How often do you tell yourself that you will never have a successful blog?
As often as you say you are wasting your time blogging? Or that you don’t have the advantages other people have and that’s why their blog flourishes? Maybe you tell yourself that you will never make any money from your blog because you aren’t good enough.
I tell myself those things. A lot. I second-guess my decision to try and maintain a blog while I work a full-time job way more than I should.
Usually, I start that negative self-talk when I’m struggling to work on my blog and I start hearing people throw out statements like “you make time for the things that are important to you” about making time for blogging. How helpful is this when a big chunk of your day belongs to your employer?
And why do people try to use guilt to motivate you? Doesn’t work for me. Does it work for you?
I mean, there are things that are true about blogging while working a full-time job.
You do have to devote time to working on it, but you don’t have as much time as other bloggers. And you most likely won’t be able to do all the things others do for blogging.
But does that mean we shouldn’t try to reach for a dream we have about making an income from our blogs?
Absolutely NO!
When you don’t have the time you’ll have to be more focused, but that’s not a bad thing. Focusing helps you get things done.
There are a few things you can do to help you focus on your blog:
- Find out what works best. We’ll need to pay attention to what works best for us and concentrate on that. It might take some experimenting. Whether it’s what platform helps us bring in the best traffic, what sources we use to help us write, or how often we send out a newsletter because our time is limited, we need to spend the time on what gives us the best results.
- Work smarter, not harder. It can feel like we are giving up some control, but by embracing tools or hiring a virtual assistant that can handle some of our blogging tasks we can free up time that would be better spent doing what we do best on our blog.
- Perfect is over stated. Spending time going over and over something trying to get it perfect isn’t a very productive use of our limited time. The reality is that only one who cares about being perfect is us. It’s better to get your work out there to help your followers. You can always go back and to fix something later.
- Let go of some things. We hate to hear this, but it’s true. Having a blog it’s just like having a second job that means we’re going to have to set time to work on it. So we have to find the time. For many of us, that means something is going to have to go. For some people, it might be having less sleep(Trust me! I am not one of those people!). For other people, it might mean going out with friends with less often. For other people it might be not going places on the weekend so that you have time to blog.
- Stop the comparison. Come on, you know you do this. You look at where other bloggers are, what they’ve accomplished, and how much income they’re making and start comparing your blog journey with theirs. DON’T. It’s all apples to oranges. They are not you. Their life is not yours. They have different resources , different skills.
Just because you don’t have the perfect blogging environment doesn’t mean you won’t succeed. It might take you a little longer, but it will be worth it.