The Top 10 Blogging Mistakes I Made in My First Year

Lots of people ask about what it takes to write on a successful blog – I think one of the keys to it is to make your mistakes early on and learn from them fast.

Perfectionism will only hold you back – I’ve found that as long as I just move forward with frequent and quick course corrections, I’ve been just fine.

But I’m also a fan of letting my mistakes be known so that others can learn from what I did wrong. So here are the top ten mistakes I made in my first year of blogging.

1 – I chose the easy blogging platform instead of the right blogging platform

When I first started blog setup, NucleusCMS was the only pre-installed blogging platform my hosting company provided. My research indicated I should really go with WordPress, but I was too intimidated by the installation process.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I should have done what I knew to be right from the start. I had to rebuild everything and lost time and a few inbound links in the process. And by the way, almost all hosting companies offer pre-installation of WordPress now – and if they don’t, the setup isn’t really THAT bad.

2 – I stopped commenting on others’ sites

Though it’s time consuming, I found out the hard way that you can’t stop contributing to the conversation elsewhere. It’s part of the blogging game – and critical to your success to comment on others’ blogs.

3 – I stopped linking out thinking I was Steve Pavlina

I noticed how Steve Pavlina NEVER linked to anyone else’s blog. I figured I could get away with that too.

Boy, was I wrong.

Frankly, I don’t know why it works for him – but I also realized that even if I COULD get it to work on this blog, I didn’t want to. I enjoy passing around the link love – and I know you enjoy receiving it.

4 – I did too much self-promotion

Right after I received my coaching certifications, I turned away from direct monetization and instead promoted the heck out of my services. I lost readers faster than you can type ’shut the heck up already’.

It didn’t take long to figure out I was on the wrong track -but I think some people forgot about me along the way. In the end, I’ve found a way to balance both self-promotion and direct advertising monetization. But it was really on a trial and error basis.

5 – I blogged 7 days a week

When I first started, I hadn’t found my rhythm – nor did I have any experience to let me know that business blogs take a break on the weekends. I also hadn’t figured out how to future post – so I felt obligated to write 7 days a week.

I rarely write on the weekends now – and if I do – they are future posted. If I’m going to write about work-life balance, I’d better practice what I preach, eh?

6 – I used number based permalinks instead of post title URLs

Thankfully I fixed this one fast – and went from URLs such as /p?123 to /i-love-to-blog. It took a while to fix the broken links throughout my site, but the SEO payoff has made it all worth it.

7 – I ran my contest way too long

When I ran my big birthday contest in April, I hadn’t run a contest before. One week would have been fine – two weeks, probably perfect. After 4 weeks, I was so sick of it I wished I could have ended it early. It felt like it fell into the ‘too much self promotion’ category. I was obliged to keep going, even though I could tell you were getting just as sick of it as I was.

8 – I didn’t promote my feed

Sure, I had the link there for people to subscribe – but I didn’t take subscription promotion seriously until 6-7 months into the game. I think my numbers would be a lot higher today if I had done some more actual promotion of subscribing to the eMoms feed. (Go ahead, you know you want to…)

9 – I waited too long to learn about SEO

Of course, when this site spent the first six months in the dreaded sandbox, SEO wasn’t really a high priority. I figured anything I would do wouldn’t help.

But once I emerged from the sandbox, I was woefully unprepared and unenlightened. I kept putting it off, until my site redesign opened my eyes to the cost of my oversight.

I felt like a moron for not paying attention sooner.

10 – I slammed a future good friend

Back in January I took Aaron Wall to task for a mention of mommy bloggers I wasn’t particularly happy about. In retrospect, I wish I had emailed him first rather than calling him out publicly – especially because little did I know I was going to meet him in person only a few short weeks later. (Although, in my own defense, the other guy Shuzak deserved a way bigger thrashing than the one he got in the comments here).

After the initial awkwardness went away, I found that Aaron is a really brilliant – and a really nice – person. And he was extremely helpful in getting Shoestring Smarts up and running. So it was my turn to eat a little crow and say “Sorry friend – my bad”.

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Are you a glutton for punishment? Then you might also want to check out Daniel’s group writing project with 48 bloggers sharing their own messy stories of failure.

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