Note: While I have addressed this post to wanna-be-bloggers, I believe that it will be hugely helpful to current (and ex) bloggers too. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, so if you’re a blogger, adding your two cents to the conversation would be invaluable :-).

Dear Wanna-Be-Blogger,

I used to sit where you are… looking into the vast world of blogging, seeing all the possibilities and dreaming of the many ways my blog would be used. I know from the outside looking in, blogging may seem glamorous. Now, having accumulated three-years-and-counting of experience, I can look back and see that there have been some wonderful highs, and some painful lows.

My 14 year old daughter decided recently that she wanted to start her own blog, Calling Teen Girls: To Know God, Find Purpose, Love Life. While her reasons for doing so were admirable, reaching her fellow teenagers with a Godly message, I suddenly felt a deep burden to warn her about the cold, hard truth of blogging.

The Elite Blogging Academy course, for example, is an outstanding way to equip oneself as a blogger, but I’d like to invite you to grab a cuppa (as they say in New Zealand) and sit with me as I reveal the realities and realizations that have crept upon me over the past years as a blogger. I am going to be brutally honest, and I pray my sharing these words with you will serve as both a warning and a blessing to your heart.

This is the longest post I’ve ever written, but if you stick it out, I trust you’ll learn a lot that you may never otherwise have known.

Within each point, you’ll find two extra parts:

“On the Positive Side”: Here I present a bright and shiny reason for why blogging can actually be a blessing in your life.

“Before You Start Blogging”: In this point I provide some food for thought which may be wise to consider before you make your decision to start a blog.

So let’s jump right in…

Life Will Never Be Simple Again

For most people life is pretty cut and dry and can be fairly neatly packaged up into various parcels;

Family

Home

Church

Work

Business

As a blogger I have found that life will never be about just family, just home, or just church, again. Now there is always the extra dimension of blogging. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. But if I take my life as it is now and take blogging out of the equation, there would probably be a lot more whitespace. More room to just be rather than always having to think of the blog in between my family, home, and church responsibilities. Less deadlines, less pressure – all of which I place upon myself, of course.

On the positive side, I find that while most areas of my life revolve around others, community, and serving, hopefully without sounding selfish…

Blogging is a place that belongs to me – something I can do for my own individuality. Click To Tweet

And that is definitely a much needed release for me now as a busy homeschooling mother of 5 young ones! You may be at a place in your life where you feel this may be something you can do for the Lord, and that you’d enjoy.

Before you start blogging, dwell on the beauty of the relatively simple life you have now, and think long and hard about whether you want to fill in the blank spaces with a never ending, demanding commitment.

You Will Never Again Enjoy a Simple Experience

Being a blogger changes the way you see everything in life. You will constantly be on the lookout for ideas to write blog posts about. As a natural consequence, experiences that you will have once enjoyed, solely to be stored away in your mind and heart as memories, will now transform into potential material towards your next blog entry. Each opportunity to try something new is a possible idea to share. Every adventure and incident will be viewed as fuel to keep your blogging machine spinning.

On the positive side, I have found that while the basic thrills or hardships that make up life’s experiences are often immediately turned into writing material in my mind, there is a good side to this, too.

Blogging has caused me to read into situations and look for a godly perspective in each of them. Click To Tweet

Somewhere along the line I have started to automatically compute everything I go through in life as lessons that I can learn from, and these ultimately may be of worth to my readers.

Before you start blogging, consider the importance and blessing of simply enjoying the experiences of life for what they are; character-building memories in the making. Know that once your blog is underway, there will always be the temptation to not simply experience them at face value, but to dig for nuggets that you can share with your readers.

You Will Never Again Have Nothing To Do

Now, before I clarify this point, I must confess that having nothing to do has never been an option for me. There is always, always, always something to do, and I have brought my children up to never, never, never to use the word ‘bored’ in their vocabulary. If you spend even ten whole years living with our family, you will never once hear the word ‘bored’ or any of its variations. That is because, especially as believers in God, if we don’t have anything pressing or immediate to do, we can never do too much Bible reading, praying, encouraging, or serving. The notion of having nothing to do, is just non-existent as a God follower.

However, what I mean by the fact that you will never have nothing to do again as a blogger, is that even if you have completed your tasks on your to do list, or simply desire to take some downtime to read a book, the sheer volume of constant work to do on a blog may not allow it.

Deadlines for blog posts loom, there are technical updates to make, new plugins to research, comments to answer, sidebars to spruce up, networking to develop, blog hops to link up at, affiliate programs to sign up for, the list is literally endless!

On the positive side, you can learn a lot about choosing right priorities and developing discipline due to these necessities pulling at you. There are many times where it will be very satisfying to choose spending time with God over meeting the demands of your website. There will be opportunities to discipline yourself to go to sleep instead of staying up far later than you should to try to cross off some more items on your ideal blog list.

Most of all, your blog will bring you to your knees as you seek to be in control of it, rather than having it control you. Click To Tweet

God will use your blog as a tool to teach you many valuable lessons about what is really important in your life, and He will use your blog as a training ground for keeping an eternal perspective!

Before you start blogging, know that it will be a challenge to find downtime. Mentally it’ll be hard to shut down, often even well into the night, as your brain scrambles with the next actions to take, research to embark on, or the other countless possibilities to invest your time in. Appreciate the luxury of simply having nothing urgent or pressing to do. Bathe in the thought that you can just wind down at any given time, with nothing else calling your name, attention, or heart. Is this something that you are willing to give up?

You Will Never Be Able To Avoid Comparison

This is a hard one, my friend. Let’s be honest. Walking around on this earth without comparing ourselves, as women in particular, to magazine model beauty, American Idol talent, Hollywood star wealth, and Pinterest style homes is hard enough.

But blogging is like inviting all of that envy closer to home, stepping it up a notch, and dwelling on it for more hours than you’d care to admit. Because let me tell you, there are gorgeous blogs out there that have been designed by professionals that you and I may never be able to afford. There are successful bloggers on the next site around your corner who are making six figure incomes monthly! There are men and women blogging out there who have the most amazing gift of writing, whose words are an artform and who express themselves in ways you and I could only dream of.

And guess what, if you are a blogger who is serious about your blog, and you’re ‘out there’ on the net pretty much every day, you are going to come across them – like every day. My friend, sometimes, it’s not easy. It’s not easy reading about people adding 10,000 subscribers to their email list in the past couple of months, when you’re struggling to reach double or triple digits. It hurts. You know how much time and effort you’re pouring in, and you naturally compare yourself to others. It’s almost impossible to avoid.

On the positive side, however, as time passes, two things start to happen, by the grace of God. The first is that you’ll be reminded once again that God is sovereign, and that ultimately He is the One who controls what happens in every area of your life.

The One who opens and closes doors, the One who grants wealth and poverty, the One who gives and takes away, He is the One who is in total control of your life, blogging included.

Secondly, just as great a realization, is that…

What the world deems as success, in God’s eyes is often failure (Mark 8:36). Click To Tweet

Sure, some bloggers may be right on top, but where are they in their walk with the Lord, in their relationships?

And vice versa is true too, failure in the world’s eyes is often success in God’s! (Now that’s encouraging, isn’t it?!). Your small readership and your amateur blog may be touching a handful of people and affecting their lives in ways that will last an eternity. Your choosing to focus on serving the Lord by spending the majority of time with your family, at the expense of a profitable blog, is highly praised by the Lord, and an admirable choice. A holy choice, in fact.

So, all that to say, that when (not if) you are confronted with the many opportunities to envy and compare yourself and your blog, know that this too the Lord will use in refining you, in purging your need for approval by man, for seeking firstly and foremostly His Kingdom and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33), and I believe that your skin will slightly thicken, while your urges to exercise comparison will slowly but surely diminish. I have found, as one who has greatly struggled with envy in the past, that the lessons I’ve learned online in this area, have helped me tremendously offline too. Glory to God!

Before you start blogging, be prepared to struggle with comparison. I once heard a very ‘big’ blogger saying “Never compare your beginning with someone else’s middle.” This helped me very much, in fact, it almost cured me of my comparison struggles.

Blogging Is A Beautiful Thing

I don’t know whether I’ve encouraged or discouraged you with my words today. I guess my intention was to do both. I wanted to discourage you from starting, or continuing, to blog by sharing the cold, hard truths with you. But I also intended to encourage you to continue on that path being informed and aware of what to expect. If you still feel the Lord’s call to pursue blogging, go right ahead.

Because blogging is actually a beautiful thing! Click To Tweet

If your Biblical priorities are in order, you heart is submitted to God’s guidance, and your calling to do so is clear, God can and will use your blog in the most awe-inspiring ways.

Your blog will be:

A ministry that you can carry out from the comfort of your own home, to people all over this Earth.

A tool to affect the very lives of other precious women, wives, and moms with the message that God has placed on your heart.

A place to express yourself, your thoughts, your burdens, your longings, your desires, your beliefs, and your soul to others who will listen and learn.

A vehicle through which you can share The Gospel to a lost and dying world out there; to enter homes that you would not ordinarily have been invited into, and to declare the salvation that its occupants so desperately need.

A platform on which to develop your writing, honing in on ‘finding your voice,’ and possibly using as a springboard to publishing an eBook or traditional book one day.

A means to help with your finances as you earn some income to assist in the running of your home, and in giving to others around you as you see the need.

Yes. Blogging is a blessing! As with anything in our sinful world, it can have its downfalls and be an excuse for sin, but as with all that is submitted to God’s Word and Heart, it can be a visible picture of His indescribable, immeasurable and undeserved Grace as we touch the lives of others in His Name.

Well, where are you at on your blogging or wanna-blog journey. Can you add anything to this list? What stood out to you in this post? Let’s start a conversation :-).

I would like to highly and personally recommend the Elite Blogging Academy whether you’re a seasoned blogger or just about to start out. I wish I had purchased this course as I was entering the world of blogging. It would have made the whole process so much more stress-free. I did invested in the course after a couple of years of blogging and it has been a huge blessing to me!

Admission to Elite Blog Academy includes access to the full course curriculum, including 12 focused unit lessons split into four powerful modules—Refine Your Message, Grow Your Audience, Monetize Your Platform, and Build Your Business.

Each unit lesson includes videos, slideshow presentations and handouts designed to clearly explain exactly what your next step should be, and why. Each subsequent module builds on the previous lessons, and together these four modules will give you a clear, comprehensive framework for creating a successful, profitable blog.