The Biggest Challenges You Will Face as a Blogger
Blogging has its ups and downs, just like anything worth doing. But what are the biggest challenges you are likely to face when starting out on your own blogging journey?
Below, we’ll look at the biggest challenges I’ve faced on my road as a blogger.
#1 Self doubt
I wish I could say that self doubt was entirely out of place in the blogging journey. But in reality, there are many good reasons to feel it. After all, there are seemingly countless blogs out there, and very few (statistically) make it as a successful blog. At times it can be very overwhelming to stare all this down and face the blank page to write your first post.
How to reframe it
There are many reasons to blog. The important thing is to choose your motivation. If you set clear goals for yourself, you can much more easily carve out your own niche. The vast world of blogging may seem overwhelming at first, but if you break it down into manageable pieces, you can conquer it one-by-one.
#2 Prioritization
I would argue that prioritization is the main key to a web entrepreneur’s success. You need to be decisive in how you prioritize your tasks. But in reality, with so many things involved with running a successful blog, prioritization is a huge challenge.
What do I prioritize on my content calendar?
Do I go to this event, or stay home?
Which marketing tools to I spend money on, and which do I go without?
Do I focus my efforts on growing an audience or monetization?
These are the challenges in prioritization that you face every single day as a web entrepreneur, and they only get worse as your blog grows and you get more successful.
How to reframe it
Every day, and at the start of every project, ask yourself what is most important. Focus on that one or two things at the expense of all others, and you’ll find things quickly fall into place.
#3 Negative feedback
You cannot do anything online or in public, or create anything that gets eyes and ears without also getting some negative feedback. The hardest part can be when receiving this feedback is whether or not to listen to it.
Because of the way we are wired, negative feedback can hit us disproportionately, meaning no matter the positive feedback we get, we listen to the negative feedback more.
This fear of what people will say and think is the culprit to many blogger’s ideas, keeping them from ever hitting that publish button.
How to reframe it
Take negative feedback as a positive sign. If people take the time to post your blog on Reddit or social media, it means it made an impact on them, even if what they are saying is mean or hurtful.
I’ve had massive amounts of comments in the past on blogs that were largely negative, but was able to reframe it as a positive: it meant my blog was getting traction!
Sometimes negative feedback is hurtful, sometimes it is constructive. It takes time to differentiate between the two but don’t feel like you need to drop everything you are doing and make a change because of an anonymous comment on your blog.
#4 Competition
When starting out on your blogging journey, you probably won’t think about your competition much. Indeed, many would-be-competitors are more like mentors in your mind as you read their work and ponder how to get started on your own.
Eventually, however, you will realize that there is healthy competition in your niche. While that’s a good thing (it means you are in a good niche), it can be painful to face down competitors day-in-and-day-out especially when they win and you lose.
How to reframe it
Let competitors do what they do, and focus on what you do. At the end of the day, blogging – and any other creative activity on the web – is not a zero-sum game. There can be multiple winners and if you are one of the strong players in your niche, that’s something to be proud of regardless of who wins what and where.
#5 Explaining what you do
This point is largely for those who end up blogging for a living, but one of the biggest challenges in blogging is explaining what you do to other people. For whatever reason, blogging can have a negative connotation, and people don’t always realize that publishing to the web is a big business worth well over $100 billion dollars.
For that reason, it can be a challenge to explain what it is that you do. Although when you start out blogging might be as simple as writing about your ideas and hitting the publish button, eventually it gets a lot more involved and complicated than that.
You’ll wear many hats during your career as a blogger, and finding a way to explain all of those things at a party can feel daunting. I’ve heard this from many, many people in the blogging community so if you feel this way don’t feel like you’re somehow weird. It seems to be the norm.
How to reframe it
Honestly, the best thing to do is just be grateful that you are a pioneer in a relatively new field, and leave it at that. What you say you do doesn’t actually matter much, and it’s better to not be in that race of saying who has the bigger title.
Highlight what you like best about what you do and resist the urge to go on and on about this month’s content plan (regardless of how great it is).
Blogging is a fantastic world, and can be a lot of fun. But like anything worth doing, it comes with its fair share of challenges. The trick is just how you deal with those challenges and stay motivated to be the best blogger (or whatever you call yourself) you can be!
