I know it has not been a while for me to write this post but nearly took an era. Just to say what happened all these days, I could say that I’ve been working on a new blog with one of my online friend. So I took some time off from BIG (Blog in Grace).
I don’t have any plans to kill this blog or leave this blog. I know this blog has a vision to help people on how to blog and what to blog.
Though I am not Pat Flynn to post a big list of my online income sources yet I love to help people who have just landed online to earn some bucks.
So I need to experiment on few strategies and if I succeed then my results and sure fire tips will flow directly through this blog.
Just to bring back my experiences on the blog I have been working on, from past few days there were lot of hindrances, which I and my friend were facing in order to bring a fully designed, well furnished product (blog). Usually when a newbie first starts a blog it seems easy and if they have landed into blogging seeing those income reports of top bloggers then they might simply think that they too are sure to make some bucks like those pro bloggers. In fact it is not so easy to turn our blog into next campus craze and bring in those huge numbers.
Money flows excessively over the net but to tap into the right resource and earn genuinely is what makes it difficult for a newbie.
Yes, earning a genuine income either by selling our own product or affiliate marketing or any other sources is not as easy as one thinks. Mostly people would like to know the review, best price and best product before they actually end up in buying one. And all you need to do is bring in such products to have a profitable market built in your blog. As of now I am not going to discuss anything on affiliate marketing but I want to share few facts which really drive a blogger to go nuts with the hindrances they face in the initial stages.
As usual before I jump into my topic a small story to justify my explanation in my rest of the post. You can skip it if you want and directly read what I wanted to share below this story.
One day, a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people live. They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”
“It was great, Dad.”
“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.
“Oh yeah,” said the son.
“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.
The son answered, “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden, and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden, and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard, and they have the whole horizon. Dad, we have a small piece of land to live on, and they have fields that go beyond our sight. We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. Dad, we buy our food, but they grow theirs. We have walls around our property to protect us; they have friends to protect them.”
The boy’s father was speechless.
Then his son added, “Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we are.”
This is a very old story which you might have already know. My point of sharing this story is simple when ever we face a hindrance we should think the other way round. That’s what we call as positive attitude, as I have already wrote an article on Imparting positive attitude to your blog readers, where you can know more about it.
A blogger who has just started his blog will have to go through some hardship or some hindrances. Below are few hindrances which I have personally faced and also adding few of them which are commonly faced by others too. So that this could be helpful to you in having a good and favorable blogging environment.
1. Hosting:
First and foremost thing you would ever regret is for choosing a bad hosting. This really annoys when you are desperately in need of support and the hosting provider does not offer a online or offline support.
There are some hosting providers which give 24/7 support but not for those who choose a baby plan or a basic plan. What will a newbie choose, definitely a basic plan not a high end professional plan and in his blogging journey if suppose he had grown his traffic to a nice extent and he faces down time now and then, its really bad for him as the blog will definitely loose all the traffic and in turn increases the bounce rate. So its better to choose a good hosting, always look for the brand and also read some users reviews before you end up in choosing one.
See that they also offer a 24/7 support whenever you are in need of them. Not to name but there are many hosting providers who offer hosting at a cheap price but then you would regret afterwards over choosing such a bad hosting. Choose a good hosting even it costs you a buck more than it usually is, for in future you won’t cry over ruining your million dollar product simply by saving a dollar.
2. Bad Hardware:
Well you started a good blog but you have a poor computer with really old hardware. You just wanted to prepare an image in Photoshop with some of your blogs topics or logos. This could really turn your table round as for the speed and the performance your bad hardware offers. See that you use a good and latest system with some pretty cool branded accessories rather than choosing some cheap products. If you have pressed enter and nothing turn up or some of your key strokes wont type a letter on the screen would ruin your energy and completely spoil the show. So use a good system or a laptop with some latest hardware.
3. Offline Contacts:
You were pretty determined to write a killer content that converts or a blog post which of course is a master piece, but then comes some of your unavoidable guests. There would be no other option but to leave your work for a while. As you bade your friends good bye already the points which were in your mind too have given you a peck and left long back. Guess what again you need to brainstorm for ideas, you need to recollect what you thought of earlier cos you thought of writing on affiliate marketing and your friends came and discussed on stock marketing. Its really a tough job to keep our friends away, so many bloggers keep a blogging schedules during nights or early mornings. I suggest to plan a good time for writing your blog and I would personally suggest early in the mornings will do the thing.
Read: Tips for Nocturnal bloggers to Supercharge their Workflow
4. Power Cuts:
Though you live in some developed countries where you would not suffer any power cuts yet some times you need to be prepared. Hurricanes like Sandy would some time love take a walk through our corridors and pull up everything which we don’t like.
But in countries like ours (India) we don’t need any hurricanes to pull the thing as our people at electricity department are very hardworking, not to blame them they take nearly 8 to 10 hours to take the thing up. They even take 5 long days with the same 8 to 10 hours to put our electric thing in its proper place. Thanks to temple run game which I have installed in my tab and few eBooks which kept me engaged for those 5 days. I was determined to write for my new blog and I had to face this break down for 5 long days. But thanks to those short stories which I post now and then in my blogs for I took some inspiration out of them and kept writing in spite of severe power failure.
Read: Feel like Quit Blogging here is why you should NOT
Many times I comment or write an article as I am about to hit publish or post then my electricity would just go and come off within a minute. Then I decided that I would write a post extra including the one which I have lost due to power cut. I am also planing to bring the UPS thing as I have faced this issue more than a hundred times.
5. Hacked:
Its not with my blog but many complain that they get their blogs hacked especially WordPress ones. So its better that you choose some of the hardest passwords but see that you won’t forget them.
I wont write too much on this section as I still have to learn on how to avoid it may be my friend Vivek covered a small topic on How to avoid Getting your WordPress blog Hacked.
6. Bad Internet Connection:
This really is one of the biggest hindrance as in India we face lot of down time with the internet service providers. Sometimes we need to compromise with some basic internet plans as most of the time cost for some good speed plans would not be affordable for a newbie blogger. We feel so bad especially when it takes 2 to 3 minutes to upload an image into a post. So try to choose a good Internet service provider who offers good speed and the same time good support. Too many break downs with our internet connection would just leave us frustrated to write any post further.
7. Lack of Motivation:
Last in my list but not the least, personally I felt it very difficult to move on when people discourage. One of the biggest discouragement a blogger faces is earning nothing even after blogging for seven to eight months. Only thing we need to do is write one more post and keep blog moving.
Read: 21 confessions to make before you write a great article
All I could suggest is just to keep writing, in spite of so many problems I was able to write 100+ posts in our new blog. Its only one thing that kept me going, a thought that I need to write a post extra if something hinders me. So if I faced power cut for two times then I would write four posts. If hosting troubled me three times I would write six posts. This is all how I manged to turn my hindrances into a favorable blogging conditions.
Though I felt so bad after writing a post of 500 words and had to sacrifice it for a power failure, I still wrote it thinking like that boy in the story that every hindrance is a reminder for me to write even better and write more and more. So in a simple sentence I suggest you to just write whatever may be the hindrance you face, just keep it going. Sorry for all those who have been my regular readers and been waiting for my next post from many days. I would see that I will be writing some interesting and useful posts in near future so stay tuned…
Hi Vijesh,
Blogging is a race that ends not until there is no more way on the internet, you make it all with all these points, bloggers faces many challenges though, but the commonest one are what you mentioned. Though I am not used to hosting but soonest I will when I move my blog to wordpress but talking about other, I can attest to that; like offline contact,if got pissed off whenever this happened and definitely what I have stored in my memory will got disappear unless I had some point on my jotter else I will have to start brainstorming again and again, also power cut, this is very common sometimes but what I do to bypass this barrier is that I schedule most of my blog post, like now I had my blog post schedule till 8th of august, automatically if there is power cut off, I will only be suffering from inability to leave some reasonable comment on other blogs, and the last one I will talk about here is poor network coverage or internet connection as the case may be, this is one of the major problem of my local internet service provider during cloudy time, it gives a lot of problems and headache but thank God for the ability to schedule some of my blog post which has really gives me come upper hand over that. Thanks
Wondered why you did not post anything for such a long time, but today I understand.
Nice to hear you don’t let this blog away man. I rarely encounter electric power cuts, however they move as fast they can to repair. Internet connection is quiet expensive, I’m paying 15 Euro / mo* for 9GB of high speed traffic up to 21 MB/s and when this ends, upload/download speed is 128KB/s which is bad.
Nice to read you. See you next time Vijesh. Best regards from I. C. Daniel
Hi Vijesh,
Um, the only power shortage we have here is when it gets really hot or when the storm hits us which is pretty rare here in California. As far as disaster is concerned, California gets hit more with earthquake other than any calamity there is. However, Fresno is the safest place to be. We don’t have high buildings and skycrapers that would fall us, in the way they do in San Francisco area. This is an EVEN flat land, mostly farmers resides in this area.
You said, to write a blog in the morning is best…that’s true. Everything is quiet and the day is afresh. However, most of my kindle books reading are during the night. Sometimes I stay up till 3:00 in the morning. Just to educate myself on things like…SEO, how to write a kindle book, how to write a killer content, how to make $ on amazon associates…that kinda stuff. When I’m on my laptop, everything is work. Reading people’s blogs, making blog comments, answering my emails, engaging in social media like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook…it’s ongoing. No time for anything.
Hosting, Bad Hardware, Offline Contacts, Power Cuts, Hackers, Bad Connection, Lack of Motivation…these are some of the hindrances alright. The biggest challenge for me so far are the hackers. But everything is under control. I installed Wordfence and this plugin is SUPERB. Caught a couple of malicious commenters who have malwares and trojan horse on their links!!!!! Have I not have Wordfence my blog would have been destroyed and infected. Evil people out there I tell ya…I just don’t understand what they could have gained from this…
I think I spend 50% on just technical issues alone…
Also, I just bought a couple of storage: (1) MyPCBackup and (2) Lacie 500GB hard drive. I had Egnyte but had to cancel this coz I don’t think I need it. I signed up for 2 years storage on MyPCBackup, just in case there is burglary or laptop got fried, my data that I’ve worked so hard will be SAFE. The 500GB there (I know I said I would never buy this again)…I’m only using this to FREE my computer storage; so I don’t want anything on my computer other than applications.
Anyway…I’m so glad you are back my friend. So YAY!!!!!!!!!
Angela
Hi Angela
That is really wonderful about power outage in califonia, though my country is doing great but not really always most especially cloudy period is not encouraging at all.
Hi Adesanmi,
I do admire your persistence my friend. Despite all, you are still blogging although the condition is not the best. Keep up the good job!! 🙂
Angela
Hi McCall,
Yes my colleague, I make sure I try all I could to make things worked out always as far as blogging is concern.
Hi Vijesh.
Well this post is something really interesting. I enjoyed reading it. Specially the story was really good. Well as you are saying I am completely agree with your point of view.
One should blog in good environment.
If you have a good work place you can give more output and gain more success in this field. Well it is not applicable on Blogging, If you talk about studying , condition is the same.
I am working on making a new workspace with table and chair there. With no additional distractions and other disturbing elements.
Thanks for the update Vijesh. Keep up the good work and have a great week ahead.
Regards 🙂
You blog Feel like Quit Blogging here is why you should NOT motivates me to write frequently , i don’t bother about money.
Hello Vijesh,
All the points mentioned here are very important if you want to do blogging and want to get good success in the blogging and I believe in the last point i.e. Lack of Confidence. I could only confidence is requied at each and every step to be successful.
Thanks
Siddhartha
Hello Sir Vijesh,
It’s just a wonderful thing to see you back again.
I could relate to every word in this as if India is Ghana.
I for instance have to travel more than 32km just to access an internet cafe.
I can write a post as well and just at the time of hitting the publish button, the goes off!
This is an interesting piece and I loved the story as well.