When starting a blog, it is inevitable that you will make some mistakes. I myself made plenty.
But to help you avoid as many of them as possible and to make sure that you don’t waste your precious time, I have laid out for you below the ten things you should never do when starting a blog. Enjoy!
1. Using Google AdSense
Have you ever opened someone’s blog, looked at the ads penetrating your eyes from every corner, and thought to yourself, “My God that is ugly!”? I sure have.
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I understand that when starting a blog, you want to begin making money as soon as possible. As a result, you are inclined to turn on Google AdSense, which is probably the most common and easiest way to make money blogging. But please, hold it off for a while. You may think that six months, which is the minimum age that your blog must be in order to be eligible for AdSense, is much. But really, for the internet, it’s not much at all.
When starting a new blog, you want to make sure that everything you do, increases the growth of your daily visitors. But trust me, as soon as you turn on those ads, it will drive some people away. This is not something you can afford to do when you have as little as fifty visitors a day.
Only blogs that are very popular with tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors should be displaying ads. People will return to these blogs no matter what. They have already earned their place in google. Your blog, however, hasn’t yet.
If five out of twenty visitors leave your blog because it looks like an advertisement dump, then you will have a very hard time growing. Besides, AdSense brings in very little money if you don’t have a lot of traffic. Very little money.
2. Overfocusing on design
I see very many people making the mistake of spending too much time on the looks of their blog when just starting out. Of course, I agree that a blog shouldn’t be ugly, but you definitely should not be wasting all of your energy on finding the perfect theme, or worse, paying someone to create it for you. You don’t know yet what the perfect theme is and you don’t know whether you will even blog in a years time.
The more you blog, the more improvements you will make. But this comes gradually.
While you are new to blogging, you need to focus on creating a lot of quality content, which is what your visitors will want to see in the first place. If your content sucks, it doesn’t matter how pretty your website is – they will leave and never come back again.
On the other hand, you may have a very simple theme, while attracting millions of visitors. Take look at Zen Habits, one of the most famous blogs on this planet. How much time do you think Leo Babauta spent perfecting the looks of his blog?
WordPress.org, which is the platform you should be using for your blog, has a ton of free themes available. Pick one that you like and move on to creating epic content!
3. Dismissing keywords research
When I started blogging, I knew nothing of keyword research. It wasn’t until I joined the Affiliate Marketing Mastery programme, that I began to apply it in my writing. Because of this, my first posts were not based around any keywords, and therefore, will never be found on google.
Learning about keywords is essential to any starting blogger. If you don’t use keywords in your articles, it means that you are writing your posts pretty much only for yourself. So if you want to grow your blog, learn as soon as possible what keywords are and how to use them in your writing.
4. Plagiarising
In school, we are taught that you cannot copy other texts, word-by-word, even if it is a text you have written yourself in the past. But when it comes to starting a blog on the internet, many have the misconception that there are no rules. This is wrong.
Google is a very advanced search engine that is not interested in the same articles all over its search engine results. It is interested in promoting only interesting and original content. Because of this, when you publish a new article, it will scan the text and make sure that it is not already found elsewhere. If it was found on some other website before yours, your article will not be indexed/shown in the search engine results, making it wasted effort.
If you want your blog to grow, make original content. But if you really do have the need to copy some existing text, make sure you do it the right way.
5. Using copyrighted images
Using copyrighted images is another very big no-no.
Just because images are freely available on google and everywhere else on the internet, it doesn’t mean that you can just grab them and use them in your blog. Doing this can get you in some serious legal trouble.
I have come across bloggers that have been in the field for quite a while, and even they weren’t aware of the fact that images cannot just be used without asking the author for permission.
I have also come across bloggers telling me that an image can be used freely just as long as you filter it out in google by the “Labeled for reuse with modification” tag. But this is also incorrect. The filtering is done by an algorithm, not a human. What this means is that the image results may be either wrongly placed there or have some additional copyright restrictions that the algorithm did not take into consideration when displaying for you the results. Why risk it?
If you do want images that you can freely use, go to websites, such as Pixabay or Unsplash. But even there double check before just grabbing an image for your own blog.
6. Not having a publishing schedule
When opening your own blog, you will want to work on it as much as possible. You will be inclined to publish a lot of content as soon as possible. This isn’t a very good approach, since sooner or later, it will burn you out.
YouTube, Google and other sites/search engines are about consistency, not about publishing a bunch of stuff all at once. If they see that you make new content on a weekly basis for a long time, they will push your blog up in rankings.
So when starting out, make sure that the first thing you do is create a publishing schedule for yourself. I, for example, publish one post per week and can allow one additional guest post written by someone else. If you are making high-quality content with a lot of research on the side, this will be more than enough. Don’t rush it. It’s not a race, it’s a marathon.
7. Copying styles and topic ideas
If you aren’t a professional writer already, you will probably need some time to get used to writing for your blog. It will take time for you to create your own unique writing style, and that’s totally normal.
However, please try not to imitate and copy anyone else’s writing style. It won’t do you any good.
For example, there are many bloggers trying to act like Gary Vaynerchuk. When they do that, the aim is to look interesting, cool, experienced and smart. Instead, it looks awkward and ridiculous. Why? Because we all know who the source of their inspiration is. And unfortunately for them, no one can be Gary V. except Gary V. himself.
Also, don’t directly copy ideas from other blogs. I have personally witnessed a starting blogger copy almost word-by-word an entire post from another blog. That blogger even used an almost identical image. As a result, he had to take that blog post down because he would have gotten in legal trouble.
You can use ideas from other blogs, and you should, but be sure to personalize them. At the end of the day, your blog must be different and unique from all other blogs, even the ones that have a closely related theme to yours.
There is nothing good about trying to be someone else. It will only hinder your progress until you eventually become you. Create your own unique writing style right from the start.
8. Thinking that “SEO is not for me”
When starting a blog, you may think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not important, or you simply may not know what it is. However, SEO is extremely important when it comes to blogging.
SEO is the only way you can tell google and other search engines that your blog exists, and that you want other people to find it through the search engine results.
In other words, if you don’t know how SEO works, then you won’t know how to make your blog visible to others. So as you can see, blogging becomes quite pointless without the knowledge of SEO.
But please don’t be afraid of this abbreviation. It’s really not that complicated, and you are going to be totally ok with learning just the basics of SEO when you are starting out. As you progress, the subject will become more familiar to you. By no means you have to be an expert at it for your blog to grow.
You can find some books on SEO here!
9. Not collecting emails when starting a blog
Why bother collecting emails? Well, it’s actually very easy – to grow your audience!
Starting bloggers often think that it doesn’t make sense to collect emails when you don’t have many visitors. But this is actually the opposite of the truth.
The earlier you begin collecting emails, the earlier you will have people on your email list. You can then notify these people of newly published content on your blog.
Look at it this way, a person that is not on your email list, may never come to your blog twice. A person that is, can become a fan of your blog, returning to it weekly for updates and even talking about it to their friends.
Setting up a signup form on your blog shouldn’t be difficult. To do that, you will need a service that will collect the emails for you. I personally recommend SendPulse and Mailchimp. They both have free plans for people just starting out.
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10. Not marketing your blog
The last but not least thing that you should never do when starting a blog is to write an article and then to not market it.
Many soon-to-be or starting bloggers think that it’s enough to just write a blog post and to let it sit there. The belief is that if I wrote a post, it will attract visitors sooner or later. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
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If you write an amazing blog post, but you don’t market it, no one will ever find out about it. For this, the only solution is to go out there and to market it. There are many ways to do it.
You can share links to your articles on your social media, in the comment sections of other blogs, on blog-sharing websites, and you can even drive paid traffic to your blog through PPC ads. However, I wouldn’t recommend the last option for people just starting out.
Yes, marketing your articles will at first take as long as writing those articles, but that’s ok. With time, once you get some traction, you won’t need to market so much. Once your email list grows and you start to rank on google, people will find your blog a lot easier, without you even having to worry so much about sharing your blog posts on other platforms.
So as you can see, there are quite a few things to keep in mind when creating and opening your own blog. It’s also a lot of work, I won’t lie. But I assure you, it’s a lot of fun, and eventually, blogging can replace your full-time job. In my opinion, it’s totally worth it. That’s why I still do it. 🙂
Thank you for stopping by and good luck!
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