Balance your blog with your full time job part 2

10 Tips for How to Balance Your Blog with Your Day Job

Part 2

In last week’s post I shared 5 of my top tips for how to balance your blog with your day job. Today I’m finishing out the list with 5 more.

6. Find Other Side Hustlers

We all have the well-meaning family and friends who support the idea of our side hustle, but not the reality.

They love seeing your photos, hearing about your website, and maybe even reading your articles. But when the tasks that generate that content mean that you have less time to prioritize the same things they do, that support can start to wane.

Balancing your blog (or other side hustle) with your day job depends a lot on your community. Finding other side hustlers who are sacrificing their evenings and weekends and trying to resolve the same issues you are (marketing, photo editing, content ideas, etc.) makes life a lot easier. No one with a startup wants to feel guilty about the work they need to put into it. And they don’t want to have to explain themselves, either.

Finding other people who are doing what you’re doing eliminates a lot of those problems.

It’s also worth mentioning that your fellow side hustlers have the potential to be some of your greatest resources. Maybe someone is fantastic with a camera and is willing to do a trade with someone who is awesome at graphic design. Same goes for proofreading, video editing, and website expertise.

Everyone who puts themselves out there with a blog is likely doing everything on their own at first. And we each have skills that come to us more easily than others. Create yourself a community that can help one another.

7. Protect Your Blog from the Outset

It’s honestly almost too easy to start a blog the wrong way. And if you do, it’s going to be a time-suck and throw you off-balance once you get it going.

Everyone who starts a blog is excited about the fun parts; choosing a domain, designing a brand kit, and posting content. Fewer bother to do any research about their competition in the space, which domains are owned by whom, and whether their desired handles are available across all social platforms.

This is just one way you can end up in trouble.

Just last week in my home town a small restaurant closed to undergo a full rebranding when a larger company hit them with a trademark lawsuit (and won).

Lawsuits happen to small startups, too.

You might be rolling your eyes and thinking that the larger company was wasting its time and money going after such a small restaurant. You would be wrong. In the world of intellectual property (which includes things like trademarks), vigilant protection of what you own is crucial. Since there is nothing tangible that you can take possession of and say you own it, the only way to prove you own something is to put the right protections in place and then diligently defend them.

If you don’t, the legal system assumes that you don’t care that much about owning it. It’s value to you decreases, and the field is open to competitors.

Your blog and its contents are your intellectual property. You want to make sure anyone who visits your website understands that and agrees to only use your blog’s content the way you say they can.

How do you do that? There are three legal pages that you absolutely must have on your blog. You can purchase them through my legal store in the Startup Protection Package.

8. Don't be Afraid to Talk About Your Blog

If you get up in your head about your blog, you’ll not only be afraid to talk about it, you’ll shy away from actually posting content. And it’s very easy to get up in your head.

There are tons of amazing bloggers everywhere, in every industry, who have been running their blogs for a lot longer than you have. And it’s easy to feel like you just don’t measure up, especially when you’re still balancing your blog with your day job and haven’t been able to make it your full-time gig yet.

It’s so important to remember not to compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 10, 15, or 22.

And really, I’d recommend not comparing your Chapter 1 to anything at all. It takes all the fun out of blogging, and inevitably makes you shy and uncertain about what you’re creating.

So talk about what you’re doing. Talk about it loudly and often, and use that to fuel your confidence.

9. Pick One Place to Promote (Just One)

There are multi-million dollar earners who call themselves business coaches that will tell you that you need to be omnipresent. That is, if you want to establish credibility and brand recognition, you must be everywhere all the time.

If your primary platform is your blog, that means promoting your posts on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and maybe even YouTube.

I believe this is the fastest way to kill your blog.

When you are balancing your blog with your day job, it’s a lot just to keep up with posting. Pushing that post out to every social platform and search engine under the sun is daunting. And you’re bound to cut corners so that your promotional efforts are wasted anyway.

To drive traffic to your blog, you have to be promoting it in the right places, to the right audience, with gripping, stop-the-scroll copy and creatives.

In my opinion, it’s impossible to achieve that everywhere when you’ve got a day job that’s still paying your bills.

My solution for this is to pick just one platform you want to pull readers from and promote your posts there. I highly recommend Pinterest for bloggers, and I suggest using Tailwind to making pinning even easier.

Why Pinterest?

Multiple reasons:

Pinterest is a search engine, not a social media platform.
Because it’s not a social platform, it’s purpose is NOT to keep viewers on its site. It lives to send its users to external sites. Unlike platforms like Instagram, which do everything in their power. to prevent viewers from leaving the app.
Go where your audience lives. People most likely to read a blog post are more likely to be looking for content to consume on Pinterest than on any other platform.

You don’t have. to start here just because I say so. Choose whichever platform works best for your content and audience. The bottom line is to just pick one for now, become an expert at it, and worry about expanding later.

10. Establish Your Know-Like-Trust Factor

Something I mentioned in my last post was how difficult it can be to stand out in a veritable sea of bloggers. In that context I was talking about choosing your niche, but today I want to talk about the importance of your know-like-trust factor.

If there is an influencer whose content you love, did you find them recently or back when they were starting out? Think if you can of someone who you’ve been following since the beginning. What did you love about them back then?

If I was a gambler, I’d say part of your answer is that you loved how relatable they were. You felt like you knew them. Maybe you even wished you guys could be friends in real life.

If that’s how you answered, you’re clearly not alone. Those influencers let their audiences get to know them, grow to like them, and come to trust them through their content. That’s why brands started flocking to them to promote their products, and it’s why many of us now complain that influencers are too out of touch to be relatable anymore. I’d even go as far as to say that I think the erosion of the know-like-trust factor with some of these influencers is why their growth has plateaued.

Don’t underestimate how important it is for your audience to know, like, and trust you. Focusing on this will make it easier to grow your blog while you’re still working full time because to get it right you must be yourself, and let your personality come out in your content. If you’re always competing with established influencers and keeping up with the Joneses, there won’t be as much room for YOU to shine through. And it’s a heck of a lot more time-consuming.

Balancing your blog with your day job doesn’t have to be as daunting as it seems. Don’t let it discourage you when you see those who have gone ahead and already turned it into a full-time gig! Get yourself organized, make sure you’re protecting what you create, be yourself, and surround yourself with like-minded individuals.