Top 5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging
Please and please, no hard feelings, I must confess to you, I'm not a wannabe blogger, I'm a very good blogger, not really because of my ability to turn things around in blogosphere, nor the ability to face and tackle my own problem when I come across them. The simple truth is because I've made some mistakes so many times when I started blogging. After I began blogging for years and making countless numbers of errors. Now, how wouldn't you know how to tackle it and express it to the world why all other blogging aspirants should not make the same mistakes? Obviously, there are still many bloggers out there that do not know these things would surely, or has been affecting them already.
In a nutshell, these 5 points, I wish I had known them, or seen them somewhere or someone should have told me, perhaps before I permanently started this blogging issue.... Let's get going:
5. SOCIAL NETWORKS: Over the years, before having interest in blogging, even before having any idea of what blogging is, I was a very active personality on social networks most especially on twitter on facebook, now when you surf the internet, you will surely come across links coming from blogs and you would be like "Damn It!!!" I hated seeing blogs link coming my way, I always went as far as blocking and removing any friend that shares link into my timeline.
I believed when a blogger needs traffic into his blog, he should just do all these SEO settings and will get whatever results he wants from search engines like google and co. I never supported the believe that you can make a blog popular through social networks. Now I've swallowed all that, I,m now even the one that would gladly accept any friend request on facebook and follow people on twitter in order to gain followers, simply because I realized the impact of social networks in getting massive traffic to blogs, either by sharing blog posts, to social media profiles or even direct messaging to some users. How I wish I had known this before, maybe I would have been a more professional blogger if I had focused on promoting my pages and building followers not blocking and removing them when I thought I was doing the right thing.
4.BLOGGING IS FREE: Hmmm, This is where I made a lot of wrong assumptions, which I know many people are already making the mistake. Okay I love blogging, Which one should I choose between Wordpress and Blogger? Then I register on either of the two, meet Jide Ogunsanya for designing of my blog, then call Olalekan of Ilovetextmessages.com for some cool SEO settings. Then I'm good to go and make my thousands if not million from blogging. Lol, these are cheap and lame thoughts of mine that time, no spending of my money before I could make it, although as a newbie I was right, but relax, let me explain how I was wrong.
Do you know that apart from opening a blog for free on wordpress.com, if you then want to host that particular blog on your own personal server, or you want to have your own domain name, you can spend up to $49 in a year. Say what???? I know it's even cheap for rich people like you, well let's even put that aside, there are so many things you will even spend money on while blogging unless you don't want to make money with your blog site. These are few of it:
DESIGN: Forget Jide Ogunsanya, if you need the best blog design that will satisfy your customers/readers, it wouldn't go without receiving something from your pocket. The senior blogger who are kind enough to do it for free would limit the design to some point, there are so many templates/themes that can never be gotten for free, how do you expect him to get it for you when you don't have anything to spend.
CUSTOMIZATION: There aren't free stuff for everything you need, sometimes it costs money to consult an expert to customize anything you need like mail address or to make you site visible enough to move along with your visitors, If you don't have enough cash to meet the consultants, I do not know the magic you will use to achieve it.
Social Media Advert: One of the best method to reach the audience is through advertising on social media profiles eg facebook ad, google adword and so on, They aren't done for free. The list is endless... It took me many wasted years before I realized all these, had I known these earlier before I started blogging, maybe my pocket would have gone fatter than this.
3. DETAILED POST: Who would love sitting down spending days, researching on a particular post before you successfully post it? Lengthy write-ups is what I never even dreamt of when there are so many blogs online I could just copy their contents and paste them on my portal. Of course I never knew its wrong to be a copy/paste blogger. Yes, very wrong, Click here to see the why a blogger must not copy and paste. If your write up should be informative, it has to be lengthy.
Another reason is that google loves it so much when you write lengthy posts. You will rank high and your visibility on search engines will increase, google sees content as king. I wish I had specialized myself in this aspect before coming to blogging.
2.AUDIENCE: When I was a novice in the game, all I was always happy about is the number of traffic I pull per day, I never cared about the original readers. There are differences between visitors and readers, though readers are also visitors but they are the returning ones. These ordinary visitors will never visit your site without them seeing any link that leads to your blog. It might even be their last time of opening the blog so far they've gotten all what they needed. But the real readers knows the address of your blog offhand. They always have reasons to go there and have fun as they are used to the system of the site through consistency. These are the people a real blogger must focus on, as they are broadcasters of your blog themselves.
Nowadays, I only focus on who my original readers are, and I always get to know them through the numbers of people that are subscribing for my blog to be receiving daily posts in their mail addresses, besides, the real readers are the ones that always have their time to comment on every article they come across on your blog. Yes, my real readers of this post will surely comment on this post below. A success-aiming blogger should be more concerned about regular readers not just link followers and I wish I had known this before i started blogging, I would have gone farther than this.
1.READERS' DIRECT CONVERSATION: What do I really mean by this? It's straight and self explanatory, have you ever sat down and ask yourself, "Why do we feel comfortable talking to our friends but would be feeling asleep when in lecture halls?" That's the big difference between conversation and lecture, in conversation, you talk I talk. In lectures you are not allowed to talk if the lecturer doesn't permits. This is applicable in blogging, I never imagine writing post that would be conversational to readers, I would rather be writing for reading sake. When I started blogging years ago HERE, nothing concerned me with readers, all I cared was about visitors, it affected me that over one thousand post, I could not record up to 20 comments which means there were no returning visitors. But less than a month ago when I realized I should be discussing with my readers not lecturing them, this same blog that is not up to a month has recorded little comments on each posts. When your write-up is conversational, you tend to realise people are enjoying you and day by day, your regular visitors increase day by day.
_______________________________________________
The number of things I wish I knew before blogging are countless but these are the top 5 ones, according to my opinion. Verily I wouldn't want you to make this mistakes as well as they hindered my swift growth a little bit. So tell me, what are your own points, and what mistake did you make also when you started blogging.
Don't forget to share this post in your social networks below:
Do you know that apart from opening a blog for free on wordpress.com, if you then want to host that particular blog on your own personal server, or you want to have your own domain name, you can spend up to $49 in a year. Say what???? I know it's even cheap for rich people like you, well let's even put that aside, there are so many things you will even spend money on while blogging unless you don't want to make money with your blog site. These are few of it:
DESIGN: Forget Jide Ogunsanya, if you need the best blog design that will satisfy your customers/readers, it wouldn't go without receiving something from your pocket. The senior blogger who are kind enough to do it for free would limit the design to some point, there are so many templates/themes that can never be gotten for free, how do you expect him to get it for you when you don't have anything to spend.
CUSTOMIZATION: There aren't free stuff for everything you need, sometimes it costs money to consult an expert to customize anything you need like mail address or to make you site visible enough to move along with your visitors, If you don't have enough cash to meet the consultants, I do not know the magic you will use to achieve it.
Social Media Advert: One of the best method to reach the audience is through advertising on social media profiles eg facebook ad, google adword and so on, They aren't done for free. The list is endless... It took me many wasted years before I realized all these, had I known these earlier before I started blogging, maybe my pocket would have gone fatter than this.
3. DETAILED POST: Who would love sitting down spending days, researching on a particular post before you successfully post it? Lengthy write-ups is what I never even dreamt of when there are so many blogs online I could just copy their contents and paste them on my portal. Of course I never knew its wrong to be a copy/paste blogger. Yes, very wrong, Click here to see the why a blogger must not copy and paste. If your write up should be informative, it has to be lengthy.
Another reason is that google loves it so much when you write lengthy posts. You will rank high and your visibility on search engines will increase, google sees content as king. I wish I had specialized myself in this aspect before coming to blogging.
2.AUDIENCE: When I was a novice in the game, all I was always happy about is the number of traffic I pull per day, I never cared about the original readers. There are differences between visitors and readers, though readers are also visitors but they are the returning ones. These ordinary visitors will never visit your site without them seeing any link that leads to your blog. It might even be their last time of opening the blog so far they've gotten all what they needed. But the real readers knows the address of your blog offhand. They always have reasons to go there and have fun as they are used to the system of the site through consistency. These are the people a real blogger must focus on, as they are broadcasters of your blog themselves.
Nowadays, I only focus on who my original readers are, and I always get to know them through the numbers of people that are subscribing for my blog to be receiving daily posts in their mail addresses, besides, the real readers are the ones that always have their time to comment on every article they come across on your blog. Yes, my real readers of this post will surely comment on this post below. A success-aiming blogger should be more concerned about regular readers not just link followers and I wish I had known this before i started blogging, I would have gone farther than this.
1.READERS' DIRECT CONVERSATION: What do I really mean by this? It's straight and self explanatory, have you ever sat down and ask yourself, "Why do we feel comfortable talking to our friends but would be feeling asleep when in lecture halls?" That's the big difference between conversation and lecture, in conversation, you talk I talk. In lectures you are not allowed to talk if the lecturer doesn't permits. This is applicable in blogging, I never imagine writing post that would be conversational to readers, I would rather be writing for reading sake. When I started blogging years ago HERE, nothing concerned me with readers, all I cared was about visitors, it affected me that over one thousand post, I could not record up to 20 comments which means there were no returning visitors. But less than a month ago when I realized I should be discussing with my readers not lecturing them, this same blog that is not up to a month has recorded little comments on each posts. When your write-up is conversational, you tend to realise people are enjoying you and day by day, your regular visitors increase day by day.
_______________________________________________
The number of things I wish I knew before blogging are countless but these are the top 5 ones, according to my opinion. Verily I wouldn't want you to make this mistakes as well as they hindered my swift growth a little bit. So tell me, what are your own points, and what mistake did you make also when you started blogging.
Don't forget to share this post in your social networks below:
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