The 9 Best Tips for Your First Month of Blogging

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Discover the essential steps to thrive in your first month of blogging, from setting achievable goals to unlocking earning potential. Learn how beginner bloggers can fast-track their earnings and exactly what you should be focusing on in your first months.

Are you ready to make your blogging dreams a blogging reality? I get asked all the time what my first year blog goals were and what are some examples of blog goals that I would recommend to new bloggers.

While blogging isn’t a fast game, the quickest way to make money blogging is to get serious within that first month. If you’re wondering how much do bloggers make in the first month, the answer might discourage you. Because typically, you won’t see financial results until after your first year blogging.

So you’re wondering how to monetize your blog from day one if it takes a year to make money? Once you’ve built a reliable blogging routine, you can set yourself up for success on repeat. And it all starts in that first month of blogging!

These are the best tips I recommend for your first month of blogging.

Exactly What To Do Your First Month Of Blogging

1. Set A Schedule And Stick With It

My personal goal was to publish a blog post twice a week. I didn’t set specific days that I needed to post on, like Wednesdays and Fridays, but I did make sure I was posting two blog posts every single week.

Having this goal helped me stay on track and gave me that “deadline” pressure.

I want to take a moment here to emphasize that you should be REALISTIC when you set these goals. Create a schedule that you know you can be consistent with.

Blogging is like a marathon, not a sprint, so consider everything you do to be for the long haul.

I will never recommend publishing one blog post one week, five the next week, and then none the following week. That’s not considered consistent blogging.

2. Spend The Least Amount Of Money Possible

The hard truth of blogging is that it’s a small percentage of bloggers that actually make the big bucks from their blogs.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible! It just takes time and dedication and there are a lot of people that fall off from blogging because they don’t have the patience to blog without immediate results.

And blogging is pretty much a guarantee that you won’t get immediate results. Which is why I always recommend spending the least amount of money on your blog in the beginning.

This means buy the cheaper hosting, don’t buy the $300 theme up front, and don’t spend $1000 on a course when there’s a $100 course to start with, etc.

What I do recommend spending money on is:

Hosting:

Again, I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of money on hosting. I used Bluehost when I first got started and it worked perfectly for me in the beginning. I consider it the Walmart version of hosting, nothing fancy but it gets the job done!

Now I’m using Big Scoots since my page views are so much higher than they were when I first started. But this is a great example and reminder that you can change hosts when your blogging needs change.

Don’t be intimidated to make a huge investment in the beginning, spend your money wisely and get yourself a host that will get the job done without breaking the bank.

Website Theme:

I recommend going to Etsy and browsing what themes they have, I bought mine from 17th Avenue Designs for about $65.

This is another expense that doesn’t have to be a huge financial burden. You just need something that looks neat and professional, it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles.

Courses:

I always recommend investing in courses because they’ll teach you things in a matter of hours that would normally take months (or years!) to learn on your own. A great first course to purchase is one on SEO (search engine optimization).

I just so happen to have created a course exactly highlighting my SEO strategy, so if you want to learn what I’ve learned and implemented, you can purchase my course!

My course goes over exactly what you need to include in your blogging pages, blog posts, strategy for creating your content calendar, keyword research, making each post SEO friendly, and so much more.

Seriously, if I was starting again this would be my dream course.

Learn My Exact Blogging Strategies That I Used to Start My 7-Figure Blog

3. Pick A Niche You Are Knowledgeable About And Like

If you start a blog about something you’re not knowledgeable about and don’t enjoy writing about, you’re setting yourself up for major failure.

You will be thinking about this 24/7 for the foreseeable future so you want to make sure it’s not something you hate.

And if you’re just picking a niche because you think it’s profitable, then you’re in the same situation.

I recommend blogging about what you enjoy, what you are passionate about, want to learn more about, and has growth potential. Blogging will already feel like a chore at times so it’s worth making it as enjoyable as possible.

My example of this is my own blog, it started with dorm room decor and organization and then became first apartment decor and now is home decor/organization. It also is the perfect marketing engine for my interior design business since it’s made me an “expert in my field”.

This blog has become a business that grew with me as I moved into different stages of my life, and it’s because I thought about this exact scenario when I picked my original niche.

4. Treat It Like Your Full Time Job (from the start!)

When I started my website, I was so excited and obsessed with it. I was a college student so while my friends were out at parties, I was in my dorm room blogging.

This caused a couple of eye rolls in the beginning—they’re not rolling their eyes anymore!—but it was that dedication that allowed me to go so far with my blog.

You have to be so disciplined and treat blogging like your job if you want it to become your full time business. Seriously, if you treat it like a hobby then that’s all it will ever be (which is fine if you want that).

When you blog with the mentality that it’s serious work then it can become that full time job you desire.

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5. Always Think Of Return On Investment (ROI)

To this day, I still do everything with ROI in mind.

ROI (return on investment) is getting someone out of what you put in. If you’re spending X amount of time doing something, you will get X results.

A great example is that my main goal in the beginning was to make my blog profitable, so with everything I did on my blog, I had that goal in mind and asked myself:

“Will completing this task lead to making me money?”

If yes, then I’d do it. If not, then I’d spend as little time on it as possible. For example, writing blog posts and making pins for Pinterest helps get page views on your website. I spent a lot of time on those two things.

Whereas my about page is necessary for my site but won’t make me any money so I took 30 minutes to make it and haven’t spent any more time on it.

Separate but important note that I should mention: get it into your head that no one cares about you when you’re blogging. Always write for the reader and what will give them the most value.

So honestly, no one really cares about your about page which means you should spend as little time as possible on that and really focus on making your blog the most helpful site for your niche.

6. You Won’t See Momentum On Your Blog For A Few Months

This is such a hard truth. Again, blogging is not a fast game nor a get-rich-quick business. You will not be seeing results quickly at all.

Typically you won’t see results until after the first year, which doesn’t sound that long but when you’re putting in the work every single day without gratification, it FEELS long.

It’s one of those things I recommend getting into your head sooner rather than later, learn to be consistent even if you’re not seeing results right away.

This initial grind and all the legwork you’re putting into your blog in the beginning is so incredibly important. And you will see results in the future! Just not the immediate future.

Blogging is a great way to earn passive income, so the work you do in the beginning can bring in earnings for years to come if you stick with it.

Be realistic with your expectations, it drives me nuts when people comment that they’ve been blogging for two months and see no results… yeah of course you don’t! It’s only been TWO MONTHS.

So yeah, you get the picture. Don’t expect immediate results, it takes Google and Pinterest time to establish that you’re a reputable blogger.

7. Do Not Do Too Much At Once

It can be super overwhelming in the beginning of your blogging journey to know what to focus on. Everyone is suggesting similar but different things and sometimes getting too much feedback hurts more than it helps.

But don’t be stuck thinking you have to do so much that you get overwhelmed and quit.

Focus only on one or two things at a time, prioritize and focus on your ROI. This will help you so much in the beginning.

Today it can feel like everyone is doing the most and if you don’t keep up then you’ll fall behind. But trust me, that couldn’t be further from the truth!

You have to be in this for the long haul which means you don’t want to set yourself up for burnout.

Learn My Exact Blogging Strategies That I Used to Start My 7-Figure Blog

8. Get Permission To Use Photos

Please let this be drilled into your head, YOU HAVE TO GET PERMISSION TO USE PHOTOS.

Like, “you ask them if you can use it and they say yes” type of permission. If you didn’t take the picture, then you need written permission to use it.

YES THAT GOES FOR EVERY IMAGE. So many people ask me what the loopholes are, if they can ever get an image without asking for permission, etc.

Please just get permission to use pictures. Assume you need it for everything, it’s not worth getting in trouble for using an image without permission.

9. Set Specific Goals

I’m a huge goals person and they’re such a motivator for me. It’s good to have short term goals so you know what to work on every day and long term goals to know what you’re working toward in general.

One of my first goals was to get accepted into an ad agency within my first year of blogging, which is sort of a medium term goal.

Writing two blog posts a day was my short term goal, and making blogging my full time job was my long term goal.

Here are some examples of great short term goals to set:

Write X blog posts per week. (Pick a number you can be consistent with)
Create X pins per post. (I recommend 4-5 in my experience)
Do keyword research for every single blog post and make sure each post is optimized. (I go over how to exactly do this in my course, Perfecting Blogging)

These are some examples of medium term goals:

Get accepted into an ad agency or affiliate program.
Build an email list. (I recommend doing this in the second or third year of blogging)
Create an offer to get subscribers to your email list. (This could be a printable or freebie or something that will provide value to your audience)

And finally, your long term goals will likely be personal to you! I knew I wanted this blog to fuel a full time interior design business for myself but you might want something else. Whatever it may be, having a long term goal is a great way to make sure your short and medium term goals are moving you towards that dream.