So month 2 of my blogging journey is in the books. So how did it go?
Well, this fabulous article got featured on the front page of the New York Times, which caused over 100,000 visitors to swarm my website and caused it to crash and forced me to upgrade my hosting to a dedicated server… oh wait… what?… We’re talking about what ACTUALLY happened and not just in my dreams?
Sorry, I got a little excited there.
My Month 2 Recap
In reality, I guess I can’t say anything out of the ordinary occurred in month 2. Traffic was up, which is a good sign. But the bar was set pretty low from month 1…
I did not publish as many articles as I wanted to. The first half of the month was fairly unproductive in terms of content production. I think I was preoccupied with research and trying to figure out how to move forward with the blog.
I ended up publishing 3 new posts (not including Centsible Report 01):
Respondent Review [2019]: Can You Make $60-100/hr With Your Opinion? Scam or Legit?
Grammarly Review [2019]: The Free Tool To Become a Better Writer
The 5 Best Ways to Sell a Used Car. Which one do I recommend?
I also slacked off on using Pinterest last month as well. Therefore, my Pinterest numbers were actually down from month 1. This month I am giving Tailwind a spin and seeing how it goes. Hopefully, I can bounce back and get more traffic from Pinterest.
I do have some interesting things going on in the background that might show up in my next Centsible Report, so stay tuned or sign up to be on my email list to stay up-to-date.
Shiny Object Syndrome
Overall, I’m still enjoying the blogging journey. Having fun interacting with others in Facebook groups, on Twitter, and even on Reddit. I’m even at the point where I can offer some help and advice to others just starting out as well (hope I’m not misleading them…).
One of the biggest issues these days is just finding the time to do everything. If you don’t know, I still work full-time and recently became a new dad, so as you can imagine I have my hands pretty full.
It doesn’t help that there are a lot of tools and strategies guided towards bloggers to help them advance in their journey. However, I think I’ve realized that a lot of this is detrimental to new bloggers and only distracts them.
This article at Entrepreneur magazine does a good job describes shiny object syndrome as it relates to entrepreneurs. In a nutshell, it’s characterized by chasing the next new “thing”, whether it be a tool, strategy, or even a new project. As a result, original projects are left unfinished or poorly executed.
Especially for me, with time being very limited, I’m always looking for something that can help me maximize my time. But chasing around all these ideas can sometimes leave you in a worse place than where you started.
I’ve heard it repeated several times by veteran bloggers that you really need to focus to move ahead. For me, I’ll be trying to make quality content creation my focus for the upcoming months.
How Starting a Blog is Like Learning to Manage Your Finances
That’s great, but I really came to see what you had to say about your analogy.
Alright, I’m getting there. I have a point to all of this, I promise.
So when you start a blog as a business or side hustle, you realize that there are a lot of aspects to it that you may not have realized before you started. A short list includes
- Website building – you’re not going to know what the heck you’re doing in the beginning
- Content creation – those blog posts ain’t gonna write themselves!
- Everything else besides content creation – read the Centsible Report 01 to get an idea of what’s involved in publishing a blog post
- Marketing and outreach – how do you think readers are going to find your blog?
- Email – ideally, you want to build an email subscriber list (or so I’m told)
- and more
With all these different areas to tackle, your attention gets pulled in various directions and sometimes it’s hard to focus on your main goal. That goal could be increasing traffic, monetization, or getting email leads… it’s different for everyone at different stages.
I think if there was one word I would use to describe what’s it like starting your first blog, that word would be
It’s definitely not easy, and I can understand why many people who start blogs quit within the first 6 months if they don’t see results. It’s a marathon and it’s a long grind, but you can only hope that the fruits of your labor will lead to a successful outcome.
At the same time, you can’t just rely on “hard work” to succeed. You need to constantly study and learn and UNDERSTAND what works and what doesn’t. Constantly test and experiment to find what strategies work for you. Everyone’s journey will be different.
How Does All This Relate to Managing Your Finances?
There’s a parallel to all of this with regards to learning how to manage your finances.
Unless you are already wealthy, when you first start getting serious with managing your finances, it’s easy to run into the same problem as starting a blog.
It’s part of the problem why many people avoid the subject entirely.
- They don’t want to know how much debt they have
- They don’t want to know they’re spending more than they make each month
- They don’t know how to invest
- They don’t want to know they have a negative net worth
Even if you do have a handle on your finances, you still need to deliberately figure out how you need to allocate the limited amount of funds you have each month. How much is going to go into debt, savings, retirement, entertainment, etc…?
This goes back to blogging, where you only have a limited amount of time to divide among various tasks. It’s nigh impossible to tackle them all at once. You have to prioritize which areas are important to you and your goals.
Also, with personal finance, you can’t just stick your head in the sand and hope everything will work itself out. Even if you manage to save money, it’s most likely not enough. You need to be investing it.
As I also mentioned with blogging, you need to study and learn about personal finance in order to succeed at it. Find what concepts and strategies resonate or make sense to you. One person’s method of saving and investing may or may not be the best method for you. Everyone’s journey will be different. But the most important thing is that you are WORKING on it and not just letting it pass you by.
Wrapping Up
I hope my analogy made sense… at least it did in my head. Essentially, time is your limited resource with blogging, while money is your limited resource with personal finance. You, as an individual, need to figure out how you want to allocate that resource to achieve your goals.
That’ll be it for this month. I have a topic I want to cover in a Centsible Report, but I’m not sure if it will be next month or not. I said in Centsible Report 01 I would probably try to recap blogging stats and income quarterly, so that would be next month. But we’ll see if those numbers look interesting at all or are a dud.
Let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this topic or if you have any thoughts. Or just say Hi.
