When I first started blogging in 2017, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. At first, I blogged on my dad’s website, writing about random things ranging from Fantasy Football scores to a weird dream. I believed my only readers to be my grandparents, and that was true.

After about eight months of this, I decided that blogging under my dad’s name seemed rather stifling. I created my own website using the free platform Blogspot. The website, elishamcfarland.blogspot.com, has since been deleted, but the lessons it taught me remain.

The biggest lesson that blogging on that site taught me was consistency. I found that I could not pass 100 monthly views if I wasn’t blogging at least twice a month. Ironically, it wasn’t until I started blogging on WordPress multiple times a week that I discovered I could reach more than 3,000 views a month. Still, the lessons remain- no traffic can be made if you aren’t putting content out.

The other lesson I learned was that of marketing. You cannot expect the world to crowd onto your doorstep just because you began a website. You won’t immediately begin receiving 30,000 daily views on your site unless you go out and attract people’s attention. This is where marketing becomes key. Marketing has now taken over as the most commonly-used form of raising awareness for something. No Go-Fund-Me, nonprofit, business, or website can expect to receive views without marketing.

Unfortunately, after nearly two years of blogging on this website, I only had 1,400 total views and around 8 followers, a far cry from some of my blogging friends. Looking back, I realize that the low readership was actually a good thing; I could make mistakes and few people would notice. These mistakes, made on both my past and current blogs, have shaped me as a blogger and helped me become a better writer.

1: The first mistake I made was mentioned above. I thought that, because I started a blog, the entire world would come at my beck and call, turning me into an overnight celebrity. Again, this returns to the subject of marketing. It wasn’t until I started reading Neil Patel’s blog that I realized how crucial marketing was to a website. A new blog will not receive a large amount of readers overnight without doing some serious marketing. For more information on marketing, read my blog post on off-page SEO by clicking here.

2) I also made a mistake in the formatting of my posts. In the beginning, none of them had pictures, tags, or categories- they were simply words. Of course, none of them came even close to ranking on any search engine or reader, and it wasn’t until I implemented these tricks that I began to see results. If this is you, and you want to see results in your blogging, I advise you to begin using these tips.

3) My final mistake as a new blogger was in refusing to go the extra mile in my writing. If you were to compare two of my posts, one from 2018 and one from this month, do you know what the biggest difference would be? If you guessed the length, you are correct. The average wordcount of my earliest posts was probably around 500 words. My 2020 average wordcount is 1,200 words per post. Google has readily admitted that they favor post length in their factors for ranking pages. In essence, the longer your post, the higher your rankings on Google will go.

If you are making any of these mistakes, don’t worry! Fixing them is not a difficult thing to do. Make these tips a habit, and you will see immediate results. If you are a new blogger, make sure to do this from the beginning and you should have no problem raising your traffic. Don’t make the mistakes I did in thinking I knew everything. Ask questions and learn, and you will succeed.

Ask questions and learn, and you will succeed

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Alright, that’s all for today. Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this post. If you haven’t already, be sure to click that Follow button below (or to the side), so as to not miss out on any new posts. Thanks again, and I hope you have a fantastic day!

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