Blogging is harder than it looks. It is so much more than words and pretty pictures and hitting the "post" button. Roniece Wright shares with us what she has learned from her three failed blogs.

5 things I learned from my three failed blogs - belong magazine blog

LESSON 1: People need to take you seriously if you want them to engage in your content.

When I first started blogging, I began with a Tumblr blog. If someone were to ask me what I blogged about, I honestly had no clear answer. I basically blogged about whatever I felt like talking about, whatever I did that today, or whatever I felt was important for people to know. Needless to say, my blog had absolutely no direction.

I had no audience, no valuable content, no professionalism, nothing.

Do you know what the craziest part was? I had the nerve to try to monetize as if someone would trust me with their money. You need to be extremely honest with yourself when it comes to creating something and putting it out there for the world to see. Even if it was just Google ads, I didn’t have the valuable content (or even the simple things like a domain) to have someone take me seriously enough to click them. Do I even need to express how badly that “business” quickly failed?

LESSON 2: Just because you love to do something, doesn’t make it a passion.

I’ve always been a writer, but once I discovered poetry, I went into overload! I wanted to write all the time and share my poetry with others. It helped me to express my emotions and build my writing skills. Well, there I was – back at the drawing board of my blog.

This time, something was different. I actually cared if people read my content and I honestly cared what they thought of it my craft. I craved feedback and collaboration with other creatives. I actually loved the “work” I was doing. This forced me to start whipping my blog into shape. I wasn’t just some teenager writing on a blog when I got bored. I was an author now. I was a poet. I was now valuable.

I soon started to lose interest in writing poetry. I still loved the art of it, listening to it, reading it, etc., but it got to the point where I would write whenever I felt like I had something to say. I would only blog about my poetry when I felt like it. I didn’t necessarily have to bored to do so, but I definitely had to be in the mood. I began to realize that if I didn’t feel the need to invest the time into learning about my craft, doing the work, etc., maybe this wasn’t something I could truly see myself doing as a career.

I wrote two amazing books of poetry and shut my poetry blog down. I was doing a disservice to my readers by not blogging or putting out content consistently.

LESSON 3: Just because you love something deeply, doesn’t make it a passion.

When you’re passionate about something, you don’t mind doing it for the rest of your life. When you get to college, you start thinking about what you want to do with you life. You start thinking about what you love to do and how you can make that into a career. I still had a deep love for blogging, but I was at a point in my life where I had nothing to blog about. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes I make with my other three blogs and considering I loved blogging so much, if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right.

While trying to figure all of this out, I ended up becoming friends with a girl who was beginning her natural hair journey. I was so skeptical about starting my own natural hair journey, but once I started to do my research on the culture behind it and see her curls come through, I made the transition! During my transition, I would watch so many natural hair tutorials and read so many natural hair blogs. I loved talking about it and learning about it, because I was so clueless on what to do with my hair and how to keep it healthy.

I started a natural hair blog and I loved it. I loved connecting with the other creatives, I loved blogging so consistently and being a constant resource for the people who were currently going through their transition process. I was offering hair consultations to monetize and was truly building a connection with my audience.

It was amazing. Well, until I started realizing that blogging didn’t have to be a hobby.

As I started paying closer attention the bloggers I followed, I realized that talking about natural hair was their full-time job. I started questioning if talking about natural hair was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Needless to say, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t. It was just something I truly enjoyed to talk about and learn about, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be a natural hair expert as a career. Not to mention, college showed me how much I love to talk about and learn about psychology, but being absolutely positive that I did NOT want to go into that field as a career only proved this fact to myself even more.

LESSON 4: You usually find your passion through your failures.

After abandoning in my natural hair blog for about four months, but still having the craving feeling to blog again, I started really thinking about what went wrong. I realized that I wasn’t necessarily passionate about natural hair, I was actually passionate about how my blog taught women how to better themselves and became a constant resource for them to do so.

I dug a little deeper and realized that the actual art of blogging and uplifting women had always been my common denominators. These are the things I was truly passionate about.

LESSON 5: You put the necessary effort, time, energy, and financial investment into the things that you are absolutely passionate about.

Boss Lady Blogger was born! Now that I was finally following my passion, everything changed! I was teaching women how to blog successfully and it lit a fire inside of me to do so. I constantly wanted to learn about my craft, always had a million ideas that I wanted to create for the blog, and I wanted to constantly connect with women and teach them everything I knew.

I knew that this was something I was truly meant to do for the rest of my life when I made my first large investment into it. I believed in Boss Lady Blogger so much that I wanted to make sure it excelled. This wasn’t $18 a year I was putting into a domain. This was the kind of money you set aside for rent. Once it was spent there was no way to get it back. I knew all of these risks, but I truly saw it as an investment into making Boss Lady Blogger a career.

Once I started to monetize and turn Boss Lady Blogger into an actual business, I found a passion for business as well and realized that it was a crucial part of blogging for someone who’s goal was to turn it into something full-time due to having the same passion for it as I do.

I now teach beginner bloggers who are exactly where I was during my last three failed blogs how to turn their blogs not only into a constant resource for their audience, but also into professional and profitable business as I have done with Boss Lady Blogger. I truly love what I do and after three failed blogs later, I am extremely good at it.

Roniece Wright is the founder and creator of BossLadyBlogger where she teaches beginner bloggers how to go from amateur to pro on their transition from blog to professional and profitable business. She believes, “Professionalism builds trust. Your audience has to trust you for anything on your blog to succeed. I help you get to a place where your audience trusts you enough to pay you.” You can follow Roniece on Instagram & Twitter.