Hi all and happy Monday!
This week I’m talking about the mistakes I’ve made in blogging over the years. This is a prompt I gleaned from “101 Blog Post Ideas” by Jo Linsdell. I started blogging a few years ago, but completely redid my blog after making some serious mistakes the first time around. I am still slowly learning what makes a blogger successful, but here are my mistakes, flounders, and completely failures that I have identified, and how I have changed my blogging behavior to rectify them.
FAIL: I didn’t have a vision.
When I first started Bitch Bookshelf, my ideas were all over the place. While this was mostly a book review blog, I often posted about other things, and those were things I didn’t care about enough or wasn’t educated about enough to write properly about. For instance, I wrote wine reviews. I’m not a sommelier. I had no idea what I was doing.
FIX: I have a central theme.
This is first and foremost a book blog! Almost all of my posts are about books or the library, and when I pepper other things in, its because I know what I’m talking about. Yes, I still blog about wine, but now I share my reviews for Winc orders. I don’t try to be something I’m not. I just talk about my experience shopping and sipping, similar to my Stitch Fix reviews.
FAIL: I worried too much about making money.
When I first signed up for my blog, I got affiliate happy. I was signing up for every program and slapping ads all over my blog. I made next to no income for this and my site looked disgusting. Furthermore, it was like I was selling out. I don’t like sites with ads, so why did I litter mine with them? I felt like blogging had to be about making an income, when the real reason I started my blog was to share my love of reading and writing!
FIX: I have fun and am genuine.
Now when I blog, I just do it for fun. I share affiliate links when relevant, and while I’m still not rolling in the dough, I actually see some results from sharing affiliate links now. My readers and followers trust my genuine, descriptive reviews on things I actually use and understand.
FAIL: I didn’t make it a priority.
I tried to post twice a week in years past, and even earlier this year. If a post didn’t get written, I didn’t sweat it. This was to the point that I just stopped updating altogether. I didn’t hold myself accountable, so nobody missed me when I was gone.
FIX: I have a plan and I stick to it.
Now, I update five times a week, and in 2021, I plan to update seven times a week. Penciling posts into my planner before I write them forces me to do just that – sit down and blog!
FAIL: I didn’t work on my SEO.
There are so many little things we can do to push our ranking up on search engines! I never really paid attention to these things before, even though I knew they worked.
FIX: I do what I have to do for SEO!
Whether this means thinking critically and strategizing a plan or just replying to every comment on my blog, I do what’s best for my SEO. I ask friends who visit my website to click through to other pages and check my site out instead of just reading the post I’ve sent them, should they have the time. I reply to comments. I look into my Google Analytics to see who is coming to my site and why, and then I take notes from that. For example, I saw folks were coming to my blog looking for book club questions and summaries, so I am in the process of adding book club questions to all of my book reviews.
Have you made any of these mistakes? What are some blogging errors you’ve made, and how did you fix them?
