On the surface, blogging seems like an amazing career. There’s the benefit of being your own boss while also doing something you love. You’re being creative, and you never have to leave the house if you don’t want to! But let’s delve deeper into the practicalities of blogging as a career choice.
It Is More Than Writing Skills
While writing skills are crucial, we have to remember that going into a career as a blogger relies on our abilities to network, which means we may work with external agencies. If you are trying to promote your own blog, and you need extra support, you will have to work with a digital agency for a while. Agencies such as unrulyagency.com work with influencers to make sure that their brand goes far and wide. If you genuinely want to make a career as a blogger, it’s not just about promoting your own blog, but it is about the constant ability to self-promote. This is why many high-level bloggers work with a digital agency. The very act of maintaining your own blog can be overwhelming if you are trying to create a product that goes far. You can certainly take inspiration and monetize your blog through affiliate marketing and other income streams, such as an online shop, but writing skills are where we all need to begin.
Diversifying Your Blogging Skills
When we are working as a blogger, and we have our own product to promote, we can work harder diversifying our income streams, but the reality is if we want to earn a regular living from doing it, we’ve got to work in other areas. A blog, when successful, is at best a part-time income. When you start to amass millions of followers, it will become your full-time profession, but initially, it’s about making sure that you are able to blog as a job. This means you might want to work with blogger outreach agencies and trawl websites for guest post opportunities. Many people go through numerous freelance websites to find jobs. The important thing to remember is that when you are focused on being a blogger, you still need to diversify your efforts. This means you will end up writing about things that you don’t necessarily care about. However, this is integral to maintaining a career as a blogger and sharpens your skills.
The Importance of Marketing Skills
The great thing is if you start out as a blogger, you are naturally adding more strings to your bow. Skills-wise, you are going to learn how to optimize your website for SEO, get involved in photography, website design, and possibly some coding. These are all things that you can use to boost your blog but also puts you in a very strong position to work in marketing. If you just want to promote your blog, you can take advantage of the many resources out there, such as singlegrain.com that provide SEO tactics. Being a blogger is about adapting to the wide variety of niches and changes, making you a prime candidate for work within a digital agency.
Is Blogging a Viable Career Over the Next Few Decades?
Many people have concerns over the future of blogging, but the next couple of decades could prove lucrative for many bloggers. Whether it’s people who are running their own blog but also freelance and work with agencies or those who are setting up a blog for themselves as a side hustle, there are many niches that demand quality content writers. And on a basic level, the consumption of content has increased over the last few years, especially during the pandemic. For it to be a viable career, you have to understand that the work is out there, but you also need to bear in mind if it is something that you can do. For example, it is, in many ways, being like a student. You have to thrive on your own initiative and learn to write, but you also need to promote yourself, learn how to create amazing content at short notice, and stay productive during stressful times.
It can be a lucrative career, but for the starter blogger, it is vital to realize that in order to learn the skills, but also make money from doing it, you have to start small. It doesn’t happen overnight. The best place to begin is to start your own blog because it will show you the skills you need to improve, but it’s the best way for you to find your authentic writer’s voice.