The first thing I would say to anyone looking to blog full-time is to take your time.

I often receive emails from people who are thinking of quitting their regular jobs to become a full-time blogger, and while I understand the "itch" to strike out on your own, it's not something I'm quick to recommend. Especially after taking a look at their site and realizing that they don't even really have much of a blog to begin with. And now they're under the impression they can just starting blogging full-time and earn a living.

The sad reality of blogging is that it takes time to build a successful blog. Unless of course, you have some radical new concept or are privy to information 99.99% of the population does not or will not have access to. If not, odds are, it's going to require a lot of time and effort on your part to get your blog to a level where it's generating enough revenue to supplement, or entirely replace, your primary income.

I'm not saying it will take years, but it will take a lot longer than overnight.

So if you're thinking of quitting your day job to pursue a career as a professional blogger, please don't. Not unless you have enough savings to carry you over until your blog is profitable or cover your expenses for an extended period of time.

That would be my first piece of advice.

The second would be to choose a topic that is something that you can see yourself writing about for an at-length period of time. I would go so far as to suggest that it be something you won't mind researching and writing about even if you knew you would NEVER earn a single Naira from it.

Because chances are very high that you probably won't earn anything from your blog.

A successful blog takes, months, even years to build up so you need to be willing to think, write and engage a certain topic for that long. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend you pursue blogging full-time. And most certainly not to quit your job over it.

But if this is something you're set on doing, then I suggest you commit yourself to working as hard as you can to build your blog into something that will eventually sustain you over the long-term.

Many people start with the goal of a certain amount of money, “I need to earn $20,000 a year, I need to earn $100,000 a year” or whatever it might be. And there's nothing wrong with that, except the fact that revenue is the byproduct of traffic + conversions.

Whenever I start a blog, or help anyone launch a blog, I always recommend that they start with a strategy built around traffic and set specific traffic and conversion oriented goals early on. My rule of thumb is to increase by 10-20% each month.

You want to set traffic goals that you know you can sustain and grow over an extended period of time. You always want a blog with a consistent stream of traffic, and not one where it peaks for a week, then drops off for the next 3 months.

Whatever growth you achieve, you want to be able to sustain it, so rather than set massive (and almost unattainable goals), set smaller goals and increase as you go.