In the year and a half that I’ve been regularly blogging, I’ve learned so much. Of course, part of the learning process is making mistakes. Mistakes, while annoying at the time, are a tool for growth. Today I’m sharing 10 blogging mistakes I’ve made so far hoping that this will help you grow without having to make the mistake.
I didn’t create pinterest worthy images
For the first six months of posting on my blog, I didn’t create Pinterest worthy images. I didn’t see why the images mattered since the content was what I was trying to promote. Little did I know that the way you promote the content is with the eye catching picture. I’ve now finished going back to old posts and making images.
I switched to the wrong wordpress
How many people have done this? I started my blog on Blogger and knew that I needed to make the switch to WordPress. Problem was, I didn’t even know there was a .org so I registered with WordPress.com. Then I had to switch everything over to WordPress.org. Switching twice was such a pain!
I updated my theme file without having a child theme
Yes, this was quite painful. I did quite a bit of customizing to my theme and CSS file. For quite some time Child Themes didn’t make any sense to me and I didn’t even think about using a plugin. So, when my theme updated, all of my changes were lost. I eventually found that there are plugins that create a child theme for you.
I added two sets of google api tracking code
This was an interesting one. I was working on my Media Kit and trying to show live stats. I decided I’d try some plugins to see how they worked. One of the plugins worked pretty well but my stats seemed off. One major red flag was that my bounce rate was 0. I then realized that the plugin added tracking code to my site so the code was then being tracked twice. Deleting the new plugin to resolve the issue.
I deleted my blog’s pinterest board
While working on Pinterest images for my old posts, I uploaded some pins to my blog’s board. The pins wouldn’t load properly and I decided to delete the pin and try again. I ended up moving too quickly and deleted the board without realizing what I was doing. There is no way of getting the board back so I had to re-create it and add all of the pins one by one.
I used categories as tags and didn’t use tags
Categories and tags didn’t make any sense to me at first. I ended up adding a ton of categories and decided I would use those instead of the tags. Once I was a bit more versed in WordPress I learned that categories are a way to sort your posts and tags are more for SEO. I had to go back and re-categorize and tag all of my posts.
I didn’t use Yoast SEO
SEO is yet another thing I didn’t know anything about. Actually, I still don’t know much about it. But, I do know now that I need to have an optimized focus keyword the post needs to have good readability. I look for those green dots!
I didn’t set a featured image
The featured image showed up looking a bit off when it was displayed on the post so I didn’t use it. When I created my pages that automatically show posts in each category, I realized that the featured image was needed to show an image for the post. After a bit of research, I found that there are quite a few plugins that allow you to choose if you want to display your featured image on the main post or not.
I burned myself out
When I started my blog, I decided to post three times a week. This was way too much! In the beginning, there’s a ton of behind the scenes webpage design. This makes it hard to have time to create great posts. After about two months of blogging I was completely worn out and took a three month break. When I started up again, I decided I would only post once per week until I was ready to post more. Now, i post twice per week. I knew I was ready when I had so many ideas for posts that I didn’t know when I would be able to post them all.
I didn’t have any group boards on pinterest
This wasn’t exactly a mistake. I just literally didn’t know how to add a group board. I’d found many group boards but I was at a loss for how to add them. One day I had a light bulb moment though and I clicked into other bloggers pages to see which boards they were part of. Many of those board has instructions at the top of the board giving contact information to request addition to the boards.
There we have it. I know I will continue to make mistakes, learn, and grow. Hopefully this post causes you to avoid the troubles that I went through.
Let me know in the comments what your biggest mistake blogging has been.
Great tips! I just started blogging about 6 months ago and its definitely a learning lesson along the way! Thanks for sharing!
OMG I made a few of these mistakes as well but this is really helpful thanks for sharing xx
thanks for all the helpful tips. Always nice to learn from someone else and how they did things.
Burnout is BAD. I’d rather not post for 3 weeks than post a crappy post because I feel pressured to post!!! lol
I loves this post! This is extremely helpful to me, especially since I’m new at blogging!
OK I have to admit I have done most of these too! But I have learned so much from all of mishaps. As long as we have a takeaway the mistake is worth it:)
Thanks for sharing! Especially the featured image for the blog. I didn’t know their was apps to fix it so it doesn’t show on the main post. I was having that problem,
That pinterest is a great tip!
It is hard to get in a steady groove and figure out what works when you first start blogging. These are some great tips! Thanks for sharing!
I am guilty of too many of these mistakes that you mentioned, but that is how we learn. A quick question, are you using premium Yoast SEO? I have Yoast SEO on my site too but have not upgrade to the premium yet. I am not sure if it worth it tho.
Hi Julie! I am not using the premium version of Yoast. I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg on SEO so far.
Hi Kari, thanks for the info. I think for now I am just stick with basic Yoast SEO and work my way through the green dots 🙂
This is great information! I’m planning to start a blog after the first of the year so this list will come in handy. Thanks!
What a great post. I have made so many of these mistakes. It is esp hard when you work full time.