I have been active on internet for more than 5 years but I
started blogging some 2 years back. In these 2 years I have made many mistakes
and am still trying to sort out some of them. As the saying goes, life is too
short to make all the mistakes yourself so it is better to learn from others’
mistakes. I am sharing some of the lessons that I wish I had learned from
others’ mistakes and not my own.
Users are not waiting to come to my blog:
I wish users were smarter and they got to know about start
of a great blog as soon as the blog started. But unfortunately that does not
happen and they need to be told about the blog again and again before they
bookmark it.
Everything takes a hell lot of time–
Getting google to index pages and send traffic, building
twitter followers or a powerful stumbleupon profile, getting admitted into
adsense and everything else will take a lot longer than what I had thought.
Checking the stats 20 times in an hour does not help.
Google is pathetic at recognizing good content –
If google bot were a person, it will be one of the
stupidest user of my blog. Posts written after hours of research do not even
get indexed while posts that were put together in 10 minutes time have reached
number one position and driven crazy amount of traffic and earned me loads of
time.
There will be time when I do not feel like posting
All of us face the writer’s block at some point of time or
the other. It helps to have a co author as he/she can keep the blog going while
you struggle to complete even a single post. Otherwise keep additional posts
ready for such times.
Fellow bloggers are way more nice than I can imagine
If you think about it most of us bloggers compete for the
same traffic. Yet we link to each other’s content, stumble and do everything
that we can to help the other guy. It may not sound a lot but on a day when I
am completely down on spirit, a nice gesture like this helps get the smile back
and has been one of the biggest motivators to keep me writing.
Surprises happen
In the 2 years of my blogging career I have experienced
extremely positive and extremely negative experiences including Google making
my pagerank zero, my blog getting hacked to my post getting featured on the
product page of Indiblogger and one of the top 10 posts of DW.
The theme matters…A LOT
This is one mistake that I think most geeks make. We love
writing the core algorithm and never care much about the front end. No wonder my blog always had a horrible look
(the theme sucks even now) and I believed that it does not matter. Only after
my guest post about blogging without passion got published on this blog, I was
surprised to see how much more impressive the post looked. I have started
working on the theme of Binaryday and hopefully you shall see a better theme
and some posts about themes on my blog soon. The point is my blog would have
done way better if I had got the theme right from the beginning itself.
Denial can kill my blog :
Sometimes we do not get something important. I did not get
the importance of themes and I did not get the importance of social media
including twitter. That is OK. But what is not OK is the fact that I got into
denial about the importance of these two things and convinced myself that they
do not matter. What is it that you are in denial of? The importance of SEO,
need of better monetization method for your blog. Hope you will get out of the
denial today itself and start working on things that are important for your
blog.
What are the points that you wish you knew when you started
to blog. Please share in the comments and let us make this a must read post for
new bloggers.
source.........shoutmeloud
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