8 habits of successful bloggers

Starting a blog and growing it isn’t an overnight thing. You don’t just write one blog post and make $6000 a month blogging. You’ll need to change your daily routine and develop some new habits. Here we want to share 8 things successful bloggers do a little differently, habits that have personally helped us grow this blog on our own in less than 2 years.

If you’re one of those people who’ve been thinking about starting a blog, but been putting off for a while, because you never feel ready…Stop making that excuse and go read this step by step guide. You’ll find everything you need to know to launch and make your blog grow fast in the first few months. You’ll figure out the rest as you go. And yes, we were the same way – it took us quite a while to finally take the step and start writing this blog.

8 Habits Of Successful Bloggers

Now, let’s get into the 8 of successful bloggers, the habits that helped us grow this blog over the last years.

1. Waking up early

Nobody knew about this blog in 2015. It did exist. However, we always found excuses to do something else and not work on it. Biggest excuse? We don’t have time for it, right now.

The year we decided to become a morning person, we saw the fastest growth. Now, suddenly we had time. And even though we were overthinking and questioning everything we did in the beginning, we actually started creating and promoting our content more consistently. Which then turned into a habit we practiced every day.

2. Writing in the morning

Waking up two hours before we had to, helped us actually create when we were fresh and not right before we were going to bed. Such a huge difference.

We were more focused, our thought was clear, we knew what we wanted to say. Plus the deadline of two hours pushed us to finish what we were writing.

Therefore if you’re always making the excuse you don’t have time to write for your blog, make it the first thing you focus on during the day.

3. Writing things down

When you’re writing a blog, ideas will come to you at awkward times.

When you’re going out for a walk, before you’re going to sleep or while you’re talking to someone.

For us bloggers, often, those are blog post ideas, product ideas, sometimes promotional strategies or monetization strategies.

Write them down!

Whether you use your phone, bullet journal or a piece of paper, put them in there. This way you can keep a list of blog post ideas and strategies to try, without spending much time on brainstorming or researching. (which can often “eat” a whole day and make you miserable!)

4. Doing things you don’t like

When you start a blog, writing isn’t the only thing you do. Shocking we know.

In fact, it’s the part that takes about 20% of the time.

The rest is organizing & planning your content, promoting it, engaging with your audience, thinking of new strategies and ideas to get better and to grow, finding ways to monetize your blog without selling your soul and way too many administrative tasks.

Now, we don’t feel like doing most of these things, like ever. We never feel like researching keywords to SEO our posts, applying for affiliate programs or doing much promotion. But we do it anyway. And we do something we don’t like, every single day.

Not because we're a masochist, but because we know these tasks need to get done and because we know how we feel after we're done with everything. There are things nobody else can do for us. If we fail to do them because we don’t feel like it that day, we know we will see no progress. And no progress = no bueno. You need to always strive for progress.

5. Investing in the right things

Blogging is a pretty inexpensive way to make money working for yourself. You don’t need to buy equipment, you don’t need to produce physical products, you’re basically making money by using your brain and the internet.

However, you do need to set a good foundation for your blog to grow. There are 3 things worth investing in – great hosting, engaging WordPress theme, and a scheduler.

We personally use and recommend:

Siteground (get 60% off)
Studiopress (We use Divine theme)
Tailwind (get a free trial)

One other tool we use is Grammarly. It’s an automated proofreader which helps us create better content so much faster. We’re talking grammar, word choice, punctuation, formatting, synomyms – everything. You can go Premium for all these notable features, but you can also get a free basic Grammarly account here.

6. Learning when to take a break

Working from home in your pajamas seems like a ton of fun, until you actually do it for a week.

Let’s skip over the part where you’re unable to get motivated and get a single thing done, and instead drink 3 coffees and read 4 blog posts on how to do something.

Because once you actually start doing things and get into that flow, it’s pretty hard to stop.

We've had days when we didn’t get away from the computer from 9 am until 3 pm. Even though we had to pee. Then, finally, we'd go pee and get back to glue myself to that screen for 7 more hours.

And We're writing about living a healthy lifestyle. Integrity? What’s that?

We didn’t feel good telling people how to take care of themselves, because an older version of us knew how to do it. We knew we needed to be that person again. That person who knows when to take a break, the person who has salad and not coffee for lunch.

So what we've started doing is setting a timer. It helps tremendously. Even if we don’t do it the same minute: we know in a little bit we will take a break.

This habit is huge in the long run. You can’t depend on bursts of productivity followed by days or weeks of burnout. Learn how to set limits and actually stick to them.

This way you can stay consistent, which is better for your physical and mental health, for your family, for your audience and for your blog.

7. Committing to finishing

Here comes the timer again! Don’t let blog posts or minor tasks take over your life.

Sometimes we underestimate how much time a task will take, but many times we overestimate it. We try to make everything solid and want to be as helpful as possible.

Here’s what you need to do: Keep it short and get to the point. Then edit and send it out to the world.

One of our main goals whenever we sit down to write a blog post or make the pins for the week is to have them finished.

We try to do our best within an hour, sometimes less, rarely more depending on the topic and whether we need to do research.

But, yeah, having that deadline and that goal of simply “we have to finish this now” or today, keeps us focused. This way we make sure there are fewer half-written brilliant articles on our computer that we never get to share.

8. There’s always more to learn

We're grateful for all the jobs we had before we started earning an income blogging. They taught us a lot of things – how to communicate, how to network, how to work with cell cultures, how to use a mass spectrometer, how to properly fold an umbrella and even how to make candles (that’s right!).

But when you start working for yourself, you’ll feel like you’re on a crash course all the time. Especially if you’re blogging or working online. Things change so quickly you can never get too comfortable. You need to be adaptable and to be willing to learn new things.

So embrace it! You’re going to learn no matter what you decide to focus on in life. Don’t make the excuse you don’t know how to do something in order to achieve a dream or a goal. You can always google it.

And with these wise words, we're going to go back to #6 and #7.