Hobby blogger – Blogging doesn’t have to be about making money

So what is a hobby blogger? A hobby blogger is someone who blogs purely for enjoyment, as a hobby and not for profit.

Most of the bloggers I know do blog for profit but to be honest, I don’t really know any bloggers who do it solely for the money. I personally couldn’t write consistently about something I’m not passionate about and I think that’s true for most bloggers.

My hosting company Lyrical Host run a really fantastic Facebook group and in one of the posts recently another group member mentioned that her friend is a hobby blogger and gets frustrated because all of the blog posts she reads for bloggers are aimed at making money.

So, today I wanted to share some blogging advice purely for you if you’re just blogging for your own enjoyment and not for money.

Top Tips For Hobby Bloggers

I think blogging is a wonderful hobby and if you don’t need to make an income from it, this definitely free’s you up to be as creative as you want.

Below are some tips to help you get the most out of your blogging hobby.

Free blogging or paid

In general, I recommend getting your own domain and paid hosting straight away but this obviously comes at a price. I’ve written about free blogging with examples of costings if you want to invest in this post Set Up A Blog For Free.

From a professional point of view, a paid domain does look so much better. And paid hosting gives you more security and certainly with the hosting I use (LYRICAL HOST) I get so much support. I’m not a techie person and they help me so much with this kind of thing. In the past when I haven’t had such good hosting, I’ve spent days stressed, in tears… because I didn’t know how to fix a problem on my blog.

That being said, if you’re not making any income from your blog, then you will need to decide for yourself if you want to keep your blog free or if you want to invest some money. Most hobbies do cost money, so take that into consideration as this could really make your blogging experience better.

Find your voice

I feel this is good advice for all bloggers. Find your own voice. I know this has been an ongoing thing for me. I definitely feel like I’ve now found MY blogging voice. I update old posts regularly and sometimes when I read the original posts I can really see how my voice has changed over the years.

The way I speak on my blogs is a mix of how I would speak to a coaching client and how I would speak to a friend. For me, this works really well.

I think as a hobby blogger, you can really focus on talking to a friend when you write if this is something you want.

Know your audience

Who is it that you want to read your blog? Is it just friends and family? Do you want to connect with like-minded people from around the world? I encourage you to get clear about this and create a person in your mind who you write to.

This person may change depending on what you’re writing about. In general, when I write blogging posts, I am writing for someone just starting out blogging or still fairly new to blogging and those people are wanting to create a profitable blog. This post is obviously not aimed at the same person.

Let’s say you want to blog about your family life and your passion for growing your own food and home cooking. You may want to connect with other families with the same sort of interests. This way you can share your ideas and learn from others too.

Or maybe you’re into crafting and love sharing ideas, you’ll more than likely want to connect with other people who also love this kind of thing.

Connect elsewhere with your audience

This is something that’s entirely up to you. But if you actually want people outside of friends and family to read your blog then it’s a good idea to connect with people elsewhere. Which social media platform do you personally like?

This will give you a place to share your blog posts and share little snippets into your life.

TIP: Instagram is very hard to get people from their site to a blog. However, if you enjoy using Instagram, why not consider making this your blog platform? Rather than having a traditional blog like mine, you can mini-blog on Instagram. My typical blog posts are over 1000 words and I wouldn’t recommend that on Instagram but you can write shorter posts. The only thing to be aware of is that you then don’t own it. And Instagram could shut you down without notice.

Also, connecting on social media with your community (readers) will help them to build a relationship with you.

Structure your content

Of course, you can ramble on about absolutely anything you want. I can definitely ramble and go off on random tangents making it very difficult for anyone else to follow. So, I do encourage you to structure your posts.

What do you want to talk about? Make subheadings. I tend to add my blog title and then before I do anything else, I add in my subheadings so that I stick to what I want to say and stay on topic.

Also, breaking up your post with subheadings makes it much easier for other people to read your blog.

A long 1000 word post would put may people off online. In a book, it works okay but online it doesn’t, so break up your posts.

Wordcount is quite a big thing for bloggers wanting to generate an income but not so much for hobby bloggers. In general, I would say to go for a minimum of 300 words, ideally 500 but you have much more freedom to write as much or as little as you want.

Pinterest

I’m a big fan of Pinterest. It drives the biggest amount of traffic to my blogs. Now, if you personally enjoy using Pinterest and you do want to drive targeted traffic to your blog, this is definitely a platform to use.

You can use Pinterest for free. I use A scheduling service called Tailwind – You can read more about I use Pinterest and tailwind but I really don’t think this is necessary for hobby bloggers. I think if you create 1 or 2 images that will work on Pinterest per blog post, then your targeted audience will naturally grow.

I create my Pinterest Images in Canva and they have template sizes already set up to make this easy. See my Canva Tutorial.

Here are a few tips to follow…

• Your pins should be vertical (use the Canva Pinterest template)
• Add text to your image describing what your blog post is about
• Your text needs to be bold and not too much of it
• Add a title, alt text and description to your image on the blog
• Share your pin to your own relevant Pinterest boards.

This is an example of a good Pinnable image.

For your enjoyment

The bottom line is that it’s your blog and it should always feel enjoyable and genuine for you. This is your space and you can decide what you want to do with your blog.

Hobby Blogging

I hope you’ve found today’s blog post really helpful. Please do reach out to me and ask if you have specific questions and I’ll do my best to answer.

I’d love to hear about your blogging experiences so far. I love chatting about all things blogging and whilst blogging is my business and I do need to make money from it, I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t passionate about it.

Best wishes and happy blogging – Wendy