7 Things You Should Know Before Starting Your First Blog
Starting a blog can be really confusing. There are so many questions you probably have in mind. How many articles should I publish? What is the most profitable niche? What is the best way to make money from your blog? What are the best photos for my website? and more. In my first year of blogging, I made a few mistakes that impacted the speed at which I could start earning a higher monthly revenue as a full time blogger. I tried lots of things I thought could make money, but I ended up quitting and moving on to the next idea. Check out these 7 mistakes I made during my first year of blogging, what I’ve picked up from them, and how you can use these lessons to boost your earnings faster, simply by not repeating my mistakes.
How I Earned Money With My First Blog?
I launched my first blog in March 2017. Titled ‘My Vibes,’ it was a feminine-oriented blog that delved into a range of topics I liked, including design, home decor, fashion, and female entrepreneurship.
During that time, I worked as a Digital Marketing Manager at a leading advertising company. My role involved purchasing sponsored articles from local news websites for our clients. I was surprised by the substantial amount of money brands were willing to spend on these articles, prompting me to try it for myself.
My plan involved selling sponsored articles to beauty, fashion, and home decor businesses, and that’s precisely what I executed, and it worked!
I started by writing down a list of businesses organized by categories, such as, jewelry designer, vintage shops, home decor accessories, interior designers, etc.
For each category, I found 30-40 businesses and their contact details.
Next step was reaching out to them, offering them to participate in a sponsored article about the “Top 10 XXX Designers You Shouldn’t Miss” on my website. This offer included a promotion on my social media; Facebook and Instagram. I ensured that all the designers shared the article on their social media platforms. This helped me expand the article’s reach to a larger, targeted audience relevant to all the businesses on the list.
Surprisingly, this plan worked really well, and I earned $600-$1200 for each sponsored article I published. I took me around two weeks, from the moment I started working on the outreach list, until I published the article and promoted it on socials. The most stressful part was selling the article and making sure I have 10 designers in the article. Over time, I fine-tuned my strategy. I started by seeking out a well-known business willing to participate in the article for free, making it easier to persuade other businesses to pay and become a part of my article.
I was doing pretty well, but after the tenth article, I chose to stop because it became too stressful and intensive to handle direct business sales, and scaling was proving to be quite difficult. My preference was to monetize the website in a more passive way.
Started My Second Blog
I started to search for other ways to earn money blogging and I found out that many bloggers generate lots of traffic from Pinterest and make money from simply displaying ads. I really liked this idea because it didn’t involved direct sales! lol
So a few months later, in June 2018, I started Urban Mamaz. During that time I was pregnant with my second son and I knew that most of Pinterest’s users were women, so starting a mom blog was the perfect decision during that time.
I read every article I could find about generating traffic from Pinterest.
I worked like crazy, hired cheap writers from Fiverr to help me write articles, and published 40 articles per month! I designed 2-5 pins for each article and published them on Pinterest. Created many boards, joined group boards, and repined every pin to all the relevant boards.
I joined Madiavine and a few months later I earned $1,630 from displaying ads on my website. This was amazing.
This is when things started getting complicated, and I did so many things that were just a waste of time and prevented me from increasing my income.
In August 2023 I managed to break a record and earned more than $8k that month. If you want to read more details about how I managed to increase my monthly revenue, check this income report.
Here are 10 mistakes I made that you should avoid if you want to make money as fast as possible!
7 Mistakes I Made During My First Year of Blogging and What I Have Learned From Them
1. Create a Business Plan
First thing you need to do before you start a business is to create a business plan. Things you need to include and questions you need to answer are:
- Who is your target audience
- What are their needs/problems
- How are you going to help them
- What type of blog are you going to create and how
- How are you going to make money from this blog
- How much money will you need/want to invest in this business
- What are your skills, do you need to hire freelancers
- What are the goals for the first quoter
- What are the goals for the first year
- Set deadlines
When I kicked off my first blog, I didn’t really think about those questions. All I knew was that my blog would be all about fashion, home décor, and badass female entrepreneurs, and I had this plan to sell some sponsored articles.
I didn’t create a business plan, set goals, or establish deadlines, which led to these mistakes. This ultimately left me feeling frustrated and prolonged the time it took to reach my desired income.
Creating a business plan is essential. It ensures that you don’t overlook any crucial aspects, allows you to establish goals and deadlines, and ensures that you’ve conducted thorough market research, all of which accelerates your path to earning money. Trust me, earning more money faster from your blog is great because it provides you with a larger budget for reinvesting in your blog and scaling it up.
2. Take a Course And Learn How To Make Money From Your Blog
I started my blog without planning anything and without making an in dept research. I didn’t really know or understand how bloggers earn money before I started. What were my options? I started selling sponsored content, but it wasn’t the right thing to start with since my traffic was very low and the method was hard to scale. I didn’t understand what affiliate marketing is and how does it really work, I didn’t know how to monetize my blog and I had little knowledge about how to start a blogging career.
Before you start a blog, you should learn all those things and the best way to do it is to take a course.
There are many online courses for new bloggers. Learn from the bloggers who did it and earn money from blogging. You can learn so much from them and it will help you make money faster.
Today I know that I have learned how to blog the hard way. I read great articles online but it just confused me even more. It made me trying new things every few weeks and I was jumping from thing to thing. I could have taken a few courses and make my life much easier!
All that I have learned while blogging I share in this guide – How to start a profitable blog! In this guide I’m sharing all the steps for starting a profitable blog and my best tips to make it a success.
Eventually I decided to took two courses that helped me learn more which I truly recommend:
- Elite Blog Academy by Ruth Soukup – Visit her site here. This course may be on the expensive side, but Ruth is truly an inspirational individual and a highly skilled writer. It’s an excellent option for bloggers seeking a supportive community that not only helps one another but also assists in answering questions and resolving issues. Essentially, it’s an online academy. You have the flexibility to pay on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, granting you access to video tutorials and all weekly sessions. There’s a plethora of sessions available for bloggers at every skill level, covering all the essentials. Ruth believes that displaying ads yields the lowest ROI. Therefore, in her course, she teaches how to establish more profitable income streams, particularly by creating and selling your own products to your target audience.
- Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing – Check the course here. If you’re looking to earn money through affiliate marketing, this course is an excellent place to begin. It was the first course I enrolled in, and I gained valuable insights into optimizing your website for affiliate marketing income. It covers everything you need, from explaining affiliate marketing and its workings to the ideal site linking structure and the top plugins to integrate into your website.
There are two more courses that I think are worth considering as well, I didn’t buy them but I follow these bloggers who make tons of money with their blogs and I really think that they are processional and you can learn a lot from them.
- Fat Stacks Blog – Check his course here. He earns over $100,000 per month primarily through ad revenue. His main focus is on targeting low-competition keywords that are easier to rank for, allowing him to generate a significant amount of traffic and monetize it through ad displays. Make sure to subscribe to his newsletter, you don’t want to miss his valuable insights, he is genius!
- Adam Enfroy – Check his course here. In June 2021, Adam made $281,776. This is mind blowing. According to his income report, he earned $80,950 from affiliate marketing, $193,808 course sales, and $7,017 from displaying ads. He publishes very detailed and informative video tutorials on YouTube, and I bet his course can be very helpful.
3. Choose a Good Name For Your Blog
Ohh, I really wish I had picked a different name for my blog. And believe me, I’m not the only blogger who feels this way about their blog…
When I launched this blog, it was pregnant and centered around motherhood. About a year after the birth of my second son, I realized that there are more topics that I want to write about in my blog that weren’t motherhood. It was at that point when I began publishing articles about home decor, recipes, and a variety of other topics, thus transforming my blog into a lifestyle website. However, I was still stuck with “Mamaz” in the blog’s name, lol.
Certainly, you can change the name, but be aware that it may hurt your blog’s performance, especially if your traffic primarily comes from platforms like Pinterest or other social media sites. From my personal experience, I can say that Pinterest doesn’t like when bloggers redirect their content to a different domain address, your account can even end up in being blocked by Pinterest and a permanent loss of traffic. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to one of my websites that used to receive 30,000 sessions per month. As much as I want to change the name of this blog, I don’t want to lose hundreds of thousands of visitors that this site gets from my Pinterest account again. Learn how I use Pinterest to generate traffic to my blog here.
Therefore, my best tip is this: if you have a clear idea of the niche you want your site to focus on, select a name that aligns with that niche. However, if you’re uncertain and you’re the type of creative individual who frequently changes their mind, it might be wiser to name your site after yourself or choose a more versatile name that can accommodate various niches.
A tool I like to check name ideas is this one by Shopify.
4. Choose Your Niche
After realizing that I didn’t want to maintain a motherhood focused blog, and as my blog started to include a variety of topics, I invested a significant amount of time figuring out which niche I wanted to focus on. I realized there were a few niches I couldn’t let go of: making money through blogging, healthy living and nutrition, beauty, and home decor. I found it challenging to determine the primary theme for my blog, so it naturally evolved into a lifestyle blog. The issue with today’s lifestyle blogs is their lack of specificity, which makes it quite challenging to attract organic traffic from Google. It’s tough to compete with established websites that have been around for over a decade and receive millions of daily visitors. For young websites, niche sites are the reigning trend today and we can see that Google prioritize those sites.
5. Focus, Focus, Focus
Focusing is the most important part of running an online blog. When you start a blog, everything seems like a great opportunity to make money.
After I started Urban Mamaz, I also…
- Started another blog about babies.
- Started an Etsy shop where I sold Instagram stickers and covers.
- Started a recipes website.
- Wrote an e-book about how to generate Pinterest traffic.
- Created an online course on how to sell on Etsy.
- Started another blog about blogging.
- Tried to grow Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts.
Half of those projects I worked on aren’t available today. I hopped from one idea to another hoping to make good money from it and didn’t stay focused. While I did learn a lot from each project I worked on, my lack of focus resulted in slow growth in my monthly income.
6. Hire The Best Content Writers
When I started this blog, I used to hire the cheapest content writers on Fiverr. The truth is that their content was bad. I was publishing a high volume of content but it was low quality. Eventually I had to rewrite it all over again. While this approach initially helped me generate a lot of traffic from Pinterest, it turned out to be a poor long-term strategy because readers weren’t returning for more. Eventually, I transitioned to hiring professional content writers, and that’s what helped me elevate my blog and significantly increase my monthly earnings. I started publishing longer, higher-quality articles and tripled my RPM. Quality content is crucial, especially in this era of the AI revolution.
7. Invest In Beautiful Photos
Photos are visual content and one picture is worth a thousand words. High quality photos are extremely important for your blog. When I started this blog, I used to download images from website such as Pixabay, and Unsplash. However, a few weeks later, I opted for a monthly subscription plan on Depositephotos. With time, I learned how to find better images and which types of images attracted more people when used in my Pinterest banners. Selecting high-quality visuals is one of the most crucial aspects of improving your blog.
Final Thoughts
Learn from my mistakes; it can help you earn more money from your blog faster. Invest in courses; they can help you grow your blog and save time. Sometimes you find yourself overwhelmed with thoughts on how to improve your blog, but all you really need is another perspective to open your mind and introduce fresh ideas—exactly what you’ve been missing. Invest in high-quality content and visuals; they are the keys to your blog’s success. Most importantly, stay focused and never give up.
Have a question or want to share your thoughts? Share a comment below.
