Allow me to add to this thread from the perspective of somebody who has been blogging for many years with the wrong mindset, resulting in making hardly any money at all.
I STILL have the wrong mindset. And I am STILL struggling, so I am not trying to pretend to be an expert here. Just sharing my thoughts.
The mindset of the "creative"
I have always approached blogging from the mindset of being a "creative". This means, that I primarily saw myself as writer, not as an entrepreneur. I worked my a$$ off producing content... every single day... but with ZERO plans on how to monetize this.
My expectation was that if only I built a large-enough audience, eventually I would make money. All I needed to do for that is to create awesome content that people loved.
I never really thought about:
- which problem to solve
- what kind of solution to offer
- who exactly my target audience was
- what my revenue streams could be
Instead, I wrote about what I thought would be "interesting" to others. That was all the value I wanted to provide - being interesting. As a result, I only attracted people who wanted to read "interesting" and, most importantly, FREE stuff.
So yeah, while I managed to attract quite a fair amount of readers, I never really succeeded at making money out of any of these efforts.
I only built a blog, but I didn't built a business.
What I failed to do, was the conceptual work on my business. Coming up with a real idea on how I could provide value and for whom. And then build all my work around that concept. That concept could've given me the necessary sense of direction to move forward, instead of just continuously writing about different sorts of things that "came to my mind".
What I am going to try now is to focus more on the business side of things while treating the blog for what it is: a marketing channel.
I STILL have the wrong mindset. And I am STILL struggling, so I am not trying to pretend to be an expert here. Just sharing my thoughts.
The mindset of the "creative"
I have always approached blogging from the mindset of being a "creative". This means, that I primarily saw myself as writer, not as an entrepreneur. I worked my a$$ off producing content... every single day... but with ZERO plans on how to monetize this.
My expectation was that if only I built a large-enough audience, eventually I would make money. All I needed to do for that is to create awesome content that people loved.
I never really thought about:
- which problem to solve
- what kind of solution to offer
- who exactly my target audience was
- what my revenue streams could be
Instead, I wrote about what I thought would be "interesting" to others. That was all the value I wanted to provide - being interesting. As a result, I only attracted people who wanted to read "interesting" and, most importantly, FREE stuff.
So yeah, while I managed to attract quite a fair amount of readers, I never really succeeded at making money out of any of these efforts.
I only built a blog, but I didn't built a business.
What I failed to do, was the conceptual work on my business. Coming up with a real idea on how I could provide value and for whom. And then build all my work around that concept. That concept could've given me the necessary sense of direction to move forward, instead of just continuously writing about different sorts of things that "came to my mind".
What I am going to try now is to focus more on the business side of things while treating the blog for what it is: a marketing channel.
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