I have been a blogger since 2011 and it’s strange that I haven’t narrated my worst experiences as a blogger. You know, when you join this industry, no one will tell you what you’ll meet, it’s after a couple of months that you’ll come face to face with real life experience which is manifested online.
I will simply reveal what I have faced so far to help those who are just starting get prepared.
- Website numbers
I know most of you are wondering why this one is a challenge. Well, when I started by first website in 2011 I thought I could get millions of readers flocking to my site every now and then. I posted 5 articles and waited, to my surprise, nobody was interested in my content. I went ahead and posted 10 more, this time I was more optimistic. Shockingly, again nobody was interested. It took almost 3 months to get few readers to read my articles.
I noticed that when you start any business, you’ll go through a rough journey before breaking even. What I went through for 6 months almost killed my hopes, I was extremely depressed. Imagine for six months only 100 people read my articles. There is a time I even thought I was forcing myself on readers. No matter how good I wrote my articles, nobody noticed my efforts.
- Worst hosting experience
Before I migrated by websites to Kinsta and Bluehost, I had the worst experience with a local web hosting company. All my five websites were being hosted by one hosting company. One day I posted an article about the death of a popular celebrity, that article went viral. In a few minutes, more than 100,000 people had read it. One hour later, I realized that my website had been suspended. What broke my heart is the revenue I lost for the two days my site was offline. The hosting company had a policy that if a website exceeds resource limit, it’s suspended.
That week I lost over $300 in revenues simply because of the hosting company.
After about 3 weeks, I again faced the problem. I can honestly reveal that there is nothing traumatizing for a blogger like waking up ready to work only to realize that all your sites are suspended.
In that year again, all my sites were infected with viruses. I was forced to spend $100 to clean the sites.
I later said enough is enough and looked for better web hosting company. It’s after thorough research that I landed on Kinsta and Bluehost.Since then, all my sites have been hosted by the two sites. Kinsta hosts the most popular sites while Bluehost is for low traffic sites.
If you also want to host at Kinsts, check their prices here
To host with Bluehost, check their prices here
- Court case
One of my worst experiences in blogging was when I had a court case. In 2015 I wrote a certain story about the government, it was a sensitive story. One-day law caught up with me, I was arrested and put in a cell for three good days. That was the first time I was in a cell and the experience was humbling. But the three years I was battling the case strengthened me. To be honest, that was the time my websites grew tremendously.
One thing I came to understand is that as a blogger, you might post a story innocently thinking that it won’t put you in trouble, but after few days, you get arrested. It’s after I completed my court case that I realized anyone can be jailed.
- Threatening messages from fellow bloggers.
There is competition everywhere. One of my blogs grew to the extent of threatening established media houses. In the process I started receiving threatening messages, most of them informing me to go slow. The competitors even went ahead to deliberately click on my AdSense account so that it can be disabled. I had to remove the adverts from my websites.
