Blogging Mistakes I’ve Made And How To Avoid Them

Hey lovelies if you didn’t see in my How I Tripled My Blog Views This January post I’ve been revisiting and editing my old blog posts, it had me thinking about all the things I did terribly wrong in my first year of blogging. So I thought I would share with you some big blogging mistakes that I’ve made and how you can avoid them.

I’m going to start with this as my first crime with blogging, back in the day (we’re talking 2016/7) I thought that the more content I put out, the more views I would get. My standards really slipped and my posts were starting to get really half assed which actually meant I lost views because the SEO was poor. I want to state here that I really didn’t understand blogging as well as I do now so we can forgive this big time.

Nowadays if I don’t have the time or inspiration for posting, then I simply don’t hence the 15 posts over the entire of 2018.

If you’re looking to grow and improve your blog then really you need to understand your followers. The best way to track where your followers are coming from and everything viewer related is to use Google Analytics. It took me a long time to understand how to use it, and all of its functions but I mostly taught myself through other blog posts and spending a lot of time stating at my Mac until it made sense. If I’d have used this a few years ago to understand where my viewers where coming from I could have utilised social medias so much better.

I wrote an entire post on this, When Blogging Becomes An Obsession. It is very easy to let stats and followings bother you to the point that you don’t do anything else, that you can’t go ten minutes without looking at your blog views. I know that because I’ve been there. You’ll find yourself taking every single minute to blog or do blogging related activities like scheduling tweets, posting to social medias, taking photos etc. As much as you enjoy blogging, you need to do things away from the screen too.

I went through a stage where I didn’t care about the quality of my images on my blog because I always considered the writing to be the most important part (which it is) but I learnt better images, better views. If you’re a new blogger particularly photography can be hard, I’ve been there too (look at my first ever post for reference). Take your time with your photos, if you don’t have the time or the resources there are hundreds of free stock images that you can use. Nowadays I mostly use stock images because I think they look so much better than anything I can produce.

Tweeting my blog posts brings me in the most views, for the most part it also keeps my twitter active as I’m really bad at tweeting day to day too. Consistency with blogging is the key to success in my experience, so don’t forget to schedule your tweets. If you don’t, download buffer or hootsuit and get straight on it. Make sure to use relevant blogging hashtags too!

Now, I fully understand that monetising is a personal choice that not everyone wants to do. After four years of blogging I’ve just started to dip my toes into making a bigger income from blogging, and is crazy how affiliate marketing can help so much with bringing a little extra cash here and there. I have read some stories this week of people who liven just off the money they make from affiliating marketing.

It wasn’t until my second year of blogging that I even accepted a sponsored post, I wish I’d have done more back in the day and been more savvy on how to monetise my blog, so that I could have of invested the money back into my blog.

I’d love to know if there is any blogging mistakes that you’ve made or anything you look back on in your blogging journey that makes you cringe a bit!