JOURNAL…

But maybe you want to keep an online journal, kind of like a diary, because you really love to write.

Or maybe you just want to create a place for your book club or community band to keep up with current events – then great! By all means do that!

In this case, any of the free blogging platforms will work fine. Platforms like blogger.com, or wordpress.com.

They are pretty easy to set up, don’t cost a thing, and are accessible anywhere you have internet, and are editable on virtually any device.

I still have a personal blog on blogger, just for keeping notes, inspirations, things like that.

These blogs can be made private too, so no one can see them unless you give the ok.

TO HELP OTHERS…

But if your reason for starting a blog is genuinely just to share – whether that be something you’re really good at, or something that you know will help others….

Then you most definitely want to start a self-hosted blog that uses WordPress.

A self-hosted blog is where you choose your own hosting company and then install WordPress yourself. No worries – it’s not that hard and I’ll teach you how.

This setup will give you the most freedom, the most options, and allow you to safely grow a blog to accommodate potentially tens of thousands of visitors every single day.

And as an added bonus – if you blog happens to really take off and grow, this setup is very easy to monetize allowing you to potentially start earning an income from your blog, like I did.

I’ll go into more detail with all of these reasons as I progress throughout this blog.

Hope you stay with me. There’s lots more to come.