10 beginner blogging mistakes & success story.

In this page, I will share all the mistakes I made as a content marketer/blogger.

This way, you can avoid them in your blogging journey.

But before that, let me say few very important things.

OK, If you are reading this post, I guess you are interested in blogging.

Blogging can in fact change your life for good.

I can say it with conviction, why?

Let me tell you a very short summary of my career as a blogger till now.

I was always interested in the idea of making money online. But never made any progress until I joined a digital marketing class(which I did not complete).

As a part of the curriculum, everyone was instructed to buy a domain name and hosting.

Until then, I was using google blogger, and not taking blogging seriously.

So first lesson is taking action and buying a domain name and just start writing/creating.

Using that domain name and hosting, I learned how to make a WordPress website. Then I bought another domain, and then another.

It was the third website that started ranking really well on Google and I started making money with.

Growth and downfall: After few years of making good money(working only few hours a day) it started going down. It is a long story and will need another long blog post. Now I am coming back strong with all the lessons I learned & focusing on blogging again.

This post therefore can be very useful for anyone starting or already doing blogging as a career. Following are the mistakes and lessons i learned.

Not focusing on content creation.

Ironically, this is the most common mistakes content creators make.

This is the number one mistake i also made. I diverted my focus to less important things like “making the website look the best”, “adding unnecessary features”, “moving site from one domain to other”, “too much focus on technical SEO” etc.

Lesson: avoid this mistake and focus more on content creation first.

Niche site authority site mess.

Choosing a particular topic to blog about is very difficult. I choose one Niche(sports), but I couldn’t include unrelated topics to that site.

So I built another site. Then I wanted another site to add different topic.

This made my effort to go all over the place & not making any impact.

Lesson: choose a niche but don’t choose a brand name that you can only use with that niche. Choose a generic website name, that way you can pivot if you want.

Mixing personal brand and business brand.

Everyone have personal social media profiles and communities they are part of. Some social media profiles will get mixed up with personal content and marketing content.

Lesson: Make clear boundaries between personal profiles / personal brand and business profiles.

Destroying old communities.

I have a very bad habit of deleting old communities I built. This includes deleting Facebook pages with thousands of followers, deleting old web pages etc. because of silly reasons.

I even deleted a YouTube channel with a lot of subscribers and views. This is one of my personal struggles but here is my advice.

Lesson: If you think one of the community or social media profile is no more relevant or does not fit into the brand, instead of deleting it, just keep it there without updating.

You won’t know how your plan changes in the future, and the page you deleted might become useful.

Learning to code.

Learning to code is a very useful skill indeed. But when your main thing is blogging, it will only become a distraction.

I made this mistake of learning to code HTML, CSS, PHP and then JavaScript. Because these are very related with web design and blogging, and I wanted to make my website perfect.

This took a lot of “time and effort”, which should have gone to making better content.

There is many successful startup owners who built amazing tech companies without much technical knowledge.

Lesson: So just focus on creating content to increase growth.

Perfectionism.

Trying to make everything look perfect like that ‘website you admire’ is not gonna work in the case of an solo blogger.

Big companies with big team of designers, content writers, and web developers can do amazing things with their website.

Lesson: Stop trying to make everything perfect and just focus on creating content.

Not making use of pop culture/trends.

This is something that I missed even though it was right in front of my eyes. It is important tot join the bandwagon as soon as possible when it comes to trends.

It is really useful to get in the trend early on. If you are always informed about a community, you can find trends early on before it gets to the masses.

Splitting attention to different projects.

Spending too much time building different things.

Another common mistake made by content creators. Sometimes it is very difficult to organise all of your interest inside a single website.

What happens then is that you create different web apps, websites and communities for different topics.

When this happens, your effort gets split between all different projects and none of them gets enough traction. It is like digging many wells instead of just one.

Not reinvesting the right way

I actually reinvested a lot of money back to the business.

But not into what was working.

My fear was that this blogging thing is temporary, so I need something else.

So instead of growing what was working, I diverted my attention to other things.

Not using Paid ads enough.

Building a community from scratch is very difficult. Use of paid ads for initial boost is very useful in the case of a now blog/website.

With the initial boost, you can get things moving really fast.

Not promoting enough.

While creating content is what you should be doing most of the time, Never forget to promote it like a madman. I now have profiles on almost all social medias, including old & new, which I use to promote content I create.