Blogging can be a rewarding experience, but it can also become a stressful experience too in the beginning. It takes a lot to time to learn and grow, but you can do it. Here’ I shall share a few the biggest mistakes I made during my first year of blogging. I hope my experiences help guide you through your journey!
Scroll to the bottom of this post for some courses that’ll help you through your blogging journey! They definitely helped guide me through a lot of challenges.
This blog may have affiliate links. This means that, at no extra cost to you, if you so choose to participate in some of the learning opportunities here, we at Kyrabe Stories may receive a commission as gratitude from the partnering companies. Thank you sincerely for your support and for your desire to learn and grow!
Okay, let me start off by saying that blogging as a business entails a lot more than just writing posts and hitting the publish button. If that’s all that you want to do though, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with blogging as a casual hobby.
If you plan to make money from this, then buckle up because you have one hellacious learning experiment ahead of you!
Starting out, I was overwhelmed by how much I didn’t know about blogging. I was fortunate enough to have come across a free 5-Day Blogging Course that got me started. It also helped to have been a part of their Facebook Blogging Community because it showed me that I wasn’t alone in this learning experience.
After a few more months of stubbornness, I invested in their 30-Day Blogging Blastoff course (new enrollment window each month), and that gave me the detailed insight as to if blogging as a business was something I truly wanted to take on. Fortunately, that answer became a definite YES!
This is one of those mistakes that should not have been a hard lesson to learn, but it was. Take this question to heart: How do you expect people to read your content if nobody knows that it even exists?
I finally sucked it up and got Hootsuite, a social media management platform, and OMG I am still frustrated that I didn’t do something like this sooner! Many thanks to P.A. Raymond for also taking over much of the social media post shares. We have a spreadsheet of all the posts listed with the description and relevant hashtags at the ready. Each day, certain posts are shared to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This allows for consistent organic traffic to the blog!
Please remember to constantly share your posts. I admit that I thought it would be spammy to post a link to a specific post more than once. That is not true! Unless every single follower hits that notification button (which let’s be real, not everyone is going to do that) only a small percentage of our audience will actually see that we posted something new. Re-posting a link a few days later just allows a new group of your followers to see that you’ve posted something new!
My mentality for most of the year on this one was, “If they really like the post, they’ll sign up on their own!” This held true for only a tiny fraction of my readers! Which was weird seeing that I would get comments on social media on how the articles were helpful. So why the freak were they not subscribing to the newsletter!?
One mistake that I made was not adding a direct call-to-action to the post itself! Something as simple as, “If you enjoyed this post, sign up to the newsletter for more updates and educational resources!” or placing a convenient and obvious method to sign up in the post itself!
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Another method has been to make my newsletter call-to-action a direct link on social media! Briefly explain what your audience can expect from signing up, like how we send out affordable educational options, then simply add the link to the subscriber page! If you’re on Twitter, make this a regular tweet!
Yes, email is still a popular method and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. One thing that’s good about Email Marketing is that your subscribers have already opted-in to say, “I want to see more of your work!” On social media, they MIGHT be notified that you’ve posted something new, but through a newsletter, they will be alerted every time.
We technically do not own our social media pages. If our accounts were deactivated or if the platform just slowed down on engagement (MySpace, anyone?), that’s their right to do so. However, you still own your email list if you paid for the email marketing service, such as through Constant Contact as we use. That is yours to notify your audience whenever you please (just don’t be spammy about it).
Social media has become such a powerful tool when it comes to promoting our brand and expanding our audience. On top of that, it’s free to link posts back to your blog on most popular platforms! Now, how many people actually see and engage with the post is a completely different and extended subject matter to touch on, but point being: larger ENGAGED audience, larger exposure. If your audience shares your post, then that’s more exposure for you!
Did you noticed the ENGAGED part? Buying followers do not work. That number will just be that: a number. Follow-for-follows don’t always work well either unless you are actively and genuinely engaging with each other’s work. Your analytics will tattle on you. It’s better to have a small/mid-sized engaged audience than to have a huge following of bots.
Another important benefit to growing your social media audience is for paid promotions from bigger brands! We are living in an age where most ads can be skipped after 5-15 seconds. What are bigger brands going to do if their marketing strategies are being ignored? They hire people like you and me to promote their stuff for them! This is getting more into Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing, but here’s this similarity gist of both:
Our audience trusts our recommendations. Companies need to sell their products. Our audience matches the company’s targeted audience. Our content doesn’t get skipped over (as much). Company extends a contract or a commission agreement for us to advertise their products. Larger audience equals higher demand from these companies.
See how a larger audience can help out? Now, let me warn you that it takes some seriously dedicated social media management and engagement to grow an engaged audience, but as long as you provide them valuable content, they’ll want to interact with you.
I thought I knew who my audience would be, but this is not the area to be making narrow-minded assumptions! Sure, we need to have a targeted audience depending on our niche, but don’t place a limit onto your reach just yet.
When I declared my blog to be focused on personal and professional development, I assumed that it would mostly be high school and younger college students interested in my posts. I was surprised to see occasionally that the 35-44 age demographics would compete for the top spots. I was also happy to find that I have an almost even gender ratio of users although I also assumed that females would be more attracted to the blog itself.
Take time to explore Google Analytics and see who your content is attracting. These reports will also come in handy when it’s time for paid promotions.
So here’s a little bit of behind-the-scenes dry humor about this tip: This is my second time making this post. I messed up my settings in Bluehost (my domain provider) that ended up resetting my blog to the last backup, which was fortunately right before this post was published. Not that bad, right? Just one lost post. Well, the only reason that was the most recent backup is because last week I made some edits that caused ALMOST A THIRD OF MY BLOG POSTS TO DISAPPEAR!
After many hours of agonizing troubleshooting, I managed to find where the other half of my blog had gone and I did a backup save right then and there!
Yes, I’m frustrated about having to redo this post, but I guess I needed that reminder. I’m grateful that I always save a copy of the rough draft in OneDrive. I still have the editing to do, but it’s better than trying to remember everything I typed from scratch, right? #AlwaysLearning
I promise that all of this was not meant to scare you away from blogging. Mistakes are going to happen. I can guarantee you that! It’s a never-ending learning experience, and I expect to make plenty more mistakes with blogging in 2020. Each lesson will just make us wiser for the following year.
What are some of your concerns with blogging? If you’ve been blogging for a while, what are some mistakes that you had to overcome? I’d love to hear about your experiences.
And above all else, remember to just live and learn one story at a time.
Take care,
Kyndall Bennett from Kyrabe Stories
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