Blogging Mistakes That I Made When Started Blogging!

I am blogging for the last 4 years and right now I have a couple of blogs through which I earn some decent amount of money. But when I started blogging, my journey was not that smooth. I did all the mistakes and the mistakes where the blogging mistakes new bloggers do when they start blogging. I was not getting any way out about how to get traffic for my blog, how to make a brand, how to show my site in top search result in Google. At that time I used to think how people make money from blogging?!? Now I know this a common question for all the newbie blogger cause at the very beginning you do not know the secrets of blogging. But let me tell you one thing frankly, blogging is not easy! This is not an over night success story if someone is successful in blogging.

When I used to read the stories of TechCrunch, Mashable or other renowned sites, I used to think how they touched the line of success! But I knew that the path is not smooth and i need to work hard to do something better. I knew that earning online is not a joke and not an easy thing. You really need to work hard to earn even a single penny online.

Then I stared to ask for feedback about some professional blogger. Not all were ready to provide me answer, because they are busy person and it is really not easy to make understand someone how to develop the skill of blogging.

As time passed, I started posting more content in my blog. But I was not still getting that much result. I thought at that time that content is the king! But though I was posting content, I was not getting the result according to that. So, I got depressed a bit. Then I tried to find out what are my mistakes while blogging. Then I found the below mistakes which were the biggest mistakes:

1. Social Media Marketing:

Yes, when I started blogging, I was not aware of the importance of the social media marketing. I did not use the social networks like Twitter, Facebook , Pinterest, Trumbler, StumbleUpon that much. But these social media networks can drive a lot of traffic for your website or blog. I was loosing those traffics from social media. So, I started working on my Social media campaign and started getting good results.

So, new bloggers who are just starting blogging, my suggestion is that give importance on Social networking and I am sure that you are going to get a lot of traffic and exposure from social network.

2. Not Using Custom Domain :

That was one of the best cause that I was not getting enough traffic though I was posting a lot of useful information’s in my blogs. I started blogging on blogspot free domain and which was not attractive at all. If your blog domain address is blog like blogaddress.blogspot.com or blogaddress.wordpress.com then do you think that you will get a lot of visitor and people will search your site? The answer is not. People always like small web address. So, now you can see my blog address is www.techntechie.com which is small and people fell much comfort to search my blog address. You can read my article Why This is Important to Switch from Blogger to WordPress. If you want to switch your blogging platform to WordPress, you need a good hosting provider to host your WordPress blog. If you do not know much about hosting, here is a guide line for you What is Web Hosting?; An Article for Beginners and Pro. This is really important to choose your web hosting company because this is directly related to your blog reputation. If your web hosting company is not good, your blog loading speed will become high and you will experience a large downtime. So, what will happen, people will come to visit your blog but your blog will be offline. I am using HostGator for my blog for the last 4 years and I did not face any major problem with this hosting. If you face any problem to install WordPress in with your hosting provider, you can read my simple step by step article How to Install WordPress in HostGator cPanel.

3. Unprofessional Blog Design:

If you design your blog with a dark background and lots of flashy widgets, it will look a bit colorful but do you think that it will look professional. The answer is a BIG NO. To make it look like a professional blog you need to make it simple but still decent. If you look at most of the top bloggers blog, you will find, they have used a simple design to design their blog.

Previously it was not in my mind and I designed my website background and all my widgets just like a colorful canvas. But one of my blogmate made this clear to me and I had understood that yes, I was really missing the appeal of the professional look of my blog. If you are blogging in default WordPress blog, please let me inform you, your blog is not mobile friendly and SEO friendly. The default WordPress theme loading time is longer. So, to get the best result from a WordPress theme, the best idea is to buy a premium theme. The themes are not that expensive and the fee is only one time. MyThemeShop is a great market for the premium WordPress themes. You can choose a nice WordPress theme for your blog within your budget. The great advantage of the premium theme is the themes are already SEO optimized which good for search engine, mobile responsive and loads very fast. If you face any problem to install the premium theme, you can read the article How to Install Premium WordPress Theme for Your Blog.

4. How to Convert a Strange Visitor to a Regular Visitor:

Yes, this is very important to convert a stranger to your website to a real visitor. I was not aware about this important topic and I was missing my traffic though they were coming to my website. There are many tricky but wise ways to convert a stranger to your blog to a regular member. You can do this by using a nice “Popular post widget” or “Related post widget” or by “Categories” or creating pages with different themes.

If you want to integrate one great widget which is colorful and stylish then you can read my post An Awesome Popular Post Plugin for Your WordPress Blog.

Also you can interlink your previous posts in your current post and you can also get a lot of traffic through this trick. It will also increase the link just of your website. Those who do not know which is link juice for them this is related to SEO and when you link one page to another page of your website with a related text of that page of your website, you get some advantage and this is link juice. This is also important to increase the number of subscriber of your blog. There are many ways to increase the email list. I use SumoMe to get subscribers for my blog. You can read How I have Doubled the Number of Subscriber of My Blog. You duty not only stops after collecting the email address. You will have to send regular updates to them to keep them coming to your blog. MailerLite is an awesome application to send the newsletter or latest post to your blog subscribers. You can read the article Best Way to Send Newsletter to Blog Subscribers.

5. Filling Blog With Lot of Advertises:

There are lot of advertising network online and some are very much easy to integrate with your blog. The best monetizing technique is to add Google Adsense to your blog. But many people do not get approved by Google Adsense for the the first time so what they do is use other cheap Advertising site and integrate their ads and fill their website with those. That is very bad. Though integrating ads to your website is good but filling it all with ads is very much spammy and people do not love to visit those spammy websites. I did that mistakes!

• How to Show Chitika Ads Just Below Post Title in Blogspot?

Now I understand that though I need money through advertising but i need to put it in such a manner that it does not look spammy. You will have to be very careful about the positioning of your ad and the number of ads that you want to show in your blog. If the number of ads are occupying more space in your blog page, people will consider your blog an advertising machine and you will loose returning visitors.

There are a lot of points which I have learnt through the way of blogging and also leaning a lot of things everyday. This post will not cover all the mistakes. May be i will write those in my next post about this topic. If you have got any question then you can ask me through comment. I will be very happy to answer your question.

Himadri Subrah Saha

Himadri is an ICT Professional who writes for his technology tips & tricks related blog TechnTechie. Though it is hard to balance time in between professional life and blogging, he still manages time to work for his own blog and writes almost regularly. The dashboard of this WordPress is the only place where he does not feel tired! Read my other blogs @ PetCare and Teleinfo