What’s It Like Blogging for 6 Months?

Writer’s block. Writer’s high. That’s what blogging for 6 months was like.

It was full of questions marks, full of excitements, and yet full of sleepless nights.

You often find yourself thinking about your blog… as you attempt to list them in your growing list of logs.

And while you journey down another month, your achievements get unveiled one by one.

“You have to keep going,” you cheer yourself.

“We can do it,” so does everybody else.

It’s nice to be in a community who understands, because blogging, to some, may seem nonsense.

And as we journey down another month, here’s to us! And to our never-ending quest of going through the fuss.

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Blogging for 6 Months: The Update

Wow, it’s been over 6 months already! A lot has changed.

From one week to the next, the pandemic crisis has swept the news. Then came the stimulus package and now we’re heading towards an economy with great uncertainties.

And on the blogging front, my pageviews have taken a massive hit lately. I guess people are more intrigued by the news than personal finance blogs.

Understandable.

Today, I will share with you my second quarter blogging progress. This is part of my Blogging Adventure Quarterly Update.

You can also read my Quarter 1 here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Don’t Give Up

After blogging consecutively for more than 6 months, I find that the first three months were the toughest.

If you’re a brand-new blogger who never dipped your toe in building contents or creating a website, you’ll know what I mean when I say the process could be overwhelming.

As a new blogger, you have to figure everything out from the technical side of running a blog to getting a groove on the whole writing process.

But then, something magical happens after the initial 3 months. You become operational.

This is where you’ll gain momentum and develop a routine for getting things done. You’ll automatically know how to write a blog post, when to publish, and which audience you want to promote to.

Then as time goes by, things can get normalized as you develop a process that works for you. From there on, it’ll all be about staying consistent, having endurance, and just not giving up.

How to Stay Motivated

It’s so easy to lose focus and motivation at the beginning because our work is not directly rewarded.

It’s completely UNLIKE a job where you’re given a task and then you get a steady paycheck in return.

When it comes to blogging or starting your own business, you have to build everything from scratch and the process and can be arduous.

But to get through it, I find that having an INTRISIC REASON for why you started a blog to be rather useful.

For example, every time I look at my content library, I feel an overwhelming flood of joy because I’m building something that can benefit others and my daughter.

In fact, I always have my daughter in mind whenever I write a blog post. I just think of what might be good for her to read in the distant future, and it just gets me going.

If you can find your reason, then you’ll forget about all of the vanity figures like dollar sign, pageviews or followers, which can be incredible stressful and counterproductive.

I think having goals are good, but some goals can be self-inflicted pain when you forget to enjoy the process and think about the end game.

Of course, a lot of the stuff I’m writing here pertains to how I feel as well. This is why I’m documenting this so that I can look back and be like, wow, I came this far!

Blogging for 6 Months: The Wins and Fails

Wins are fun, but fails can be life lessons. They are both equally important!

In the past, I had a strong tendency to minimize my wins because I’d always focus on aiming for my next goals. This puts immense pressure on my mental health, and it’s obviously not healthy.

Having this blog is a great way to help change my mindset because I’m forced to evaluate both sides of the equation objectively by writing them down.

So here goes… let’s celebrate both the wins and fails of the past quarter.

Let’s start with the fails and save the best for last!

Documenting the Fails

1. I got a long list of to-dos but very little got done

I must be naïve, but I didn’t thought that blogging would be this much work.

You look at my website, and you go, “Yeah okay, cool contents.” But what you don’t see is a lot of background work.

So my first fail is that I haven’t been great at time management. In fact, I suffered from analysis paralysis and decision-making fatigue most of the time!

• I need to improve on my Pinterest, so I should really finish this course.

• But I also want to improve my SEO and blogging skills, and Moz and Ahrefs are offering free courses at this time, so I really want to take them both

• I want to write more contents, but I also want to make pins for my old blog posts

• And, I want to post my artwork on Ko-fi, but… <<insert lame excuse here>>

In between all of this, I have to juggle between taking care of Baby Bear and other priorities. I guess the challenge here is that I need more than 24 hours in a day.

Solution: Prioritize and stick with what’s important.

2. My safety stock of blog posts is depleting, and I haven’t replenished

So before I started this blog, I actually wrote about 20 blog posts but 50% of which were… pretty bad.

I did this to see if I can truly become a blogger, and once I felt that I could do it… I took the plunge.

At times, I would write 3 blog posts per week and other times none for several weeks, but the average has always been 1-2.

After I started this blog, I tried to keep up with my writing schedule.

But as I got more things on my plate, I couldn’t get myself to write.

I have many ideas, but between structuring a blog post to producing the actual content, it took a lot of my brain power.

So as days go by, I’m now down to just 5 blog posts of safety stocks left. This would last me a month in my current posting schedule.

My goal is to keep at least 3 months of safety stock. I thought with the confinement, I’d be more productive. But as it turns out, everything I do now is counterproductive.

I often suffer from writer’s block, even though I knew full well the topics I want to write about.

But then once I finished a blog post, I experience writer’s high. I love the feeling of producing a final product!

However, as someone who has never written so much in her life, writing consistently is difficult.

Solution: Improve time management by defining a writing schedule.

3. Social media is so addicting, I couldn’t stay away

I have to be honest; I’m not a fan of social media for personal use.

The main reason was because it sucks a lot of my time!

But with this blog, I kind of have to be on it a lot to engage with others and promote my contents.

In fact, I learned the most through connecting with other bloggers as we share tips and tricks.

But doing so also means that I have unconsciously spent more time chit-chatting than actually producing.

I think this has to change because Baby Bear is growing more and more frustrated with my using the phone. I also don’t like the fact that I’m ignoring Baby Bear sometimes.

Solution: I will set 2 hours max of phone usage per day.

4. I haven’t sent out a newsletter in months

I have to improve this, because I did set out to provide more useful resources via emails.

I’m grateful that no one has complained to me yet. But I’m really working on getting better at this.

Solution: Put this as a priority for May.

Continue reading in Part II for my 6 months blogging update

This isn’t over! Click here to continue reading about my wins and lessons learned in Part II.

Here’s a PIN