Whether you think you can or not, you’re right.
These inspirational words from Henry Ford ring as true now as they did when the first Model T cars were being manufactured. An abundance of confidence will not make up for an overall lack of talent though.
If you’re wondering if you have what it takes to be a successful blogger, you may or may not be ready. You’ll never know if you don’t give it a try though, right? The only way to monitor if you have the gumption to get it done is to start up your blog and see what happens.
Can You Write Professionally?
Anyone can scribble some words on paper but it takes real panache to write something people will like to read. You must not use any netspeak like “ur” (you’re) on your blog if you want people to take you seriously. If you can’t come up with the quality copy you need, it might not be worth the bother of starting a blog.
Blog-goers can tell when a blog’s owner isn’t the person actually writing for it, so don’t think you can be sneaky and get someone else to do your writing for you.
Blogs like that are called Flogs because they are essentially fake. You shouldn’t be aspiring to a half-hearted effort anyhow, so don’t even try starting a blog if you can’t do the writing for it.
Do You Have Anything Meaningful to Say?
Here is where many young blogs foul up and go bad. You could put whatever you want on your blog, all day every day. If none of the content is any good, nobody is going to be recommending your blog to another person. Your copy needs to pull at people’s strings, get them feeling or thinking or maybe best of all, laughing.
There is one way to get around meaningful content and that’s if your blog will make people giggle. There’s a surprising amount of slack given to blogs that send their visitors away with a big, dumb smile.
This could be perfect if you’re already a sort of comedian. With a venue you control, nobody can make you stop until you’re ready to call it quits.
Can You Keep The Content Coming?
Writing a blog takes a lot of time and work. You will be looking all the time for something new to write about and that in itself is like another, small job.
If you aren’t giving your readers something new at least once a week, you can bet they’ll go somewhere they can get new stuff to read. A good way to deal with this is to have some posts ready before you start your blog.
This isn’t cheating or anything, you just do the writing beforehand and then you have a bank from which you can pull good, original content when you need it. It seems like common sense but then we all know how uncommon that really is.
It is a good idea to start tracking your rankings earlier to be able to tell which of your keywords perform better and identify your priorities earlier on. SE Ranking SERP tracker is a great app to do that easily and affordably:
Do yourself a favor and come up with a store of posts before you launch your blog. That is, if you’re still interested in blogging at all.