When you start a new blog from scratch, you have a lot of juggling to do. There is all of this new information to take on board, blogging can make you feel overwhelmed and scared in the beginning.
And when things get on top of you, it is very easy to make a few rookie mistakes that can cost you time and money.
To help you save tons of your valuable time, I’m sharing with you the Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A New Blog.
This article may contain affiliate links which means I could make a small commission if you purchase anything using one of the links. The price you pay will not be affected. It helps to keep me in coffee when I’m researching and writing these posts for you.
Money Is Not The Top Priority In The Beginning
Initially, when you start blogging, you see $ signs in your eyes and that seems to be your focus, It’s where you concentrate on everything you do. This is a huge mistake.
As with any new business it takes effort and time to get going. Nothing worth having was built in a week, neither will your blog be.
Not Setting Up Social Media
To begin with, all I had was a Facebook account and my blog. I was very reluctant to set up any other accounts on social media platforms.
A few months in and my traffic was not growing very much, after speaking to a few other bloggers and picking their brains I discovered some possible reasons for this. I took the leap and created some accounts on other social media platforms.
My traffic started to grow rapidly after that!
Now my two biggest methods of traffic come from Facebook and Pinterest. It is not a good idea to only have one source. Do not leave things to chance, open up other sources from different social media platforms.
When your audience is excited by your blog post, the chances are they are going to want to share it with others. This can be done by setting up a sharing plugin. This puts the buttons onto your website and enables them to be able to do it!
Not all platforms are the same, but about 98% of them do let you have the buttons on your website. I set it up for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and Instagram, using Sassy Social Share, there are about 50 in total you can choose from.
Choose the ones that you think your audience is going to be involved in, also the ones you use so you can share your own content.
Not Writing Consistently
When you first start to write a blog, your head is going to be filled with great ideas for the first few blog posts.
But then, other things get in the way. Your focus starts to get a bit lost, little by little. And your levels of motivation are not what they once were.
That is so normal! You cannot be blogging every hour of every day. There is more to life!
But believe me, once you stop writing regularly, it is very easy to let a few days or even weeks go by without writing anything new.
The more this continues, the more difficult you will find it to grab the bull by its horns and start up again. Your blog will start to suffer a slow death as Google and your readers notice your absence.
Not a good thing to do!
Not Reading Other Blog Posts
Find other bloggers in your niche and check out how they are running their blog sites and posts. Do not copy their work. I found some inspiration when I was suffering from writer’s block from other bloggers that have been doing this for a while.
I started to collect ideas of things that I liked from different blog posts that I visited and then did some research, in the end, I had enough to write a blog post that made me happy with the finished article.
Not Editing Your Posts
Most people are not aware that you should spend as much time editing your posts as writing them.
Editing gives you the ability to check that your content is answering the question, engaging, and valuable. As well as making your blog posts much easier to read and follow.
In other words, your visitors will enjoy reading your content a lot more, thus spending more time on your page. It can take quite a while to get this completed, but it will be well worth the time in the long run.
Not Making Sure Your Site Is Optimized For Mobile
It, has become the norm for more people to be using their mobile phone and tablet to access the internet and this is something that is not going to change, it is only going to increase over time.
If you are getting ready to start a new blog and are in the process of getting a theme, it is crucial to make sure that the theme is already mobile optimized. Be aware not all free themes are. Although this is not always the case, just be aware when choosing one.
You are probably asking yourself if this really matters? Mobile optimization is an important function for SEO purposes, and if your website gets bent out of shape when viewed on smaller screens it can be punished by google by being found farther down in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which is not where we need to be!
I really wish I had known about this in the beginning as it could have saved a lot of money and time on getting it fixed.
Generate Press is mobile Optimized and very fast!
Not Setting Up A Mailing List
Having your own email list will in time become one of your online business’s most valuable assets, yet email list building is often not thought about by new bloggers in favour of doing other things, like growing a following on social media platforms.
An email list is something that YOU OWN and have total control over. It should be a part of your monetization strategy because the subscribers are going to be warm leads who are actually interested in the articles you are writing about.
Put another way, they are the low-hanging fruit’ you are searching for, for when it is time to launch your own (digital) products.
Also, the email list is a great place to share new blog posts that can contain affiliate links to new and exciting products.
Not Knowing Your Target Audience
You have reached the point where you have chosen your niche and you also know what value you would like your blog to provide to your readers (The ‘why?’), now we need to think about the who?’. Who is your target audience or ideal reader, who is your writing aimed at?
A good exercise is to start to envisage your ideal reader in your mind and start to list their characteristics:
- What does he or she like to do for entertainment?
- Whereabouts do they live?
- What is most useful to them?
- Where do they hang out?
These are questions that you need to ask yourself to ensure that the content you put out serves that ideal reader you have created in your mind’s eye. Not knowing who you are writing for will make it a lot harder to attract a loyal audience.
While this may not necessarily be an issue at first, it can become harder when it comes to making money with your blog.
Final Thoughts: Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A New Blog
You made it to the end, well done! Did you find some useful information in the tips above? hopefully, a few things you could make use of in your own blogging journey? tell me what you thought was the best tip in the comments below!
When you start a fresh new blog from scratch, you can save a ton of hours of work by using the tips and tricks in this post.
I made mistakes in the beginning, which is how I learned, now I’m sharing this with you, so you don’t make the same mistakes, which means you can move forward quicker!!
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Lisa.
This article was just what I needed. You really explained everything that I wanted to know. I am so glad that I have stumbled upon your article because nobody was giving me answers on the questions that I had. Thank you for providing us with this useful information and I wish you all the best. I will definitely implement some of your advices. Thank you again and all the best.
Pleased you got some value, thanks for stopping by.
Thank you for this incredible post on blogging. My blog has not done as well as I’ve hoped it would but I can see now that I have a few more options in regard to improving my website results! I’ll make sure to edit my posts to keep them current as well as starting a mailing list. Thank you!
You are very welcome for the tips, It will pick up for you in no time!
Thank you very much for writing these mistakes. I think I’m guilty of not being consistent to publish new articles in my blog and lack of knowledge of my audience. If I missed a schedule to publish a new article, is it automatically a failure? Should I just create a new blog and consistently publish new articles? Thanks for your advice.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t hit the targets you set as long as you get at least one post published each week.
All that really matters is that you choose a strategy and stick to it.
Maybe 1 a week is what you should aim for.