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There are online marketing truths you need to know before you start or you will learn them the hard way. In today’s episode of Marketing in Minutes you will learn about three of them.

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This episode of Marketing in Minutes was recorded with the following equipment:

Alesis Multimix 4 – Behringer Ultravoice XM8500 – Samson SR850

In this episode of Marketing in Minutes you will learn:

• Why online marketing and blogging is about budget management
• Why online marketing and blogging is very lonely
• Why an online marketing or blogging career is absolutely worth anyway

All in under 10 minutes.

More Information

Here are some more articles that will help you:

How Much “Blogging” is There Really in Blogging?

24 Blogging Quotes To Get Inspiration, Motivation And Perspective

How To Start Your Blog And Take It Straight To Success Right From The Beginning

For a traffic strategy that will allow you to take your blog straight to success even on a low budget, read The Social Traffic Code.

Episode Transcript

The full transcript for this episode can be found below.

All online marketers started someday. There was a day when we launched our first blog, there was a day when we first made revenues, and there was a day when we became profitable.

And along the way, we learned some lessons. Lessons that we all wish someone told us before we started.

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and this is Marketing in Minutes.

Welcome to Marketing in Minutes by The Social Ms – the podcast that gives you everything you need to know about one Marketing topic per episode.

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and today, let me give you some lessons that I wish someone had told me years ago – before I became an entrepreneur and before I became a blogger.

***

Maybe the first lesson that every entrepreneur and every blogger has to learn is that blogging is hard work.

Yeah I know, you already know – and this is not a lesson I want to talk about today.

But what I do want to talk about is why blogging is hard work.

Because when we start out, we all have a romantic impression of what blogging life is about.

We picture travel bloggers on planes, on their way to their next travel location, writing a post about their last adventure.

Sure it’s work, right? But how hard can work be if you sit around palm trees with a laptop on your lap, sipping Cuba Libres at the coast?

Well, turns out that even a travel blogger’s life usually isn’t that romantic. At least not when starting out. We picture a life after success already happened – and we forget how long the way to success was.

And that’s where the first lesson starts: Budget is everything!

***

Reaching success with a blog is largely based on budget management. A blog is a business – so it’s dependent on achieving more revenues than it has expenses.

When you think about becoming a travel blogger, you decide to try your luck in the hardest niches on the web. Why? Because everyone wants to be a travel blogger, and and the expenses for having a travel blog are massive.

Running a blog costs money already – not a lot when you just think about server costs, a few online marketing tools, and so on – but it does cost money.

When you want to travel around the world and make money blogging, that requires a massive investment – because traveling costs money. Hotels cost money, flights cost money, food costs money, insurance costs money.

And it’s highly unlikely that your first trip will generate enough money to make back your investment.

The same goes for the second, the third, the fourth, and so on.

Every trip will allow you to write only a blog post, or maybe 3 or 4.

And even if you are really good at generating traffic for those posts and making money from those posts – you probably won’t make your investment back any time soon.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make it as a travel blogger – but blogging success is not going to come instantly, and you have to follow a path that allows you to stay in budget for as long as it takes.

Which means you are probably going to spend a lot of time writing posts around your trips to the local zoo, your strolls through your city, your visit to local coffee shops, your hikes through the local forest, and so on.

That’s not very romantic – and you’re going to go through a very tough time. It won’t be spectacular, but it’s necessary! And you will need to find an audience that is willing to invest into you so that one day you can actually buy your first flight ticket.

***

Budget is one of the most important lessons every blogger has to learn – and it is true in any niche.

Fashion bloggers don’t get free clothing until their successful – they have to actually pay for everything they write about. Tech bloggers have to pay for the gadgets they write about, and so on.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make it – it just means that you need to fit your blog into your budget.

Another lesson every blogger has to learn is that blogging is lonely.

***

Yeah right – so what. You don’t care that blogging is lonely, right?

Let me put that into perspective – blogging is depressingly lonely – and you need to find ways to counter isolation. Seriously – if you don’t find ways to do that, you will need to go to a shrink soon.

There are many ways in which blogging isolates you from the world outside:

Your friends won’t get what you are doing and why you are doing it. So you won’t be able to talk about what you are doing all day. So you’re going to see them less.

For a long time, you are going to spend 90 percent of your workload inside, figuring out technical stuff. For many, it starts with setting up their blog, but even if you are the kind of technical person who knows this already, you will have to spend ages on SEO, Social Media Marketing, Automation Setups, and so on. And you thought it was about writing blog posts? It’s not and most of your time will be spent on other things!

Another thing that makes blogging really lonely is that the audience you build to consume all your content is a virtual audience. Sure, they will admire you – but being admired on Twitter doesn’t have a lot in common with the admiration Hollywood actors feel. You can have 2 million followers on Twitter and no one will recognize you on the street. You can grow your email list enormously – you are probably still not going to meet anyone from your audience in real life.

Blogging usually isn’t glamorous. It’s just lonely, at least for a long time.

And you need to counter that feeling of loneliness or you will not succeed. You will need to find new friends that you can talk about your work with. No, don’t skip on your old ones, just find new ones as well.

You will need to leave the house, work in different coffee shops, just to get the feeling of being outside.

You will need to network among other bloggers to build cooperations – even if it’s just to be among people who understand what you are doing.

Countering the loneliness of blogging is very important for your success.

***

I just gave you two very tough truth about blogging. These last two lessons are probably some of the most important ones and responsible for many failed attempts at blogging.

But there is another lesson about the life of an online marketer and especially the life of bloggers. And that is that it’s totally worth it.

***

The fundamentals about the life of online marketers haven’t changed since Tim Ferris wrote about the 4-hour work week.

If you are willing to go through the tough start, if you are willing to go through everything an online marketer has to suffer before reaching success, then you are in for a treat.

There is no better feeling than to turn a profit with a blog.

There is no better feeling than seeing the success of an online business that you built.

And once you make it, you can live life to it’s fullest.

The way there isn’t easy – and it’s not for everyone. But if you develop the superpower of not giving up when things are tough, then you can do it!

But you will have to push through the times when you will have to do two jobs, your day job, and your blog. You will have to go through times when things will be very tough. And you will need to go through times when you want to stop.

Because if these times would not stand between you and success, then everyone would become a blogger.

***

I hope these three lessons weren’t too depressing. It’s a hard truth about entrepreneurship that it’s not easy – and that there is going to be trouble before success.

I can’t tell you if you are cut out to make it in the online space – but I can tell you that it’s possible. And that you should at least try – because if you do, you will make the first step into a different life!

***

I hope you enjoyed these three lessons about online entrepreneurship and blogging. If you like this podcast, please subscribe to it – you can find links to all major podcasting platforms in the show notes at blog.thesocialms.com/MiM-30 – that’s blog.thesocialms.com/MiM-30

For regular lessons about online marketing, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow our blog. And for a complete marketing strategy to build massive traffic to your blog, check out the book The Social Traffic Code by Susanna and myself. You can find the link in the show notes as well.

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and this was Marketing in Minutes.

That’s it for today – take care, Bye!

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