5 Mistake I Made In my Dark Blogging Days – Part I
Everybody makes mistakes, and I can tell that every new blogger has gone or will go through the dark blogging age. People get into blogging for different reasons but end up making the same mistakes over and over again. Blogging is a tough business and unless your heart’s in it, you are not going to survive the grind. So I hope by reading my 5 mistakes in this post you can avoid making the same mistakes in your business:
- Starting Blogs for the wrong reasons: I remember it like it was yesterday. I was reading an article in one of these tech magazines about a guy who made 6 figure income with his blog. So I thought, if he can do it, I can do it too. But these guys really make it look easy, and unless you get the whole process right, you are not going to make it in the blogging business. I pretty much started blogging for the wrong reason, money. I would go and find topics that would pay a lot of money, as far as Adsense was concerned and start a blog about them. After a few weeks of not making any money, I would abandon my old blogs and jump ship to other topics. I don’t think I made more than $20 from this whole process, so this was probably the dumbest thing I have done.
- Putting myself first: when I got started blogging, I thought everything should be about me: How much money I am going to make, how long I can take vacations, how my readers can help me make more money,… What I didn’t pay attention to was providing value to my readers. I know a few bloggers got away with this approach in the early days, but that simply does not work today.
- Affiliate Marketing Is as Good as Cash: like any newbie blogger, I was buying these ebooks and “how to make a million in an hour” audio-books on a consistent basis. I probably burned a fortune on my training courses. What I did was trying to put affiliate offers all over my pages and hoping for people to click on them. Talk about being dumb. Hoping and praying almost never works in the Internet industry, but I was misguided. If you are reading this, and you are running a banner farm in hope of making quick bucks, do yourself a favor and focus your efforts elsewhere.
- Not testing enough: flying blind in marketing is a major mistake, and I am guilty as charged. I used to not test things and leave everything to fate and God. God’s not going to help you if you don’t test different advertising channels, affiliate offers, and … Being blind in the marketing world is as good as being dead, which means you are not going to make it.
- Not knowing when to quit: this happens to almost all of us. We fall in love with our projects and fail to see it when the ship is sinking. If you have blogged on a topic for a year and still can’t get decent traffic or retain your users, something’s got to change. You can’t keep what you are doing and expect something different. But I have done. I did it for 2 years and was too stubborn to leave my project behind. I got into a hyper-competitive market. I didn’t have enough resources, but I thought I could outsmart the big guns. Two years later, and I finally came to conclusion that the market wasn’t right for me. But I should have made that decision a year or so earlier. Too bad so many of us don’t know when to cash out.
There you have it. These are some of the most basic mistakes that I made in my dark blogging days. I still make mistakes. Everybody does. But it’s a learning process, and you are better off for it if you actually avoid making the same mistakes again. In the next part, I will talk about some more surprising mistakes that bloggers make everyday and how you can avoid them. Stay tuned.
