Bloggers that I admire typically have the same story buried in their blog somewhere, a passing reference to how many hours they were working on their blogs when trying to get them off the ground.
How many hours? I consistently see them stating 30 – 40 hours a week working on their blogs initially, on top of a typical 40 hour work week. That’s a lot of work! Is it really necessary to work that many hours to get the blog off the ground? Is the secret to blogging success just working more hours?
What Happens When A Blogger Puts In A Lot Of Hours?
Well, the simple answer is this: more work gets done. What happens when more work gets done? Simple: more progress is made. Enduring long hours to build a successful blog is a small price to pay.
Many will hate to hear it, but more hours = more success. Many out there are hoping for a magic shortcut, but there is none. Some think they found that magic shortcut with AI, but they didn’t.
Humans who come to blogs don’t want to read AI content, if they wanted to read AI content they would have gone to a chatbot instead. Google knows this and if you get identified as an AI article mill, you’ll get deindexed from search results. There are no shortcuts, just hard work!
The Hard Work On The Blog Has To Be The Right Kind Of Work Though
The “hard work” can’t be simply long hours, that’s not hard work. That can easily become going through the motions and not really getting much done. People do this at their day jobs all the time.
They are present for 8 hours yet only get about 3 hours worth of work done. That’s not the kind of work I’m talking about for your blog.
30 hours of blog work needs to equal 30 hours of work. Every second of it is work. Time is too valuable to waste on building a blog because it is important work that will dramatically impact your life in a positive manner.
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Starting out, focus on getting your 50 first posts published, all of them 1,000+ words.
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Ensure the fundamentals of the blog are sound, but don’t spend time perfecting the blog design. Get it “good enough” and move forward. You can hire a pro designer later.
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Focus on learning “on-page” SEO, which is essentially using smart H1, H2, H3 title tags with relevant keywords and interlinking articles all over the place.
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Once you get your first 50 posts, go back and update all of the posts. There will be a HUGE quality difference from post #4 compared to post #50. You will be tempted to delete old trash posts, but don’t–update them. They would have been indexed by Google by now and you don’t want to lose that.
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Once the posts are updated, settle into a three posts a week routine and do not deviate (unless the deviation is posting more than three a week).
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Start the process of mastering a third party platform to drive traffic to your blog.
Those bullet points contain a lot of work! And it’s best to get through it with a lot of hours worked at a high-intensity level. You wanna be free through your blogging efforts, don’t you? Gotta put in the work!
Is It Okay To Take A Break From The Blog?
No, not if you want to be a full-time blogger. When you start out you have to fight for every minute you can find for your blog because you have many other life commitments.
Taking a break quickly turns into not posting for a month, 2 months, 3 months; and then before you know it you are among the 80% of blogs that fail within the first 18 months.
I don’t want that for you. I want you to be free, and that means a ton of work needs to be done upfront.
Once freedom is achieved, I recommend more hard work, but now you don’t have to worry about that pesky full-time job and can put in a solid 40 hours a week of blogging, but having the benefit of being able to take frequent breaks that last from a week or two to a month or two. That hard work will have you living the dream, baby! Some sweat up front is nothing compared to the payoff!
Blogging Success: Keep Your Eye On The Prize
I talk about VISION a lot around here and that’s what we all need to keep our eye on. I have a vision of being free via blogging so I can do what I want, with who I want, when I want. For me that means providing a good life for my family and being able to spend more time with them doing fun things.
But wait! If you spend 30 hours a week on the blog doesn’t that mean you aren’t spending time with your kids?
No, absolutely not. There are 168 hours per week. I spend about 6.5 hours in sleep per day, so that is 45.5 hours. My day job is 40 hours. Blogging is 30 hours. So now I am at 115.5 hours. Which even with all that I still have 52.5 hours of unclaimed time per week, and almost all of that time is spent with my family.
What am I not doing? Netflix, doom scrolling on my phone, sitting around idly, video games (except when playing with my son), and any other time-wasters people get stuck on. Time is short, for sure, yet most people don’t even use the time that is given to them! One of life’s great mysteries, I suppose.
Hold that vision in you mind and do not deviate from it. Put in the work, because the simple secret to blogging success is putting in more hours.
What To Do Now With This Blogging Success Knowledge?
Take a look at your schedule. Where can you block out time to work on your blog? For me, it’s all about early morning writing sessions that start at 5:00am. This gives me a solid 3 hours of writing time every day (7 days a week). That clocks in at 21 hours.
In evenings, I usually spend an hour reading a book on blogging, SEO, marketing, etc so that’s another 7 hours. Now I’m already at 28 hours of dedicated blogging time per week. I usually find another hour or two on the weekends, another 30 minutes in evenings. I don’t keep track of every minute, but I think I am clocking in around 35 hours of “working on the blog” per week.
It’s not as hard as one may think to find the time to do something that is important!
Good luck, my friend! Now, blog on, blog on.