How Starting a Blog Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

I’ve been thinking recently about how starting this debt blog was a really important turning point for both me and the hubby.

This blog has helped us to finally face up to our debts and start to turn our finances around. Not only that, but this blog has actually opened doors for me personally too.

It’s given me a source of income – albeit a small income right now and irregular at that – but if I continue to grow this blog, then hopefully the income will grow too. This blog also acts as my portfolio of work and has helped me to get freelance writing jobs because clients can see evidence of my writing style right here on this site.

I first started this blog without any goals in mind other than being able to vent my thoughts ‘somewhere’ about how I was feeling about the stress and worry that our debt problems were causing us. But it wasn’t long before I began setting financial goals for myself and I started using my blog to motivate me in achieving those goals.

For anyone reading this who isn’t already a blogger, I thought I’d let you know how starting a blog can really help you with your personal goals.

First of all, how easy it is to start a blog?

Starting a blog these days is fairly straightforward and you don’t have to pay a fortune to set one up. The first thing to do is decide what you want to blog about (what your goals are) and which platform and hosting provider you want to use.

For example, you could use WordPress like I have done with this site. WordPress has many free and premium themes and once you get the hang of using this platform, it’s pretty straightforward to use. Blogger is also very user-friendly or you could use companies like 1&1 which make setting up a site very straightforward.

Once you have your blog set up, you just need to publish content frequently on your chosen topic and start building your readership. Commenting on other blogs in the same niche as you is a great way to get some traffic in the early days of blogging and you’ll be surprised at how many people will want to read about what you’ve got to say.

I’d recommend starting a blog to anyone looking for ways to motivate themselves and keep on track with their personal goals.

Here are a couple of ways a blog can help you do just that:

You can use your blog as a progress diary

This is what I do here on this site and what many other bloggers do too. Every month, I post an update on how things are going for me financially and how much debt I’ve managed to pay off. If I think I’m not going to have a great month, I usually work a bit harder so that I can post a more positive update on my financial goals!

When you’re posting your personal stuff out for the world to see, it does kind of have that effect on you. So posting progress updates is a great way to keep you focused on what you’re trying to achieve – and it’s also nice to see how far you’ve come too in working towards your goals.

Your readers will motivate you to work hard and pick you up when you’re down

If I hadn’t have started this blog and become part of the personal finance community, I have serious doubts as to whether the hubby and I would have made quite as much progress in paying off our debts. That’s because the readers of this blog and the blogging community in general have really spurred me on to keep going in our mission to pay off debt. That’s the beauty of blogging that you don’t always think about.

If you can build up a following of your blog, your readers will keep you accountable to your goals. You have your own support network and that means such a lot when you’re working towards some tough personal goals.

When you’re doing great, your readers will be happy for you and give you a virtual hi-five. When you’re not doing that well, your readers will encourage you to pick you back up and when they do that, you just have to keep going. You can’t let your readers down after all!

In summary

If you’re working towards a personal goal, financial or other, why not start a blog about it? If you do, you could end up with an audience that have got your back, who want you to succeed almost as much as you do. Plus there’s a whole heap of other benefits that blogging could bring such as an extra income and other work related opportunities. And did I mention that blogging is also a lot of fun?

Is blogging helping you to achieve your personal goals?

*Image courtesy of Flickr