9 things we wish we had done when we started our blog

Regrets. We all have them and when it comes to blogging there are some things we definitely wish we had done earlier on our journey.

It took us 1.5 years to join social media after starting our blog and it took us about a year to join an ad network after we already had enough traffic to make some money from it.

We could’ve been making passive income for a year and we didn’t even try.

Well, those are not the only areas we procrastinate in when it comes to our blog.

Hoping to inspire you to stop wasting time and take care of your blog, here are 9 things we wish we did earlier – those are also the big mistakes most bloggers make.

9 Mistakes Most Bloggers Make (Things we regret not doing earlier)

1. Waiting to know everything

Okay, so one other thing we waited for: actually starting our blog. This took us 3 FREAKIN’ YEARS. Like 3 years to do something that nobody we knew had to know about, nobody could judge us for and we didn’t need to invest more than $100.

It’s insane.

We were putting it off, and putting it off and always did something else, because it was “more secure”.

But during those 3 years, blogs we followed got huge. And we had stayed the same. Even though we did change our job for another one we didn’t like.

We didn’t learn any new skill, even though we were reading thousands of income reports and how people organized their blogs and made money online.

It’s obvious, but…reading and doing something are two completely different things. You learn differently, you cannot discover new things only based on the experiences of others.

So if you’re always putting it off just start your blog and you’ll figure it out from there. If you’re unsure about how to do it, we have written a detailed blogging guide about how to start a blog, grow your traffic and make money, you can find it all here. It’s free.

2. Creating helpful content

Above all – we wish we created content that was helpful from the start.

We actually only started feeling good and not like we're oversharing once we started thinking about others and not myself when writing our blog posts.

Once we took the focus off of us us us and put that focus on the people we can help, everything changed.

Our traffic grew quicker and people actually read our content.

As a rule of thumb now we always ask myself: “Would we share this if we were a stranger reading it?”.

If the answer is not a firm yes, it’s definitely a no.

3. Joining the RIGHT platform

As we said, it took us 1.5 years to get on social media. So, no doubt – we wish we had done this earlier. Joining social media has allowed us to get more exposure and kept us from being somewhere on the ass of the internet.

Fail:

The thing is…

They come and go.

Win:

And there within a month, our traffic which was 860 from using Yummly for a few weeks grew to 19.000 page views.

And that felt so awesome.

4. Investing

From the start, the goal of our blog was to do whatever we can by spending the least money we can (yes, we're kinda stingy.).

So naturally, we bought the cheapest hosting we could find and used a free WordPress theme, that didn’t showcase our content in a good way and wasn’t SEO friendly. In fact, we didn’t even have a real start page – it would just be our logo and post excerpts under it.

Now, this is ok, if you’re just starting out and testing the waters, but we wanted people to stick around for more and we wanted to grow quicker.

Plus we wanted some freedom in the customization of our website and we wanted our website to load fast. Also let’s not forget SEO, guys. Free themes aren’t SEO optimized, or whatever they call it. All we know is, once we bought the Genesis framework and the child theme, all of a sudden we started getting traffic from Google. Which never happened before. You can search for beautiful SEO friendly themes here.

Long story short after overthinking for about 8 months, we started spending money like crazy (it was $200, but in our mind, we were like spending money like a billionaire).

We bought better hosting that was surprisingly cheap and paid for a WordPress theme which was more engaging and SEO optimized. As mentioned, all that cost us around $200 and it is still a reliable investment we made for this blog because it allowed us to grow so much. Who knows where we would be if we didn’t make that leap? We don’t even want to think about it.

Bottom line: Invest in a strong foundation for your blog. If you are unhappy with your hosting or haven’t decided which hosting company to choose, definitely go with Siteground. You can even get 60% off and a free site transfer if you already have a blog. Your site’s uptime will be 100%, it’s cheap and the support is there for you 24/7.

5. Engaging with our audience more

One thing we regret not doing from at least day one since starting getting traffic is capturing email addresses and actually emailing our subscribers.

Now, this is, still (!!!), something we're behind and something we need to finally work on.

We started collecting email addresses, but we're still trying to figure out a way to actually stay consistent with emailing our subscribers.

Each week we promise myself we'll figure it out next week, but in the end, we put it off again. So that’s another regret there.

6. Joining an ad network

We waited to start promoting our content on social media, but we waited even longer to make ANY money from our blog.

We waited around a year to join.

When you do some math…Even if we made a $100 per month (passively!) from that alone, we would still get an extra $1200 that year!

This is definitely something we regret not doing sooner.

7. Joining Affiliate Programs other than Amazon

We're working on this right now and we need to test more to report here.

The Amazon Affiliate Program is great if you’re in a niche that can make money from it. But in our case, we feel like it is not worth it.

We get some clicks and income from that program here and there, but it’s in the 10’s. Not even in the 100’s. The fact is that Amazon doesn’t pay you much for your referrals.

They do however give you money on all purchases your readers make within 24 hours of clicking on your link. So it might work for some, but it doesn’t work that well for us. And we feel like we're not consistent with it.

Our goal for the future is to find more, higher paying affiliate programs. Those need to fit our niche and offer good products we like. We already joined affiliate networks like ShareASale and Awin and look for merchants there.

Another great thing about those affiliate programs is that you can offer your readers a better deal on a product you love. We love promotions and discount codes, so this is something we're excited about.

8. Creating our own products

Now, this is actually the reason we wanted to start a blog in the first place. We wanted to create a book with healthy recipes and help people eat healthier in less time and we wanted to promote it on our blog.

Kinda like, have a taste and then get the full meal here thing.

But did we do it?

Nope.

We got so caught up in creating our blog content that we completely pushed off creating any of our ebookS (with time we got more and more ideas and let some behind).

This is definitely something we want to work on this year. We know it’s something that can make us good extra money without investing a lot. And what’s more, it will be such a relief to finally get these books off our mind and share them with the world.

Another great thing about this is: you have the freedom to create something you’re truly passionate about! Something you believe in and something that can help someone else too.

9. Connecting with other bloggers

Last but not least – connecting with others who do the same thing, because it’s more fun this way.

In real life, we've outgrown this, but somehow connecting online with other people who have the same hobby or “job” like us is tough.

We feel like a weirdo reaching out to people who we have never seen in real life. Even though we're from the bottom of our heart happy when others reach out to us. We need that connection.

We realize we're overthinking this and it’s definitely one of our biggest New Years resolutions – be more social online and offline.

We know working with others can benefit your blog and business in many ways beyond getting traffic from leaving random comments on posts you think will be viral.

Mostly though, we miss having “coworkers”.

Working from home has its good and bad sites, you know? One of them – not being in touch with people other than your family and friends. Not being able to talk to others who actually understand your struggles.

So getting the courage to reach out and connect with others on social media or by commenting is definitely something we're working on now.

Alright, guys, we hope you found this post helpful if you’re just starting out, we realize it was all us us us, but we hope it was a us us us talk that can actually help you and inspire you to do all the things we listed above SOONER!