Honestly, I thought I knew everything I needed to know before I started this blog. I read many articles on this “10 things I wish I knew before I started blogging” type of post. I went to Youtube researched about it and watched many videos from great YouTubers like Adam Enfroy, Create a Pro Website, and the list goes on.
Turns out you can’t know everything before you start a blog, you learn most of the things the hard way, and what these posts and videos I watched made me do, is to avoid the common mistakes that you really need to know before starting a blog and this post is gonna add to that list based on my experience.
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Be Passionate
You gonna need to love blogging, if you want to succeed in this space because you’re about to write a shit ton amount of blog posts. You gonna have to work day in and day out managing your website, linking with other content creators, basically introducing yourself to the Matrix.
For your blog to grow a little bit faster than most of the blogs, you need to publish content more frequently and alert those Google bots that you are really serious about your site. Publish at least 4 times a week.
That is the threshold, If you’re still doing your 9 to 5 and can’t afford to get time to write 4 posts, you can always outsource content writing to people on Fiverr, UpWork, Freelancer and many other free lancing platforms. And soon enough with the right monetization strategy you will quit that 9 to 5 and become a full time blogger.
With that said, this is the mistake we did here at Lyncteck, we published content once a week following the advice of some random YouTuber. It didn’t work out really well.
We started to see traffic growth when we started to publish more posts per week, in some weeks we would do 3, some 4, some even 7 and our traffic went through the roof.
Being passionate also helps in gaining knowledge in your niche. Have you ever noticed that when you are passionate about something you always keep learning about the new stuff related to it, you end up being a guru in it.
That is exactly what I want you to become, a guru, a grand master, an expert in your niche. Knowing a lot about your niche comes with a lot of benefits. Like being able to do consulting which is one of the early monetization strategies you must implement when starting a blog.
Being an expert also means you can now launch a good course and sell it to your audience. Please take note, you don’t have to be at a level of Genius. You just have to know a little bit above average people in your niche, if you’re in the fashion niche you better know the top brands, trending stuff and so on. Not how a Gucci Bag is made.
Investing in your blog
You’re gonna bleed money from your blog, you gotta expect that, it is a sad reality, whether you are buying a plugin or some CRM service, money is going to be spent. You have to be patient with it, I guarantee you, all the money is going to come back. It will take like a year for your money to come back and yeahh!, patience is a strong word.
I’m sure a lot of you don’t wanna be writing content for like a year without seeing some income. This is bad news for you because in all the monetization strategies that are there, they all need an audience. Especially Ad revenue, you need to have tens of thousands of monthly visitors to earn a living from Ads.
There is one monetization strategy that can make you money from day 1, Consulting. This strategy requires you to have a little bit of knowledge about your niche.
If that’s you then all you have to do is add a work with me button on the navigation bar of your website. You will start to see some clients coming through. Make sure to deliver the best service so they can recommend you.
Taking your email list seriously
I never thought an email list was important, at least that important. Get this when a company you are an affiliate partner of sends you an easter coupon deal. The deal will last only for 3 days. When you write a post about it, it will rank a week later when the offer is expired. An email list is a quick way to send subscribed users some deals. With discount deals, the users are likely to purchase that product or service.
For collecting emails and sending campaigns, I recommend you use HubSpot. It is an all-in-one CRM platform.
HubSpot has its own plugin that will create a pop-up, slide-in, and many other types of forms for you. Not just that, you can also have a chatbot on your website. How cool is that? Better check out HubSpot.
There is also Convert Pro, made by the same team that made the Astra theme. So if you like the world’s fastest theme, you will like the Opt-in plugin which comes with it. The plugin allows you to create forms based on multiple triggers. You can have exit intent, scroll depth, session duration, etc.
It is really important to capture the emails of your visitors, they will be the first to get your content. When you have the emails, you almost have a consistent monthly returning amount of visitors.
Atta boy, Go get those emails.
Perfection is the enemy
Perfection, not even a single machine is 100% efficient yet people still use them. Avoid being perfect. It slows you down.
By trying to be perfect you end up doing the opposite. Posts you publish on your site are not permanent, you can always come back later to edit them later.
Usually when you come back later to edit a post. You will have more knowledge and more to write about. And at this point, it is when the post will need editing as your site traffic will be high enough.
The Website looks don’t matter, just make sure your website isn’t ugly enough to look scammy. Show some blog posts on your home page. Talk about what you do, a little bit of your story, and a digital product you have. That’s it you don’t need a fancy Home page as you find on websites like Forbes or something.
Also include a Newsletter Form, fishing for email subscribers.
Writing Alone won’t cut it
Done with a post, you hit publish.
Weeks later, you look at the stats and your post isn’t getting views, let alone impressions on the search results.
Welcome to the Matrix, small blogs don’t do well on Google Search Results. You are going to need something better than that.
Marketing, Advertising, Social Media
Do any of these word ring a bell?
After you hit publish here’s what you do. First of all, make sure you have an account on every social media platform.
- Tiktok
- Tumblr
- TruthSocial
- Discord
- YouTube
- OnlyFans(I mean, you really need this traffic)
You see all those, you have to market your posts on all those platforms. That’s one way to do it. Publishing on every social media platform increases your odds of success, it’s a number game.
OnlyFans was a joke there, but who knows?
Pinterest usually gives the best results out of all the social media platforms we mentioned.
Use Canva to make beautiful designs to post on your social media it’s completely free. All the featured images for our posts are made with Canva. They have like a million templates for everything. Check Canva out.
Post Format Matters
Ever noticed how our blog posts are formatted in a similar way, especially the “top X [product]” posts. They all show some images, the pros and cons, a bit of features, and then a call-to-action button. This is all strategic, some blogs even use some good-looking content blocks.
The blocks tend to go to the extent of showing the rating, the price, and other cool stuff here’s an example.
If you organize your posts this way, you will surely retain some visitors. Structuring posts really matters. You must have a template that you will be able to reuse on your different types of posts.
The posts you will probably write, are how-to, comparison posts, and product alternative posts.
And obviously some other random posts like this one.
Write More Guests Post
The hardest part of building your domain authority is getting backlinks. Google suggests that you don’t seek backlinks manually. Their theory is that if you have good enough content, you will get organic backlinks, and that is what we are aiming for here.
But if you want a quick way to get backlinks, I suggest you reach out to some content managers of emerging blogs on LinkedIn.
Connect with them, do an outreach, pitch your post idea and hopefully, they will approve. Once you get approved. You will write the post and add backlinks to some of your articles in your blog that have relevant information.
The more links you get, usually the higher your website ranks in Google Search Results.
Don’t make the mistake of buying links once Google notices that, your website will be blacklisted. It will be thrown to the end of search results, page 70 or something and you don’t wanna get there. You will be lucky if your website is even on search results.
Also an important tip – don’t link your website to scammy websites for backlinks. It destroys your credibility. Be safe.
Monetize 90 days later
I wish I knew this before I started the blog. Heck, I knew this, I had followed what Adam Enfroy said in one of his videos.
I didn’t follow the advice, so this counts as “something I wish I followed when I was starting my blog”.
Monetizing early, or at least trying to monetize early, will consume your time, you have to wait until your blog has some consistent traffic.
So in the first 90 days of your blog, you have to focus on content creation. You can outsource some of the article writing to people on freelance websites. Remember you need as much content as you can before monetizing.
Write content and grow your social media platforms. That’s it.
Focus on One Niche
Do not stray too much from your niche. If you chose PC tech, blog about PC tech. Don’t start writing about Car Reviews. You better create another blog related to that.
Otherwise don’t try to cheat the Matrix, you’ll end up with a blog with multiple unrelated articles with no traffic. People wanna follow someone who is focused, you know, that’s how you gain your audience’s trust. All you have to do is a blog about 1 specific niche. PC tech let it be PC tech.
You can blog about sub-niches in that niche. For example, how-to posts in fixing some of the common problems related to PCs.
Conclusion
You guys now know what 95% of bloggers don’t know when they begin their blog.
With great power comes great responsibility, If you start your blog, let us know what you wish you knew before you did start yours.
Remember to start monetizing content after 90 days. It’s 3 Months just be patient and write as many articles as you can.
