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I have been blogging for nearly a year and a half now on this blog, and I have learned a lot of lessons during my time. While I was talking to my two blogging accountability partners about our blogging experience, we decided that it was time to talk about our experience. We talk a lot about our blogs, best practices and such – I mean, our group message could probably be turned into a course, with the valuable content there (if you don’t have a blogging accountability parter, you NEED one or two – they kick your butt, tell you to blog, and you end up teaching each other and learning together!).
So here’s how this works: this post is part of a 3-post roundup with 2 of my favorite blogger friends. You can read the other posts in the series here:
I Wish I Knew That One Size Doesn’t Fit All in the World of Blogging
There’s no such thing as a blogging formula, really. What works for one person isn’t going to play out the same for another blogger. We each have a different voice and a different style and a different audience.
When I went through a blogging boot camp, I was told that at 40 posts, I would see an increase in visitors to my blog. It didn’t quite work that way. In fact, if you google search the number of posts you have to have to get strong SEO results, there’s no absolute number. It can be 40 posts, it can be 70 posts. It just really depends on how you are keywording and sharing your blog. I know of bloggers with 15 posts that are getting 25,000 views a month (and applying to the MediaVine ad network), and I know bloggers with 100 posts who get barely more than a few thousand views a month.
At my heyday, when I was blogging for a high-traffic search term, I would get approximately 200 hits a day. It was crazy! Now, with a lower search traffic term, I am building up to that number of hits again. It just takes time, and your blogging story will be different from every other blogger’s story.
I Wish I Had Built My Email List from Day 1
A lot of aspects of blogging are scary for someone who hasn’t done it before. Email marketing is invaluable for those who want to build a strong following and a repeat audience who is addicted to your content. I started my blogging experience with Jetpack installed on my blog, and ended up ditching it because it glitched out. Apparently, I had a lot of followers on Jetpack through their subscription service, and when it crashed, I lost those subscribers.
See, here’s the thing: when I rely on an outside service, I don’t own my followers. I don’t have their information. The same issue happens with Facebook, and with Twitter. If you use any kind of social media service, you don’t own those followers, and you’re at the mercy of that service. If Facebook shut down today, I wouldn’t have the traffic from Facebook. If Twitter went away, I wouldn’t have access to those followers.
With a mail service, I own that list. It’s not just a curated list on a social media platform that has chosen to follow me. It’s people who have willingly opted in to receive emails from me.
And, honestly, they expect to see more marketing in their inbox. People go to social media sites to be entertained, not sold to. They want to have fun and connect with friends, not be asked to buy.
If you look at how big brands run their social media, you’ll see a lot of storytelling. If you look at your inbox, you see (and expect) sales pitches. People are WAY more forgiving when you slide into their email DM’s vs when you’re spamming them on Facebook.
I Wish I Had Outsourced Earlier
I hired a Pinterest strategist yesterday, and I cannot express how excited I was. I’ve used all the tools available to me: I mean, Tailwind has SAVED my butt so far! However, I wasn’t getting the traffic that my blog is capable of, and I heartily believe that it was due to the fact that I was just hanging on for dear life.
Outsourcing means that you pay someone else to do the things that:
- You’re not good at -OR-
- The things that aren’t strategic tasks for you
Posting to Pinterest took a lot of time for me every single week. I hired my strategist, and you know what I did in the time that I normally would have taken to work on scheduling my Pinterest? I batch-made more than 100 graphics. Yep.
What do you wish that you knew before you started blogging? Tell me in the comments, and make sure that you visit Nicole and Devin’s posts in this series. Here are the links again:
Want to learn more about my blogging journey? You can find me first income report HERE, and my 2019 blogging lessons learned HERE.
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