17 Things I Truly Wish Someone Told Me When I Started Blogging!

I’ve been blogging for over 8 years now & have built numerous blogs along the way. Some blogs made money and some failed miserably. But the best part is my learnings through these experiences.

It’s hard to predict the future, but easy to look back & realize the missed opportunities. And looking back, I now realize the mistakes I made and the right decisions I took.

My aim through this post is to help my fellow new bloggers avoid those mistakes I made early on. I did them because I had no one to point those out to me. So, here goes a post on my learnings over the years – I hope this proves useful to you. Because knowing these beforehand would have saved me tons of money, time and effort.

As Orson De Witt quotes in Earth Won’t Miss You, “We don’t have to waste our time learning how to make pastry when we can use grandma’s recipes.”

Without further ado, let’s get started!

1. Do not get caught with trivial things, do what’s truly important.

When you are starting out, work on crafting new content, improving SEO, and getting more traffic to your blog.

Design, branding & other agendas can be taken up once you start seeing an uptick in traffic.

In the beginning, focus solely on writing cornerstone content & driving traffic – that’s the path to success! Everything else is a distraction.

2. Passion doesn’t necessarily translate to success

Just because you are passionate about a topic and can churn out blog posts one after the other, doesn’t mean you would make money.

You have to choose a topic with high earning potential, i.e., products and services to recommend and sell. It’s highly important to treat your blog as a business and choose a profitable topic.

For e.g: Yes to a “Pet” blog, but no a “Wildlife biology” blog. A pet blog would have significantly high audience and products to sell over a wildlife biology blog (with limited academic audience).

PS: Exception is if you are an actual wildlife biologist and objective is to write about your domain and be known as an expert. In that case, the above point stands invalid because the objective is not to profit from the blog.

3. Google & SEO are still important

The recent Google HCU algorithm news would have scared a lot of bloggers. But the reality is Google still exists. Google still has a 90% market share. And the same no. of people search on Google today as before. Nothing has changed except for the Google algorithm.

So, while you have to keep in mind that depending on Google alone as a source of traffic might be catastrophic, you must not forget to focus on Google. Diversify your traffic sources and make Google one of them, because honestly, Google is still the biggest traffic machine!

4. Focus on a niche

When I first started a blog, I was pretty confused what to write. I wanted my blog to be about trading and investing, but I was new to the game and was reading about stories of how ViralNova sold for $100 million to Zealot Networks, TreeHugger acquisition by Discovery for $10 million, and Huffington Post being sold for $315 million to AOL. They all started out as small websites and blogs and got sold for millions. I would get so confused if I should also target creating a general blog.

The entire blogging ecosystem has changed now. That doesn’t mean a new blog can’t emerge to be the next Huffington Post. But, with more people entering the blogging and content marketing landscape, it’s hard to compete in a broad category. 

You must focus on a specific niche while beginning and build authority first. Once the blog has enough traffic and reputation in the niche, you can slowly start branching out to related topics.

Covering a wide range of topics upfront would be asking for more competition, that too from media giants. It’s important to focus your blog on narrow topics you have subject matter expertise in (topics that people will actually listen to you) and has profit potential.

5. Focus on what’s working and let the streak continue

When a strategy is working for you, add more fuel to it, maximize the result and let it run as much as possible.

For example, if you find certain topics are trending with your readers, publish more content in and around the trending topics.

6. Leave room for growth when choosing your domain name

Do not make your domain names too narrow.

For eg, “deepseadivingequipments.com” might not be a great domain name choice because you are restricting yourself to the area of diving equipment alone. What if you outgrow equipments and want to write about deep sea diving methods, diving tips, etc. A domain name such as “deepseadiving.com” would rather be a much better choice as it’s more broad while being specific enough.

7. Start building an email list early on

According to this post from Mckinsey & Company, email is nearly 40 times more effective in acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. And according to a 2018 email marketing industry report from Campaign Monitor, 59% of marketers see the most ROI from email.

The best part about email marketing is that you own your subscribers. Unlike Google search, Pinterest, or Facebook where your performance is dependent on another platform (and they can decide to change algorithms or kick you out any time), an email list gives you complete control. You own your list (not Google, not Pinterest, not Meta – but you), you can mail your subscribers anytime, you can promote anything & not worry about what the big boss Google is going to do!

You must start capturing emails early. It’s one of the most powerful strategies as the Returns on Investment for email marketing are much higher than other methods.

8. Learn to outsource

Any activity which is not directly adding value has to be outsourced. For eg, if you feel you are better of writing awesome content instead of creating 20 pins a day & managing multiple social media channels, you must outsource the social media piece immediately. Treat your blog like a business. You do the strategy & core activity and your team (of freelancers) do the supporting activities.

9. Structure your content correctly

One of the factors that Google looks for while ranking posts is how structured your content is. Make sure that you have structured your content well, use the right fonts, images, and use an optimal number of keywords at important places.

For example, make sure that your post headings are clearly separated using H2, H3 headings. Use the keyword in the URL slug, titles, and content. This makes it easy for Google to identify the keyword.

You can use plugins like Yoast SEO which can help you give output on the readability analysis of your blog post. This is one of my key learnings over the years. It’s very easy to write content and publish them. But we miss out on minor details like formatting the blog posts correctly which could have a positive impact on rankings.

10. Guest posts are still a great way to build backlinks

It might seem ironic to spend your time creating content for others, but guest posts works like a charm in getting backlinks from authority sites and improving your blog ranking fast. Do not think of guest posts as helping competitors, but as growing mutually. It’s a positive-sum game. And when you are writing guest posts, make sure to create high-quality long-form content because your post might now be reaching hundreds of thousands of readers instantly.

11. Track your domain authority score from beginning

Moz provides us with a free domain SEO analysis tool. Through this tool, we can find our domain authority score – a score of how authoritative our domain is. The higher the domain authority we have, the more our chances of ranking better on search results.

Getting more backlinks, more traffic, and more engagement in your blog will translate to a higher domain authority score. This is one of the simplest metrics you can use to estimate the worth of your blog. Track it continuously and try to keep improving your score.

12. It doesn’t help much by bragging about your new blog to everyone you know

Creating a successful blog requires time. A lot of time actually. The beginning stages most usually are extremely dull. You will be writing content and doing things when there is literally no one visiting your blog.

Do not make a big thing out of starting a blog. Starting a blog is easy and anyone can do it. Creating a successful money-making blog is hard. It’s better to keep shut while starting out and let everyone know once the blogging venture is successful. This way, you will not get disheartened having to answer everyone how you are doing in the initial stages of your blogging journey.

13. Organize your blogging finances

Be financially organized from the very beginning. Know where the money came from, where it went, what you brought using that money and keep receipts of all these transactions. If not, it’ll confuse you later – you’ll not know what’s coming in, what’s going out, which affiliate accounts you have, what subscriptions you have, etc.

Prepare an excel file with below 2 sheets:

• Incoming sources of money (Adsense, Mediavine, affiliates, sponsorships, etc)
• Expenses (Hosting, domain, Canva, themes, plugins, SEO tools, etc)

14. Affiliate marketing is powerful, but not so much at beginning

It’s better to wait and see how well your blog posts are doing and then add affiliate links to the best-performing ones. Joining hundreds of affiliate programs at the start of your blogging journey and expecting to make money when few people visit your site isn’t the wisest decision. It’ll take away a lot of your time (which could have been used for more important activities). Moreover, affiliates do not accept you unless you have a website with decent traffic. Wait for a while, grow your traffic & then initiate affiliate marketing.

15. Quality over quantity

It doesn’t matter whether you write 5 posts of 1000 words each, 1 post of 5000 words of 2 posts of 2500 words, the only thing that counts is the quality of content. If your content is of high quality, is of value to your readers – it’s all that matters. Go for quality & success will follow you.

16. Always write what the readers want

If your readers are constantly requesting posts on a particular topic, write more on those topics.

If your readers are engaging highly on certain topics, write more content on those topics, because that’s the content that your readers visit your blog for.

Give your readers what they want, not what we assume they want.

17. Make Friends in the Blogging World

Having blogger friends can turn out to be a huge leverage for you. Let me mention a couple of situations:

1. Guest posting becomes easy – because you are now reaching out to a friend instead of a stranger
2. Your friends can promote your blog (or posts, products, etc). As humans, we prefer linking to someone we personally know over a random blog.
3. Hardly a few people understand blogging. It’s not something your family, relatives or friends can help you with. Your blogger friends understand your struggle & can help you brainstorm ideas.

Try to build friends who blog, help each other and grow together.

Bonus Tip: Never Be In a Hurry

One of the most important qualities required for blogging is to ensure that you are not in a hurry. Always be patient.

You might not see results fast, it might take you weeks to finish some posts, it might be hard to decide on the niche or the domain name of your blog, SEO-optimizing your posts might be time-consuming, there are thousand such things that can make you impatient. 

We all know what happens when we get impatient and go for shortcuts. They often fail. Be patient. Growing a successful blog takes time. It might even be a few years even before you start seeing returns. It’s supposed to start out as a passive income source. Be calm and patient.

My Learnings: Like all other things in life, starting a successful blog also takes a fair amount of time. If you can be patient and take the time to think through each step, you will be able to succeed in the game of blogging.

These are a few important takeaways I have had from my blogging experience. I hope you had some good insights!

Please let me know in comments section what you felt about the points above, your experiences, if I’ve missed out on some points, and anything that’s on your mind regarding this post. As you’d know, I read every single comment & use your suggestions to continually improve my posts. Like one of the points above, a blog should cater to what readers actually want, not what we assume they want.