17 Blogging Advantages And Disadvantages – My Experience In The First Year Of Blogging

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With social media rapidly growing for the last couple of years, blogs have become less popular. If you look at the most popular apps, you’ll see that they focus on short form videos now. Even Instagram switched its direction and currently keeps pushing Reels. It’s not surprising seeing that people’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter – according to a study from Microsoft Corp., people now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish! At the same time, watching YouTube or listening to podcasts in the background is perceived as a great way to boost your productivity. Who has time to read articles nowadays?

Despite all that, blogs are still very popular and have a huge following. They’re still a great way to connect with people, share your thoughts and all that stuff, although we are way past those times of writing diary-style entries.

Writing a blog can be also a great way to earn money passively, and create searchable, green content that will bring you traffic all the time. Where do people go when they type anything in Google after all? That’s why today I’d like to share with you blogging advantages and disadvantages I discovered during my first year of blogging. Let’s go!

Advantages of blogging

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You own your space

That’s a tremendous advantage of blogging! If you’re running a self-hosted site, you own it. You’re free to change its look and layout at any time. You can share whatever you’d like on your blog and no-one will ban you for that.

Relying solely on Instagram and other social media can be a bad idea because it is not permanent. Your content may be removed with no warning, even if you didn’t violate any rules. You don’t own your account, so you always depend on someone else’s vision they have for their app.

Do you remember those times when Instagram was all about sharing photos and connecting with others? They changed their direction suddenly and posting photos isn’t desirable anymore. If you want to succeed, you probably should try to understand the ever changing algorithm and post videos every day. Also, content you share on Instagram usually can be searchable just for 24 hours, while posts on your blog can bring you traffic for years to come. 

That’s why I love blogging. I can create content or set up my space exactly as I want. There’s no such thing as deleting posts or blogs whatsoever. If you’re worried about losing your content, you can back it up and keep it somewhere safe. In fact, you should always back up your site regularly.

Limitless earning possibilities

When you work at a typical 9-5 job, you often have a glass ceiling over your head. If you’ve never heard that term, it basically means an invisible barrier that prevents you from being promoted to higher positions. Even if you’d like to change your job, it might be difficult to find a suitable position that would bring you more money than your current one.

When you work for yourself, the earning possibilities are limitless. Everything depends on you, your vision or ideas, and the amount of work you put into it. You can find new opportunities to earn money, create your own products, and diversify your income in ways you wouldn’t even think of while working in a 9-5 job.

You are your own boss

Have you noticed that your energy varies from throughout the day? If you think about it, it changes our perception of time and how productively we can use it. Your energy levels change throughout the day. Knowing how to manage energy can help you work less and be more productive.

If you have kids, you need to plan your work not only with your energy in mind but also around other people and their schedules. That’s why I love flexibility and freedom working for myself gives me. Being able to arrange your day however you like and move your tasks around when needed is such a blessing.

Improve your writing skills

This is probably the biggest advantage of blogging. When I started this blog, I was really concerned about my language skills. My English has never been perfect, and I was struggling with writing longer pieces at first, but after a year of fairly regular writing I’m more confident with it. I believe that blogging can help you learn a new language from the ground up too. People are interested in reading about someone else’s experience as it often motivates and inspires them to take action.

Inspire people

One of my goals is to inspire and motivate people to travel locally and discover the beauty of the world around them. I guess I do something right as people keep coming here to read about the walk from Margate to Broadstairs. At least I hope I do.

You might’ve noticed that cleaning, organising, or planning content does great on social media. It’s because people love to watch things they can relate to. Seeing others cleaning their home can inspire and motivate you to do the same.

If you have a good quality content that performs great on social media, writing a blog can be a great idea for you. It would help you reach a new audience and inspire more people while potentially create an additional source of passive income. Cleaning, organising or planning content does great on social media. It’s because people love to watch things they can relate to. Seeing others cleaning their home can inspire and motivate you to do the same.

Work from anywhere

If your goal is to become a digital nomad, blogging can be a perfect job for you. It takes a long time to gain some traction and earn full-time income regularly from your blog. Once you reach that point, you can live wherever you want. All you need is a laptop, camera and internet connection.

Creative outlet

Blogging requires a lot of brain power from you! It’s a great creative outlet because, as a blogger, you’re a writer, photographer, and graphic designer at the same time. If you’re writing about your travels, then you also need to create interesting itineraries and come up with creative photoshoots, often in popular locations.

As a food blogger, you need to create your own recipes or come up with creative modifications to existing ones. Apart from that, you often need to create marketing strategy for your products and blog posts. Being active on social media is usually an integral part of a being a blogger too. Even though coming back to Instagram has been on my mind for months, I don’t have any energy left for that. It takes plenty of time to figure out content schedule and that stresses me out.

Small investment

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to start a blog. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to buy expensive courses when you’re just starting out. Sure, they may speed up your learning process, but there’s plenty of free material available online too. All you need is time and motivation. It’s easy to get lost and keep enrolling in courses just for the sake of it.

To keep your initial investment minimal, you can get a self-hosted WordPress, use free stock photos or take photos with a camera, and just get started. Don’t wait until you’re be ready because you might never be.

Disadvantages of blogging

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It’s lonely

Social interactions are very limited when you’re blogging full time. Most of your days are spent either at home or in cafes working on your laptop. That isn’t the best way to connect with other people. It can get ever more lonely when you can’t share your struggles and wins with anyone because your friends and family don’t get what you’re doing and don’t take it seriously. Joining Facebook groups and looking for like-minded people in your area might solve this problem.

Learning required

If you’re not a learning type of gal, you might struggle with starting a blog unless you want to do it just for fun. There is so much to learn about! Building a website, doing research, writing newsletters are just a few examples of things you’ll likely need to learn when starting a blog. And don’t even start me on SEO. It took me weeks to get a grasp on it and I feel like I may still miss something.

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint

People aren’t patient, are they? Everyone would like to see results of their work immediately. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible with blogging. Your website usually spends the first 6-12 months in Google’s “sandbox” so you might not see any results at all during that time. It might be very discouraging and, in fact, it was one of the reasons I disappeared from here last year.

Trying to stay on top of my blog, which wasn’t bringing any traffic or money, was difficult while we were moving across the country. Writing new blog posts and posting them regularly takes hours (I keep forgetting to track time I spent on writing, ugh!) and requires a lot of brain power, especially when your end goal is to earn decent money from it.

No control over the results

Even if you’re 100% sure that you’re doing everything right, you might still miss something that will stop you from achieving your goals and succeeding. If you want to gain more traffic to your site, you need to rank higher on Google. There’s no guarantee that your post will hit the first page in Google even if you write a truly fabulous article. I feel like at least in the beginning, it’s like a roulette. You try your best, but at the end of the day you have no idea how your content will perform.

Trolls & haters

Internet is full of trolls and people that write hurtful comments. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always have to endure that. I’ve never got a mean comment in my first full year of blogging or during the time I was active on Instagram. If you get any negative comments (don’t mistake them with constructive criticism though!), just delete them and forget about it. You can’t please everyone.

Impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome is sooo real! I don’t think I’ll ever get over my inner voice saying that I shouldn’t write anything since I’m not an expert. I know that I’m just trying to sabotage myself this way. Best you can do when you experience impostor syndrome is figuring out the reason behind that and pushing yourself straight through it. It gets better with time for sure. For me, finding clarity and specifying my goals was very helpful to limit the frequency of it.

Boring tasks

Researching a topic that you don’t really care about but it has potential to interest your readers, resizing and uploading photos because somehow they ended up looking really badly on your website, editing the same post over and over again… Some tasks are really boring and you can’t unfortunately escape them, unless you hire an assistant or content writer. Going through them might be very boring, especially if you lack clarity or you don’t earn any money from your blog yet. Every job comprises both interesting and boring tasks, so I don’t think anyone would expect something different from blogging.

It’s more difficult than you think

Designing your website, taking and editing photos, or SEO optimizing your posts requires a bit of knowledge, practice, and a lot of time to get it right. Blogging isn’t just about writing about topics you’re interested in and hitting publish immediately. Often you need to do a lot of research beforehand and then edit your draft multiple times, which can be very mundane. If your blog is established, you also need to stay on top of your emails, keep looking for sponsorship opportunities, create your own products, which sometimes take weeks, etc. All you really can see is the final effect of hours of work someone put into their blog post.

Passion is not enough

Passion is not enough, trust me. You need to plan, schedule, and push yourself, even if you have no motivation at all. If you want to earn a full-time income from your blog, you need to treat it like a job. Everyone around me has “normal” jobs, so it’s been difficult to consider blogging as a job. That’s why writing has never been a priority to me. It resulted in posting irregularly on the blog. Sometimes it’s so difficult to do anything blog-related when you feel like it’s not important and that’s where impostor syndrome often likes to creep in.

Blogging advantages and disadvantages: Conclusion

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Blogging is hard, takes a lot of time, and is usually misunderstood by others. If I’m being honest with you, I believe advantages outweigh disadvantages. Every job, or even passion you pursue, has lots of pros and cons, but it doesn’t mean that’s not worth doing it. I know that because of my choices, I’m not in a place I wanted to be yet. Despite all that, it makes me thrilled to see this place grow and hitting those small milestones of x amount of visitors every month. At the time of writing this post, I had 1.5k people visiting my blog in the last 28 days. Knowing that someone wanted to read anything I wrote is really motivating!