If you want to run your blog as any kind of business, you’ll have to have a product or service to sell at some point. When you’ve been blogging a while, you’ll inevitable have learned a lot, sometimes without knowing it. Then, when you start to think about monetising, you don’t know what you know. This is where you need to lock down what your definable knowledge is.
If you’re having trouble deciding how to make your money from blogging, this post is the best I’ve seen for listing the range of options.
Full disclosure: I’m pretty terrible at knowing what I know. I tend to automatically presume that everything I know is exactly what everyone else knows. It was only in 2014 that I realised, “Hey, I do know a lot about this blogging stuff” …and a few months later, Bloggers and Bacon was born. Funny that. And then I got sick of writing on multiple blogs and I’m editing, updating and republishing the content here on NormalNess.
Definable Knowledge
So what do you do if you want to know what you know? How do you understand this definable knowledge so you can share it with others?
The first step I take is simple (and a bit boring, to be honest). I write down what I do. In the process of creating a blog post, you use things like:
- Creativity
- English skills
- SEO skills
- Image skills
- Social media skills
And to do those things you use tools such as:
- WordPress/Blogger/CMS skills
- Newsletters (eg MailChimp)
- Link shorteners (eg Bitly)
- Social media platforms (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn)
And that’s just for starters. The more you dig, the more skills and tools you’ll find that you have knowledge of.
Ask yourself:
- What do I do? (Write, blog, build community…)
- How do I do it? (What tools do I use?)
- Who helps me do this? (Who have I learned from?)
- When do I do this? (Skills such as time management…)
- Why do I do this? (Enjoyment, passion, communication…)
How do you work out what skills you’ve gained from blogging (or any other activity you take part in)?
