Blogging in 2021: things we would do differently

You might remember last year, we were thinking of starting a new blog and we did! Some say blogging is dead, we'd say…it’s much alive right now. So, if you’re looking for some great blogging tips to grow and start a new blog in 2021, here are the things we'll be doing differently this year to grow our new baby blog!

So, what we're thinking is: we want to keep Gaical only for food, recipes and healthy lifestyle and to share our personal development stories, blogging, productivity and business tips and ideas in our new blog.

You Don’t Need To Be A Writer Or An Extrovert

We understand blogging is not cool anymore, it wasn’t cool when we started this blog in 2015. But to us, it makes us happy. It’s fulfilling to see we've built something out of nothing. See the progress we've made from even just a month ago.

Did we tell you that we never thought blogging would be for us? Never in a million years. All the writing and promoting content is so not in what we considered our nature. We did not like to write. Being the introverted extrovert that we are (aka shy) promoting something we had created also sounded pretty terrible. Yeah, just go, dig a hole in the backyard and hide somewhere. Who do you think you are?

But after doing this hundreds of times, you kinda get used to it. You kinda know it’s going to be okay and you start trusting yourself. Because it’s true what they say: Nobody’s solid. Something else they say: You live and you learn. They know things.

So blogging in 2021. Let’s talk about it. What’s going be different if we were to start a blog all over again?

Blogging In 2021: Things we'd Do Differently

1. Start Social Media Before The Blog

The reason we want to do that is that it takes time to build trust with these platforms. You might remember we started social media about 2 years after starting this blog and because of that, during those 2 years we didn’t have anyone come around. Now it’s grown into something that brings us so much joy and helps us connect with others and serve those who need it.

So by starting maybe two, three weeks in advance we'll have the basics covered and we will have build a small audience. So that when the blog is actually ready, we would have people to show it to.

We also don’t want to wait more than 2-3 weeks to start, because we kinda lose motivation when we put things off and we get less excited.

Of course, with starting social media – we'll focus on saving and sharing content that’s relevant to our blog niche. So for personal development, blogging and business we won’t necessarily be saving a pin about how to dry tomatoes, even if we might want to do it. Always think what your ideal reader would like to read.

2. SEO Everything.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s what people do to get found on Google. You do it by using specific keywords and by formatting your blog posts properly.

Still, SEO is a mystery to us. We try to do it, but then we're too slothful to go and start guest blogging and building backlinks. It just doesn’t excite us, it makes us want to run away and hide somewhere. But we have found that choosing the right, more niche keywords and writing helpful articles helps.

3. Write Helpful Content That Isn’t Solid

Whenever we write content now, we always keep the end in mind. Start with the end in mind they say. And this is so true. And it makes things so much easier and the content so much more helpful.

The end we keep in mind when we're writing content now vs in the past is that we want our content to be useful, but not overwhelming. We don’t want to go into too many details. We want people to come, get the information or inspiration they need, understand why this is important and then take action. Like actually take action.

Too much information, too many details aren’t empowering, they can be debilitating. Too long of an article can give your audience an excuse to not do what they want to do. To put it off for later when they do have time to read it all. Most of us, don’t have that much time. We still bookmark all these notable blog post with 3000+ words, graphs, and helpful content that can probably solve all our problems, but we never actually read them. A video that’s longer than 5 minutes? Don’t actually watch it. People want solutions fast. And we want them too.

So keep it straightforward and focus on the essentials. Keeping the end in mind has helped us create better content a lot faster. We're not wondering what this blog should include and what it shouldn’t. Not trying to impress anyone. We're quite aware we're not writing poetry and we've let go of the desire to be unique or to make content about how special we are. The only thing we want when someone stumbles upon our article out of all the articles on the internet is to make them feel good, understood and to help them take action.

4. Get the Technical Stuff Right!

We won’t go into too much detail here, but here we've built a foundation that works for us at this point so we're thinking about using the same things on the other blog:

Hosting: Siteground (absolutely recommend, get 60% off!)
WordPress Theme: Genesis and the Divine child theme (the one we're using now), although we love the Cook’d theme as well, so we might use that!
Pin-Making Tool: Canva!

BTW. if you’ve never made a blog before and need help with that, read our How To Start A Blog Guide, it pretty much goes through everything you need to know at first about creating a blog.

5. Create a Blogging Calendar and Stick to It

2019 was the first year we created a simple schedule for this blog, that is humane, not overloaded and actually works for us. That simple schedule changed everything. Thanks to that schedule in 2019 we were able to stay consistent with our blog and with social media and we saw the biggest progress and growth. It makes us happier and helps us breathe easier.

Before that, we'd have weeks when we didn’t post anything, weeks when we'd post 5 times and we'd always have that nagging voice in our head: When are you going to finally post something???? Now we're calm and so much more productive.

With the new blog, we're thinking of blogging once a week at first and see from there.

6. Delegate More

We don’t know if we'll necessarily hire someone to do things for us, but we'll definitely invest more in scheduling tools like Tailwind, automate as much as we can and create layouts for things like social media graphics and blog posts.

And update: we feel like last year we came to the conclusion we definitely need to hire someone to help us out. Someone help us out, please. Hahaha, we're kinda all over the place and do not like it. So this year this is one of our top priorities: delegate more!

7. Think of Blogging As A Marathon

We hate when people say this, because running a marathon has never been something we'd want to put myself through. We'll probably change our mind in a few years when we get a little bit older and have to prove things to myself.

But when it comes to blogging, patience pays off. It does. Impatience, however, can waste quite a lot of time. Checking stats over and over again has only made us unproductive and stressed in the past.

Now we want to look at a blog as what it can be not just a year from now, but 3, maybe 5 years from now. What it can become.

We always used to set monthly or annual goals for this blog – how much traffic it should get, how much money it should make, how many posts it should have. And it always created stress, not excitement. But this year, we let go of this and understood that with patience this blog can grow this into something much bigger and better and it’s okay if we don’t “get there” this month or this year.

Blogging in 2021: things we would do differently