Top 10 Things Not To Do When Starting A Blog

One thing I have done over the years is to use a lot content creation by writing a blog. There are many people who can tell you what to do when writing a blog but very few tell you what not to do when writing a blog.
All of these bad things are coming from someone who has started a few blogs more specifically I have used one for when I owned a Brick and Mortar business as well as numerous authority sites using a blog. Specifically, I wrote a blog for 18 years for Papago Brewing Company and used them in numerous e-commerce businesses that I owned as well as the current ones I am doing.
Just this past month I started up a couple of new blog sites, Worldwar2.blog, Tattoolovers.blog, Europeantravel.blog and Skateboarders.shop and have many more in the works. So I think I’m going to be able to deliver a lot of the great value to you on this message and I’m excited to get started.

Let’s talk about the 10 things not to do when starting a blog.

Having started multiple blogs that have failed and two that have had great success, We know a few things about starting a blog and a few things, especially about starting a blog in the wrong way.
1. What not to do is I do not start in a niche that you’re not passionate about or have a specific reason for building it. For instance my Tattoolovers.blog and Skateboarders.shop I am building for my nephews who are into those things to be able to take over once I get them going, while my Worldwar2.blog and Europeantravel.blog are things I am.
A little story about a blog that I started was called Fattycrab.com, and I paid a lot of money to have it built. However, the thing about it was is when I started to try to create the actual content for it. I couldn’t do it because it was so incredibly boring and just something that I really wasn’t interested in. Listen, there’s a lot of money to be in cooking products but that doesn’t make it something I’m passionate about or interested in.
So if it’s something you’re not interested in, don’t start a blog in it just because it’s able to make that’s, not a good idea. I did eventually sell the site for a small profit. Think about your blog just like having a long conversation with people. So it should make sense that it should involve the things that you actually enjoy talking about are closely related to your passion.
Remember, a blog is just a long conversation. It better be something you’re interested in or it’s going to turn into a job for you really quickly.
2. Do not spend days perfecting your name and mission statement. I’ve done this, probably on every single one of my blogs. You know you spend days hunting down the perfect domain name and trying to get the perfect mission statement going in and the About Us page and just all this stuff.
That really doesn’t matter that much. You know many of the blog names I have come up with were very good. Europeantravel.blog is probably the best domain name, I’ve thought of because everybody reads that totally knows what it is about before even going to it.
That being said, it hasn’t made any money yet but I attribute that to the travel shutdown due to Covid and look at it as a temporary setback. It has given m time to begin establishing it and to work on the site’s SEO. But the main one was, I spent so much time trying to perfect what cannot be perfected and our most profitable blog has been Digitalpapercuts.com and this is not even a real word.
Yeah, it’s not the best blog name, but doesn’t really matter because the content I’ve created does the talking.
It’s about the content, use about what you do, not what you say you do that matters, it’s what you actually do. One of my favorite quotes in “is what you do speak so loudly. They cannot hear what you say.”
3. Do not get started on a free blogging site. Nothing is a bigger signal for a wiki blogger than a domain name like jenny blogs here at bloggers, blogworld.com. You understand what I’m saying there. I understand it starting a blog for free, sounds sexy, but there are no free lunches, guys don’t be fooled when companies do things like that, the company needs to make money somehow.
So if someone’s offering hey free blogging, blah blah blah they’re going to make their money and they’re going to make it later on, and it’s not going to be fun for you on top of all that, having a blog like that looks unprofessional, it looks sloppy.
It doesn’t make a good first impression: it’s not actually owned by you, so they can take it away from you and it’s a real waste of time because whenever your blog starts to become successful, you’re going to want to move it to your own hosting and your own domain eventually. So if you do become successful, which you want to be successful, I assume that is a waste of your time. So don’t do that.
4. Do not buy a bad website host, so we were hosting with SiteGround for a while at the beginning and our website kept crashing due to large influxes of traffic. It even became such an issue that we almost lost out lots of traffic in a month that we had again, I don’t bring up money or anything too, like oh, my gosh. They make so much money.
What I bring up that stuff just to impress upon you that you know we do know a little bit about what we’re doing when it comes to blogging. That’s really the only reason I would bring up money. The thing here is that we moved to Namecheap and they were super helpful with us getting started.
Now our websites get a lot of traffic, and even though I love Namecheap we will be moving a number of websites to Groovepages once they release their blog feature because in the long run, Groovepages speed is outstanding since they use Googles Cloud for hosting. The problem with Siteground is that we were losing out on traffic and losing eyeballs and eyeballs means money.
If we were still hosting with Siteground. It would have literally cost us thousands of dollars because the site would keep crashing and it wouldn’t be able to handle this kind of traffic and in the amount that SiteGround wanted us to pay to handle.
5. Ok, do not buy crazy, expensive, all-inclusive software that hasn’t been updated in years. One of the biggest mistakes I made as a rookie blogger was buying into something called Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is a massive company and they were kind of the leading forefront of internet marketing at the beginning. Now they are seriously old and outdated.
The problem is that trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, You will be a master of none, okay and so Infusionsoft tries to do everything, They try to do email marketing. They try to do the small business customer relationship management software. That being said, they try to market themselves to bloggers and people like that, and again, as I’m saying before they try to be everything they try to be email marketing.
Next, they try to do landing pages. They try to do sales pages, they try to literally do it all and when you try to do it all, by doing this they have become very mediocre at even some of the basics, and I just stated it here: when a company tries to do everything, they end up becoming really mediocre at everything they do as the software progresses and needs to be updated, internet marketing and blogging and starting a blog, is an ever-growing ever-changing evolving thing, there’s always going to be new software like Grooovepages that come along and do things better.
There’s always going to be new techniques and new ideas and new ways of doing things, and you need to be aware that you can start out a company that you know is focused on everything and maybe the software starts out really good. But unless you are like constantly updating and advancing it’s just going to be outdated so fast, so so fast everything changes and that’s why a big company like Infusionsoft software is a dirty dinosaur.
They aren’t small and nimble. There are some good software programs you can use that I’ll recommend here. We used to use activecampaign. This is now what we use for email capturing is something called convertkit. Convertkit has just been amazing for us. It’s email, marketing for professional bloggers. Dark themes is amazing for collecting leads, and it’s just an amazing plugin for your website and WordPress.
WordPress is really the only platform you want to be blogging on because of all the tools available until Grooveblog comes out that is sure to be as good as their other platforms I am sure. WordPress I think it’s something like over 70 million blogs are hosted on WordPress, 70 million active blogs.
So people who create plugins and create different themes and things for your WordPress site aren’t are constantly being updated as well to match these new techniques, and things like that, if you start off with something like say, a Squarespace you’re not going to get these same options.
Is that if you start out with something other than WordPress and some new technique comes along and there’s no plug-in and nothing to help you out on Squarespace? Well, you can’t do that thing. You can’t try out that new technique and that’s that’s why you want to start with WordPress.
6. Okay, do not forget to invest in yourself and your business. I have spent dozens of hours, hundreds of dollars, hundreds I’ve spent thousands of dollars investing and furthering my education. Research into blogging, because knowledge is power, the deal is, is that you’ve got to think about it as investing in yourself.
Investing in ourselves has been incredibly important to the growth of our business, especially buying books and products in the right software, for us to help us learn and advance. Yes, you can learn it on your own and you should be doing it. You need to be constantly taking action and constantly writing new articles and creating things. However, you do want to invest in yourself in your business.
This money spent towards investing yourself versus money spent on buying the latest pair of Air Jordans shouldn’t even be a question in your mind. You need to forget about material things and all that stuff and focus on investing in yourself. That way, you can actually grow your income and grow the amount of money you can make later on. If you really want to get those Air Jordans as well, you can get them and it won’t be that big of a deal
7. Do not mix business expenses with personal expenses. On your credit card, this happens a lot and it happened for me because you know I was just a small business owner. I owned a Brewing Company back in Scottsdale and if you start mixing up these things, what happens is you go back to your credit card statements, and you say what was that Amazon purchase for?
It was it that those books I wanted, or that rad Colorado sweatshirt or those Air Jordans. One of the good things about having a blog is that you can write off all sorts of things. The bad thing about having a blog is it becomes easier to justify certain expenses, so be careful of the lifestyle growth thing whenever you actually start making money.
With a blog, you’ll want your lifestyle to grow as well, and you got to kind of mitigate that and make sure you don’t get go too far down that rabbit hole. Obviously having nice things is okay, it’s just it’s about keeping your head on straight.
8. Do not forget to keep diligent records of expenses and revenues. You know. Sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard to look at the numbers, but a good business owner is not afraid to look at the numbers, even if it’s a loss, even if you didn’t do well, even if you didn’t make a sale that month, you need to look up the numbers at the beginning of every month, all right at the end sit down with a spreadsheet and look at your numbers.
Look at here’s what we spent on software! Here’s what I spent on blogging! Here’s what I spent in these various places and keep diligent track, and in that way, it will be the forefront of your mind.
Keeping track of our growth figures out is how we can cut costs, and keep track of how much we owe in taxes which is very important.
9. Do not ignore the power of Pinterest for bloggers, think of Pinterest and blogging like peanut butter and jelly, like milk and cookies, wine and cheese, enough food talk I’m getting hungry. The point is if you’re not using Pinterest for your blog you’re crazy.
We drive over 1,000 views per day to Pinterest. It is just an incredible resource for those of you who want serious traffic to your blog. Now we have some other additional resources here:
10. Do not give up, do not give up. I started out in this game of trying to make money online. I have started numerous blogs and will continue to create new ones. About 5 years I wrote my first ebook and tried to sell it on Amazon.
Now it is a lot easier to do that because of software like Squibble but the point is I tried something new and learned how to do something out of my wheelhouse. If you are new to the game of trying to make money online and – you’ll be like me probably and will try finding the latest shiny toy to help you make money but you won’t unless you are persistent and keep at it.
I’ve gone through a lot of sleepless nights to be honest, I felt like getting my teeth kicked in. It felt like I would wake up and work and work and I’d, go to bed feeling like I had just gotten punched in the face. Even so, a lot of things were going right even if you couldn’t see the results right away.
I did do one thing correctly throughout the building of a business and that’s was I never gave up, no matter what I just kept moving forward. It doesn’t matter whether it takes five years or five months to find your success blogging. What matters is that you keep going and keep pushing forward.
If you haven’t started your blog yet do not put off starting up a blog off any longer. That’s the thing about it is, is taking massive action towards your goals. It kind of eliminates most of the problems that you’ll face but it doesn’t eliminate them, it exposes the problems that you will face, and that way you get to attack them.
Blogging is just solving a series of problems and once those problems are solved you can make a full-time – income blogging, but there’s just it’s like think of it, like running the 100 yard hurdles. It is kind of similar for some reason it just brings up in my mind, it’s this.
It’s the race right where people have to jump over these hurdles as they keep moving forward, very similar to blogging is that it is what it feels like is, is you’re going to take a few steps forward and then you’ve got a jump and then there’s some other thing you’re going to face, so you have to jump there. You have to jump, but that first jump and that first push-off is the most important because most people never even take that leap and you can get started by making your blog today.
I hope that this stuff was interesting and informational and will help you out in the future.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is A Blog

A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular content of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or instructional or entertainment videos. .

How Do Bloggers Make Money?

While most blogs are not for profit those that are generally use three ways to get paid. Bloggers get paid through ad networks like Google Adsense which are per impression or per click or Paid per impression – with these ads, the viewer does not have to click on the ad in order for the blogger to receive an income. The other way is to promote affiliate products such as Amazon products and the blogger gets paid when the person buys on the other site.

Is It Worth Starting A Blog in 2021?

Yes, with the lingering effects of Covid we have seen internet usage continue to climb. People are always looking for information. And yes, you actually can make money – by blogging.

What Are The Best Tools For Blogging?

Tools to help you write easier and faster

Google Docs
You can also consider writing in Google Docs for collaborating with others and tapping into the extra power of Google Docs’ spelling and grammar tools.
Sqribble
Squibble can take your blog and turn it into a beautiful looking e-book.

ContentNinja.io
This one helps you cheat a little but also helps you create unique content. It transcribes YouTube videos on any subject you can find on YouTube and then you simply have to do a little bit of editing and voila you have a blog piece. It’s one of the most straightforward and time savings tools you can find.
Grammarly
Copy and paste your article into Grammarly’s online grammar checker or use the Chrome extension to check for spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, style, and more. T
WordPress Distraction Free Writing
This helpful tool is built right into the WordPress editor. To access the Distraction-Free editor, click on the four-way arrow icon in the top right corner of any WordPress post you’re writing.