6 Lessons in 6 months of Blogging

This week has been a lot of firsts for me when it comes to blogging. I decided after about 7 solid months of blogging I was ready to take it to the next level and start a self-hosting site where I would have the freedom to do more and hopefully start making some income off the site. It’s been a week with a few stresses, some wins and some losses but I’m happy I took the plunge to start making some changes.

When I first started blogging I honestly thought it was going to be pretty easy. Slap together a website, start writing some posts – and watch the traffic come in. Reality hit pretty quickly after my first couple posts as I realized blogging is seriously hard work. At first I was struggling with how to generate traffic. I was obsessed with the stats and numbers coming in. How do I get more people noticing? How do I take advantage of SEO? How to I get people to start Pinteresting my pages?

I’m in no way an expert on blogging, and I have relied on quite a number of other blogging experts to help me get to where I am (I’ll list the best blogs I’ve found later in the post), but I have learned quite a lot and I want to share that with you (whoever you are) because maybe you’re just starting out and have no idea where to begin.

Lesson one: It’s damn hard work.

If you want to build a blog, and do it well it really takes time. It’s generally not something that can be slapped together in a day. You can read all the blogs in the world and never be an expert until you start building and audience yourself and testing different things to see what works for you and your followers. Because I have a full-time job, a social life, and various other responsibilities I can sometimes find it hard to sit down and dedicate time to building my blog, audience and social media accounts. I’m starting to get the hang of it more now. I give myself a goal of two blog posts per week at minimum. I do this because new bloggers often need to be posting more frequently to grow their audiences faster. On top of that I try and post at least 3 Instagram photos a week and spend at least 30 minutes every day (often spread out) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Most days I don’t feel like I’m doing enough, or ask myself why am I even doing this? It’s hard to know if people are actually getting value out of what I’m writing but because I enjoy it I’m going to keep going with it. Traffic does seem to be increasing (slowly but surely) and I’m hoping now with a more ‘professional’ looking template, that will help.

Lesson two: You have to be constantly learning.

I’m lucky in the sense that my digital marketing background has helped me get a leg up over many others when it comes to self-promotion and building communities online but that still hasn’t made it an easy ride. Ask anyone in the digital space what the most important part of their job is and many will answer you: learning. You have to constantly be keeping up with trends, new software/platforms/hashtags or whatever to be relevant. Same goes for blogging. Blogging is a growing trend for many reasons and I find bloggers have to constantly be learning new ways to grow traffic, new technologies or just simply new ways to expand, grow and promote their brand online.

Lesson three: It’s a community. 

That’s the great thing about having so many bloggers in various categories. You’ll always find a group with likeminded interests and ideas as you so it’s easy to fit in somewhere. I definitely would like to start connecting more with bloggers (I’m often nervous and confused about how to do this) because I can see how supportive everyone is of each other. I have joined a few Facebook groups in the past several months and it’s amazing to see everyone sharing what they’re doing, sharing products, trips or opportunities if they can’t take them themselves, and sharing tips to help those of us that are a bit newer into the game.

Lesson four: There will be hiccups so ask for help. 

It doesn’t matter how savvy you think you are, or how good the digital platforms you are using are – you will have hiccups. Most of the time these hiccups will make you want to cry, rip your hair out, throw your laptop in anger or simply succumb to the fetal position, but once you’ve solved the problem it’ll be the best feeling in the world. This week has been one of those weeks. After taking the plunge into self hosting through Bluehost my website went down, and I couldn’t figure out how to transfer the domain name, or even get WordPress.org running at all. This is where I learned the value of asking instead of researching. While it did take several attempts and many conversations with Bluehost agents I finally figured out what to do and it felt great! Same thing happened when I bought my WordPress Theme from Themes Art. Some elements weren’t transferring over or working as I expected them to, and after several frustrating attempts to research myself I finally reached out to the owner Marcus who was incredibly helpful in working out the kinks for me. I’ve finally got the blog to the point where I’m happy with how it looks (mostly).

Lesson five: Sometimes your family and friends just won’t understand. 

Don’t get me wrong, I have the most supportive family and friends in the world but for people who don’t understand blogging it’s often hard for them to grasp the concept of why you’re spending so much time (and a bit of money) on an online diary (their words obviously not mine). It’s hard to explain what I want to do and why because no one really believes you can make an actual living out of being a blogger but I’m determined to one day prove them wrong!

Lesson six: You’re not always going to be the best. 

Obviously. I see this as a good thing. There are so many bloggers out there that I look up to in different ways and for different reasons. I’m nowhere near being an influencer in any community yet but I’m hoping that with a little hard work one day I may just get there. For now I am more than happy not being the best and looking up to those that I think are.

Bloggers I admire: The Young Adventuress  / Pinch of Yum / Just A Girl and Her Blog / Heartless Girl / The Hip and Urban Girl / Girl vs Globe / We 3 Travel / The Travel Hack