Blogging has never been easy, it involves you spending time to find great resources and ideas to write about. Not only does it end there, writing the article is just even a 40% job done, promoting your blog content is another ball game altogether and requires more work if you wish to gain a targeted audience and exposure to your blog. All these are some simple facts I never realized earlier on when I ventured into blogging.
As a blogger who has been in the blogosphere for quite a while, experience has thought me and I learned the hard way, I therefore thought it good to outline some things I really wished I knew when I started my first blog so you could learn from my mistakes and build that perfect blog you’ve always dreamed of.
Must Read: 4 Things To Do After Publishing A Blog Post
My Early Blogging Mistakes
1. I Valued Quantity Over Quality
When I started blogging, I made sure I wrote a post every single day, and the most annoying part of this was they were all poorly written articles. Though I gathered a little traffic around, but I could not convert the visitors into loyal readers with this strategy. Blogging is not about how many articles you have on your blog, it is about how many of your articles out there add value to peoples lives.
My Opinion Now: If you can write quality articles even once a week, you’ll be amazed at how much traffic and readership you can gain, I tried this recently on one of my blogs and it sure has proven to be worth trying.
2. I Was Not Social
Everyone is on one social network or the other these days, so you can realize social networks are simply where you can gain huge exposure and readership for your blog, but then I never realized this earlier. I had publish my post and forget it in my archives thinking everyone was gonna find them. Well, I realized the power of Facebook and LinkedIn groups lately, also another great social media tool that helped me in driving traffic to my blog is Twitter hash tags, it is a great strategy and works for both the big fishes and newbies in the blogosphere who have found it.
My Opinion Now: If you can leverage the power of social media networks such as Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn for a start, it would be such a shock to you on what amount of traffic you’ve missed out from.
3. I Never Promoted My Blog Posts
There are several ways to promote your blog posts even beyond the social media as a blogger and these should never be overlooked. I never promoted my articles then, I only published them and forgot about them, but I recently realized some cool ways that work in blog promotion if you wish to build a successful blog. Some of the ways include
- Guest Blogging
- Commenting on Related Blogs
- Joining Blogging Communities
My Opinion Now: Blog post promotion is the only key to new traffic and more money in blogging, apply the above mentioned tips and you won’t regret you did.
4. Not Having An Email List
I realized that the money was in the list lately, forget what you read every where saying that email list building no longer works. I sure does and mean every bit of it. If you wish to gain targeted and return traffic to your blog, then build a list. Not only would you gain traffic from them, you can also promote your products your subscribers and get faster ROI because the people now trust whatever you say.
My Opinion Now: Email list is a great tools to get you repeated and targeted traffic and has been working wonders for me on my blog.
5. Writing About Everything
Sometimes wonder how I was able to merge different niches into one blog and still cope with that in my early blogging days. I wrote virtually about everything ranging from Education news, jokes, technology tips, blogging and lots more in one blog, when I came to realize the loss this had caused me, it was too late and had cost me my traffic.
My Opinion Now: Writing everything on one blog would confuse your readers and make them have no other option than to leave your blog for niche specific blogs.
Conclusion
If you can avoid these mistakes I made earlier, you would be sure of building a successful blog in a few months from now. There are lots of things that can help to succeed as a blogger such as experimenting. I recently put up a 30-days self blogging challenge on my blog which was aimed at publishing 2 blog articles everyday for 30 days and this has worked greatly in improving my traffic. Come up with new ideas and experiment on your blog, you’ll find out what works and what does not, then improve the ones that work and you won’t regret you did.
To your blogging success, Happy Blogging.
