“I committed more than six blogging mistakes while starting as an amateur blogger, and this has nothing to do with being a Nigerian. The “blogger in Nigeria” is just for SEO”
In this blog post, you’ll learn some of the blogging mistakes to avoid as a blogger.
Let’s face it. As a new blogger you will surely make mistakes. While some might make tons of mistakes like I did, some had luck to avoid some mistakes.
When I started blogging I made more than 6 mistakes but the six mistakes I listed here played a huge role in delaying my blog success.
And some of the Mistakes were discovered recently after some years of blogging.
So I will get straight to the mistakes I made in blogging and the corrections I did.
Six Blogging Mistakes I made as an Amateur Blogger
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Starting on a free blogspot domain
Yes this was one of the mistakes I made when I started blogging.
let clear this first. I do not mean using blogger was the mistake. The mistake was not integrating a custom domain name with blogger.
When I started my blog, my blog address was blog.blogspot.com
This was how I ran the blog for over a year. And you know what?
All the months of running the blog on free blogspot domain was a waste.
There was practically nothing to show for it. It was almost like blogging wasn’t meant for me and I did felt like quitting.
And then I decided to take a step of faith and buy my own custom domain which I integrated with my Blogger blog.
That was how I bought guruscoach.com
Buying the custom domain was a huge achievement for me because I have always thought that I would only invest into my blog once it starts making money for me.
But I had to since there was no improvement on my blog.
On getting the custom domain, I started seeing some improvement within 2 months of integrating a domain name with blogger.
Now here is my point.
Using blogger doesn’t limit you from succeeding but what hinders you is if you are still running on .blogspot.com.
At least I run most of my blogs off blogger platform and i have a good decent traffic and also make a decent income off the blog.
And not just me, there are a good number of bloggers who cherish the Blogger platform to WordPress.
That being said, WordPress is still the best.
How to Avoid it
To avoid this mistake, if you are starting a blog start with your own custom domain. Besides, I’d recommend starting with a self-hosted WordPress site. Get a cheap and quality web hosting for your site without the fear of breakdown. Vet this by choosing a webhost with free trial to have a feel of what it looks like to be hosted on their server. Here’s a list of 60 day free trial web hosts.
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Not Blogging Consistently
I have to admit this, this has eaten up most of the things I should have achieved with my blog.
I am just too lazy to blog consistently. To tell you how lazy I am in being consistent, after blogging for three years the total number of posts on my blog is 90.
Did you see that?
I have always tried to correct this issue but it still keeps getting in the way.
As a new blogger, you need to blog at least three times a day to increase and grow your blog traffic tremendously.
But I Knowing this still haven’t found a way to pull myself together and write blog posts consistently.
But what I notice is that whenever I Consistently publish new content on my blog consecutively, I see a spike in my blogging traffic and revenue.
How to Avoid This
You need an editorial calendar to discipline your blogging.
Editorial calendar is not just for big blogs and websites, it is also for small blogs and bloggers like you and I.
Are you looking for an editorial calendar template, then check out Lilach editorial template.
She has you covered with the templates she uses in running her blog.
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Changing my Blog Templates and Themes Umpteen times
I know almost every blogger is a victim of this. You just feel you haven’t gotten the best theme for blog.
When I started my blog, I was always changing my templates everyday(this is the plain truth).
To know how much I have changed my templates, I became CSS and HTML expert just because I had to learn to tweak my template codes to suite what I needed.
And at that time , I had no experience in coding but only understood that everything was a code.
I had to learn and read sites tutorialspoint, w3schools, CSS tricks ,etc. To learn and master web design.
Tweaking my blog templates later turned out to be a blessing to me because I learnt how to build a website.
But the truth be told, I already wasted a lot of my time. Those times I should be writing and networking, I was busy playing with my blog codes.
You just can’t understand how pained I was to discover I have wasted a good number of months doing unnecessary things!!
How to Avoid This
To avoid this, you need to discipline yourself not to get worried about your site look.
After starting your blog, pick a nice and simple theme that you love and make a promise never to change the theme again not until the blog is close a year or over a year.
That is long enough for you to focus on writing and networking with other bloggers.
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Not Monetizing my Blog from the Start
This is another mistake I made. I didn’t monetize my blog not until after several months.
All through my early months blogging, I didn’t have the required knowledge to monetize my blog.
Not actually the knowledge, I just didn’t monetize my blog at the early stage and this is a result of the blogs I do read at that time.
In fact different bloggers have their own point of view on Monetizing your blog.
Some believe it is best to monetize your blog after growing it to a certain daily traffic.
And some also believe to monetize your blog the very day you start up your blog.
And they both have their reasons and to me they are correct.
But I have come to taste both sides of the monetization technique.
And they are both right in one way or the other.
But as far as I am concerned, it is best you monetize your blog from onstart.
Monetizing your blog from onstart enables you to make some money while still learning the act of blogging.
And this will in one way or the other motivates you to continue blogging.
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Getting Distracted with Services and Monetization
This is something I admit slowed down my blog monetization.
When I finally started to monetize my blog with my writing service, my blog still had a small audience but I was actually getting a good stream of clients.
Then it dawned on me that I was always busy offering my services to clients that sometimes I might not visit my blog for two weeks and if I do it’s just to check the stats.
This actually slowed down my Blog growth because I didn’t have time to update my blog.
How to Avoid this
To avoid this, I decided to get a friend who can meet the needs of my clients while I focus on getting more clients and growing my blog.
So the deal I made with him was to pay him half of what I receive from my clients while he does everything and I verify it is up to standard.
This has saved me time to increase my blog traffic and get more clients while I still make money.
So the thing is that blogging is easier when you have a helping hand to assist you in doing some things.
As a matter of fact, my younger brother also helps me with one or two things.
And with that I have been able to run over four growing blogs.
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Not Building Backlinks
This is an open secret. One of the things that makes your blog get better visibility on Google are backlinks.
Backlinks is important if you want to last in the blogging game.
When I started my blog, I didn’t build links to my blog because I never thought it was important.
And a lot of bloggers are busy spread false information that when you create quality post, people will start linking to it.
This isn’t true for a new blog.
As a new blogger, no one knows you exist so how on Earth do you expect them to link to you!!
Get out there and start building backlinks to your blog.
Write guest posts
Build comment backlinks
Build social PR links
Build editorial links
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Choosing the Wrong blogging niche
I never thought I might be sharing this here. But I need to make mention of this because a lot of newbies also make this mistake in their early blogging journey.
I can clearly remember how I went from changing blog niches for up to three times on the same blog.
I started my blog as a place to tutor students on subjects like mathematics, physics , etc.
But it dawned on me that though I am intelligent to teach these subjects, there are some topics that could be too deep for me to tutor and also it would be a bit difficult to monetize the blog.
These were my reasons for changing that niche.
After that, I decided to go into the entertainment niche.
I published like three posts and got tired of the whole ideas of blogging everyday.
Because in the entertainment niche, you will need to constantly update your blog daily because of how competitive the entertainment niche is.
Not until I finally changed to entrepreneurship and business niche, wI never actually had any success.
So when starting out, rethink your niche together with your blogging strategy.
Conclusion – Avoid these Blogging Mistakes
There you have it. The mistakes I made while starting a blog. And one more thing, I definitely made more mistakes than these five.
I have made other mistakes like choosing the wrong blogging niche, not having a product or service in the early stages of blogging.
But these are the five mistakes nearly all new bloggers can relate to.
It’s your turn.
Which of these mistakes did you make early on blogging?
Are there other mistakes you made while blogging?
I would be creating a resource page for the mistakes a lot bloggers do make and would need ideas on this.
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