This is a Guest post by Sita, who writes at Binaryday. If you like to write for us check, Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.
I have been active on internet for more than 5 years but I started blogging some 2 years back. In these 2 years I have made many mistakes and am still trying to sort out some of them. As the saying goes, life is too short to make all the mistakes yourself so it is better to learn from others’ mistakes. I am sharing some of the lessons that I wish I had learned from others’ mistakes and not my own.
Users are not waiting to come to my blog:
I wish users were smarter and they got to know about start of a great blog as soon as the blog started. But unfortunately that does not happen and they need to be told about the blog again and again before they bookmark it.
Everything takes a hell lot of time -
Getting google to index pages and send traffic, building twitter followers or a powerful stumbleupon profile, getting admitted into adsense and everything else will take a lot longer than what I had thought. Checking the stats 20 times in an hour does not help.
Google is pathetic at recognizing good content -
If google bot were a person, it will be one of the stupidest user of my blog. Posts written after hours of research do not even get indexed while posts that were put together in 10 minutes time have reached number one position and driven crazy amount of traffic and earned me loads of time.
There will be time when I do not feel like posting
All of us face the writer’s block at some point of time or the other. It helps to have a co author as he/she can keep the blog going while you struggle to complete even a single post. Otherwise keep additional posts ready for such times.
Fellow bloggers are way more nice than I can imagine
If you think about it most of us bloggers compete for the same traffic. Yet we link to each other’s content, stumble and do everything that we can to help the other guy. It may not sound a lot but on a day when I am completely down on spirit, a nice gesture like this helps get the smile back and has been one of the biggest motivators to keep me writing.
Surprises happen
In the 2 years of my blogging career I have experienced extremely positive and extremely negative experiences including Google making my pagerank zero, my blog getting hacked to my post getting featured on the product page of Indiblogger and one of the top 10 posts of DW.
The theme matters…A LOT
This is one mistake that I think most geeks make. We love writing the core algorithm and never care much about the front end. No wonder my blog always had a horrible look (the theme sucks even now) and I believed that it does not matter. Only after my guest post about blogging without passion got published on this blog, I was surprised to see how much more impressive the post looked. I have started working on the theme of Binaryday and hopefully you shall see a better theme and some posts about themes on my blog soon. The point is my blog would have done way better if I had got the theme right from the beginning itself.
Denial can kill my blog :
Sometimes we do not get something important. I did not get the importance of themes and I did not get the importance of social media including twitter. That is OK. But what is not OK is the fact that I got into denial about the importance of these two things and convinced myself that they do not matter. What is it that you are in denial of? The importance of SEO, need of better monetization method for your blog. Hope you will get out of the denial today itself and start working on things that are important for your blog.
What are the points that you wish you knew when you started to blog. Please share in the comments and let us make this a must read post for new bloggers.
Related posts:
- 4 Ways How Images Enhance your blog
- How (NOT) to make a complete disaster of your blog!
- Blog Features : Establishing Quality and Usefulness of Blog
- How to Make your Blog popular
- 8 Important Points To Check Before Starting Your Blogging Business
- Interlink your old blog post to keep your visitor stay long
- How Google SERP Position Affects Your Blog Traffic
- 5 Common Reasons Why You Can Not Monetize Your Blog Yet
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post !! thanks for sharing
Thanks Rahul for the kind words
I think SML is going its way on becoming the next problogger. May be thats the reason guest posts are so amazing here….
I think the best thing to know is that …. no matter how hard it is … one should start on self hosted wordpress.
You are right Debajyoti, In the coming time SML will definitely get the peak.
Great article, thanks for sharing, i learnt a lot out of it
@Debajyoti,
I am flattered to get such a nice comment from you. I know you from indiblogger where your post is the longest running sticky post I guess.
Ya blogging tips always work….. well I think there are more bloggers than readers.
I mean, till date I have hardly recieved any comments from non-blogger readers…
May be because people with strong views on a topic tend to blog…Btw I have seen lively dicussions on sites about startups, product and moview reviews as well
Really nice post.. You told some thing true about Google… unexpected things works. That’s why i give equal importance to any type of content.
Very well written…..
Must read post for newbie bloggers.
Well, I noticed you have changed your blog theme. I think its still under constrution.
You can see the prrof in the popular posts section of SML. One of the best blogs about internet marketing does not have a single internet related post amongst the top posts.
Sita this is one of the best posts i’ve ever come accross which has prompted me to open binaryday…
Really worth a read Sita…
Good insight about your blogging experience. Every blogger can relate with the points mentioned here.
Nice post Sita, it’s good to reflect on past triumphs and mistakes, even better to share them with others. One this I wish I had done is work on one project at a time rather than spreading myself too thin.
Nice post buddy. Even though I always gave importance to the look of a blog, I really didn’t like the SEO part of blogging. I never have understood it till now.
I wish I was an SEO expert before I started blogging!
Thanks everyone for the encouraging words. This is one of the factors why I have started enjoying to write on SML instead of my own blog. I get a lot more comments on SML.
Cool points.
I truely agree with you Harsh…. I started in fall 2007 n still i am stuggling to get traffic.
But I guess its not always about the traffic. I love to write and that is why I blog and one more reason i blog is that – wen I face a issue i resolve it and post about it so that once again if I face it I dont have to go through all those searches again this also happens to help others.
Great article. I’ve run into a lot of these things you mentioned while working on my blog.
Thanks 4r sahring