Blogging is known by many to be something to be like writing on an online diary or journal. That's probably how it originated anyway.

These days, blogging is not like in the past. Online diary type of blogs are dying and this is partially due to the rise of social media and other networks. With the ease of social media, people can easily type without learning how to do basic HTML and CSS.

Blogging as most people know it is pretty dead, and it has now evolved into a business thing. You may have seen the plethora of websites on how you can begin blogging and setting up a blog.

Here are 5 things you should know before starting a blog.

1. Identify your niche

A lot of bloggers will advise you to get a niche before blogging. It's not a must but it's recommended if you're new.

This is because having a niche keeps you and your readers focused. If you're writing on travel and in the next section, you're talking about politics, your readers may not be truly engaged.

However, you can have a multi-niche website if you're not comfortable with niche-ing down. There are big sites that have multiple niches and are still highly authoritative. Think Forbes, TrustedReviews and so on.

2. Determine if you have time

Next, you need to know first if you actually have the time to blog. Many people create websites that die off simply because they're not determined enough or they don't have the time to update their site.

As starting a blog may not be free (in terms of money and time), you may want to think twice.

3. Do you want to make money or blog for fun?

Also, you have to identify your intentions. If you wish to blog for fun, you can even use Steemit. Other alternatives would be Medium, WordPress.com or Blogger.

If you wish to blog for income, then you may want to go the self-hosted route. Here's a good article on what self-hosting is.

4. Determine your monetization method

This one's only applicable for those who wish to earn money from blogging.

You should have some idea of how you're going to monetize your content before you even start. If you're going the affiliate marketing route, your aim may be different. You may want to go more niche / narrow in topic. This is to give yourself some authority in the eyes of readers.

If you prefer to write news articles or some fun-type of articles, then advertising may be more suitable. Not all kinds of articles can promote a product / service. For those types of articles, you may want to use advertising on your blog. Think Mediavine, Adsense, Media.net and so on.

There are other ways to make money - sell courses, sell services, open a job board and many other methods. Try to think of how you wish to make money first.

5. Blogging can be easy or really hard

Depending on what you wish to achieve, blogging can be really difficult or rather easy.

If you hope to earn lots of money from it, there's so much to learn. Assuming you can already write well, you still need to think of how to get readers. The hardest part is getting people to read your blog.

You will need to learn the ins and outs of SEO (search engine optimization) if you wish to get visitors from Google, Bing and other search engines. You also need to learn how to promote on other networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Quora, Twitter and many more.

Apart from just getting blog traffic, you also need to learn how to manage a blog. Some things can be a bit technical but you don't need to learn programming to actually run a website. There are plenty of articles on the internet already covering questions you may have when beginning a site.

If you have the budget, you can even hire people to help you in certain things. Once you've reached a certain level, hiring others to do certain tasks is actually recommended for scaling the blog.

In a nutshell

Blogging in today's terms can seem daunting at first but once you get the grip of it, it isn't too difficult to earn money.