OK, so recently I was asked by one of my followers on social media to list some of the mistakes I have made blogging. I have been blogging seriously for about 2 years now, and within those 2 years, I have made a few mistakes that I would like to talk about. In today’s article, we are going to take a look at 5 beginner mistakes I made as a blogger. The funny thing about this article is that some of the mistakes I made, are the very mistakes that I was advised to avoid when I was taking my blogging course.

Alright, let’s go through the beginner mistakes I made as a blogger. The very first mistake I made and I think I have mentioned this before, was not making a decision about what topic I wanted to write about, when I chose the domain, I was not sure what I wanted to write about so I chose a random name, it was called speak my mind lol.

First Beginner Mistake I Made As A blogger Not Choosing A Topic

Then I started pushing out articles covering many different topics. One day I would write about fashion, then the following day I would talk about online dating lol, and then at the end of the week, I would write about sibling rivalry lol. To be honest, I thought I was doing great, I mean within one month of constantly writing I had a good number of articles.

So I thought it was time to speak to my affiliate marketing mentor, so he can take a look at my website, and congratulate me on the great work that I was doing lol. This is the beauty of being a member of a community that helps you as you are building your website, when my mentor looked at my website, he told me that I was not niche targeted.

And that if I want to ever make money with blogging, I must decide what my blog is going to be about. At that point I decided to seek help from the Wealthy Affiliate community since I am a member there, I requested an audit of my website, so I can get feedback.

My Blog Was Not Niche Targeted

The feedback I got was that my website was all over the place, and they couldn’t figure out what niche I was targeting or what my website was about. They also had the audacity to criticize my slideshow lol.

Anyway, I contacted my Affiliate marketing mentor again to ask him what the next course of action should be, he advised me to go through my articles and see how many relate to each other. I found about 5 articles that were skincare related. All the others did not relate at all.

So I asked him what to do, he told me that all that don’t relate, I had to either save them somewhere else, like in word or Google docs, so I can create other websites for them later, or just forget them altogether, but I had to delete them from the website.

He said since I had 5 articles in the skincare niche, then maybe it would be better to target the skincare niche. I had a lot of work ahead of me, I had to restructure the whole website, to make it about skincare. Don’t forget the website was called speak my mind lol.

I Had A Lot Of Cleaning Up To Do, Its Like I Was Starting Over

After cleaning up the website and getting rid of the slideshow, I started putting out content about skincare, I build out the website and it started looking like a skincare blog, one year down the line, I decided the domain name was not working for me, so it was time to purchase a new domain, and rebrand the website.

That decision has cost me a lot and am still paying for it . I purchased a new domain and moved all my content to that new domain, my traffic which was mainly coming from Pinterest was hit hard by this move. After claiming my new domain on Pinterest,  that meant all my pins on Pinterest were directed to a website that was not claimed, but the downfall came when I deleted the old website.

Second Beginner Mistake I Made As A Blogger I Deleted The Old Site Before Editing Pinterest Pins

I didn’t know that the pins were not redirecting to my new domain, so my traffic tanked even further now, because I was getting zero traffic from my old pins, some of which were ranking very well.

By the time I realized my mistake, my website was almost dead, like I was not getting much traffic. I was just getting a few clicks from Google. See what I didn’t know is that the traffic I was getting from Pinterest, was also contributing to my posts ranking on Google, so when the traffic tanked, Google clicks went down too.

So now I had another task ahead of me, I needed to delete all pins that were not editable, and create new pins for all those old articles, I sort of started again from scratch on Pinterest. I contacted a Pinterest representative to ask them what to do and they advised me to first of all delete all those pins that are returning error messages of the website not found.

Pins That direct To A Website That Doesn’t Exist Are A Big Mistake

Because they said those pins are very hurtful to my blog, So the Representative told me that all pins that I had saved directly from my old website which was now deleted, those pins can not be edited so I had to delete them immediately, or if I want to use the images, I can download the images to my computer and use them to create new pins, but that is only if the images are not branded with the name of the old blog.

But the other pins that I had created and uploaded to Pinterest can be edited and I can add the new URL, so I started by editing, the ones that I could edit, and then I deleted all the ones that I could not edit.

I spent a whole week just working on Pinterest, creating new pins, and editing the old pins, that I could edit.

Then Finally my Pinterest account was looking good again, but up until now, I haven’t been able to get back to where I was in terms of traffic.

Third Beginner Mistake I Made As A Blogger Joining Amazon Associates Too Early

The Amazon affiliate program is very easy to join, all you have to do is sign up for their associate program, and then you can start using your affiliate links immediately. That’s exactly what I did, but what I didn’t know is that if you don’t make at least three sales in the required time, you will be kicked out of the program, which is what happened to me.

Now even though you can re-apply at any time, it’s better to join Amazon associates when you know you have constant traffic to your website and you are able to make sales.

My Fourth Mistake Was Using Too Many Images In My Articles

If you are in the Skincare and beauty niche, then you know that there are so many beautiful images that you can use on your blog, and it’s easy to go overboard with the use of images. I was using up to 6 images in one article and it was not a long article. This meant my pages were loading slowly due to the number of images, and the size, I liked large images.

What I didn’t realize was that most people are using mobile devices, like phones and, tablets, and iPad. So even though the articles looked great on my desktop, they probably don’t look so good in other devices, and of course, as I mentioned the pages were loading slowly.

As a blogger, I would highly recommend that after writing an article, you go back to it using a mobile device just to see how it looks in different devices.

And Finally Too Many Plugins

Blogging is very easy, and you can change just about anything on your blog, especially if you are running a WordPress site, you have a plugin for just about anything. Now, although plugins are super helpful, you must keep the number of plugins on the low.

You must decide, which plugins are absolutely essential, and then the ones that you don’t really need, you have to disable them. And if you install a theme and it suggests that you install plugins, you really don’t have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. I have themes that suggest that I install plugins, and I chose not to and all is just fine.

There are some plugins that are absolutely necessary, those are the kinds of plugins that help run your blog smoothly, for example, an SEO plugin, security plugins, an image compressing plugin, Please read this article to get a clear picture of plugins that you need on your blog.

I had installed all kinds of plugins, and when I checked my website speed, was terrible especially when it came to mobile devices, so I contacted site support at Wealthy affiliate, and they fixed the issue by removing some of the plugins that I was not even using. They also advised me on which plugins to deactivate, because I had some plugins that were doing the same thing, yet I had two of each.

For example, I had two plugins that were supposed to compress my images, and they were interfering with each other so my images were not being compressed anyway lol.

Conclusion

Blogging can be fun, but you need to do things correctly from the start especially if you plan to make money with your blog. But if you just want to blog for fun, then you can start a lifestyle blog, which will not target any niche, and you will just blog about whatever.

Although lifestyle blogs do perform OK, over time, it will take time, and you will not gain authority on any topic, because you will be covering various topics.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my mistakes so I can save you from making the same.

I would like to hear from you, have you made any mistakes blogging? what kind of mistakes have you made? Please leave your comments below.

Thank you for your time.

Rose.

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