How to handle growth as a blogger

The Money Shed has been running since 2013 and what started as a humble little forum has grown into a brand which covers a blog and every form of social media going.

For a lot of people, they enjoy the journey of running a blog or other website but HATE the promotion side of it. The days of just writing content and putting it up on your site and then waiting for Google to send traffic your way has sadly gone the way of the dodo. I’m not saying you need to become a personal finance guru on TikTok and start doing silly dances to get traffic but being a part of a community like that is very important.

Now it’s all about building backlinks on other sites and promoting your content all over social media (sometimes free, sometimes paid). All this in itself can be a much large portion of what you do compared to just creating the content you want to create.

Of course the more you put out there the more you get exposed to people who don’t like what you do. This could come across in any number of forms from snarky Tweets through to emails from people angry about your latest blog post. Sadly you just have to take the rough with the smooth and learning to accept that you can’t please everyone all of the time is part of this journey.

It’s not all bad though because as your blog grows so will the opportunities. Hopefully, these are paid ones and not just companies offering you freebies in exchange for some kind of mention or blog post about then but the earlier you spot this sort of practice the better!

At times it can feel like you are spreading yourself quite thin and as you divide your time between creating new content and promoting it. For a lot of people, they will look at using freelance copywriters who can produce some of the content for them. This is a great solution for when you have a paid article to produce and you allocate some of that budget to a writer. It means you can spend more time pitching for other work or promoting your existing one.

Creating a sense of balance is also quite tricky the more popular your blog becomes. You might be trying to do this alongside a full time job or a busy family life and more often than not something ends up having to give.

In my own personal journey once I could see regular money coming in from my blog I decided to make the leap to going part time in my very sturdy job in Local Government and then about a year after that decided to hand my notice in and become self employed full time.

Becoming a ‘full-time Blogger‘ is often seen as the dream for a lot of bloggers and it’s promoted very heavily as something to aspire to on social media but the reality that it brings a lot of problems for some people. From cabin fever affecting your mental health through to living a life with irregular payments and a lot of invoice chasing, there’s no doubt that it’s not for everyone and shouldn’t be seen as some sort of holy grail to give you a creative outlet as sometimes the negatives can really outweigh the positives.

There’s no doubt blogging is a fun journey but just make sure you look both ways before deciding to give it a go!

Collaborative Post