Things I Learned From One Year Of Blogging

Last Updated on April 11, 2022 by Roslin Dwivedi

Can’t believe it’s been a year already. I still feel like a fresher. But, what’s a better way to celebrate my first year of blogging than writing all about it. God, that was insane struggle back then, every day and mostly the nights. Taking time out from our daily lives, running behind my toddler and managing to put a website together.

I wanted to make a journal for our funny and bizarre stories, travel pictures and experiences. I call my website a time machine to travel back and revisit these places virtually. Even my son can see where he was when he was small and didn’t understand a thing. So, I decided to write a blog about it.

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Writing a blog post. 

I launched my site with a blog about our life in Seychelles, a semi introduction post. 

So when I started writing blogs for my site, I wanted to write about vacations we are going on. Thought I could write as much as I want. I also wrote about “places to visit” and “things to do” as a travel perspective from our experiences learned from other travellers. As I realized, I could write a few things differently to provide other fellow travellers with some helpful insight into the new cities.

Writing my first blog post, I wasn’t confident to press that publish button. After writing it, I read it many times, corrected it many times, and once the post looked good enough, I struggled to beautify it. 

Mostly spending an hour or two on brainstorming sessions picking the right pictures, followed by editing or resizing, or which image goes. 

But as I said you want to achieve something, means you just do it, right! My husband and friends also helped me write my few initial articles for which I am grateful. I am also thankful to the people stopping by and helping, spending some of their precious time on my website.

Shortly, I understood blogging is not only writing, but it is also much more than that. I learned more about work-life balance. To run a successful blog, you must balance a few crucial things. 

Learning to have a tone in my blogs

I am still learning to have a tone in my blog posts that could grab people’s attention. I want everyone who comes to the site to enjoy the travel tales. They don’t want me bragging about myself, but they are interested to know what’s right for them out there.

Choose your blogging niche wisely

Deciding on a blogging niche before starting the website helped me make a brand for my website. I chose to write about travel and mommy things on the other side, as I had just become a new mom. And also wanted to share my motherhood experiences with other moms to get some helpful ideas if I could provide.. 

Best web host for blogging

Buying the right web host means the right provider for your website. GoDaddy, Bluehost and Hostgator are a few good and cheap providers. 

When I compared Bluehost, I found the price and the benefits suits me better than others. And I made this choice after buying two wrong websites.

Bluehost provides a low price plan to start the first year with a free domain name. I chose to go for a year package, which was enough for me to know if I want to pursue the blogging business or no. 

Bluehost is a reliable hosting provider. It has been one year, and I have no complaints yet. The customer service is rapid and helpful. I got a special price on the renewal of my website. That happened while on a help-chat with customer care to understand the plan. Don’t know if that supposed to be a secret or 🤫

Noteworthy tip: Always make sure all the services are installed on your site you bought at your payment to the provider. Otherwise, you might wake up with a shocking discovery of your site not working the way it should be.

Designing the website with a perfect Theme 

So after choosing a niche, after buying a domain and purchasing a host, here comes designing that dream website.

The first ingredient we need to get started with the designing work is a Theme for your site.

You can go for paid WordPress Themes if you like. There are great unique Themes available in WordPress. Since I am still not ready to spend money on Themes, I am going on with the Themes’ free version. 

You should choose a theme that suits your brand. For me, it was travel blogging. Selecting the suitable Theme saves ample of your time and protects you from initial overwhelming moments. 

While designing comes plugins. Plugins help make the website easy to use for the audience. Plugins provide that additional functionality your Theme might not have. Choose the plugins knowing what’s better for your site, what’s suitable for your posts. 

The search for helpful plugins is always going to be there. It’s a constant activity for me. There are still useful plugins out there. So don’t be confused and always go with the plugins you think of the time suits your website. Because at some point or the other, you may need to change it as your website grows.

I spent so many nights setting up my website, sitting late until 2 am at night. Watching the tutorials on Youtube. It took a long time to get the look of my site I wanted, and I still spent hours designing my website as if that’s all I had to do. 

Widgets are saviour

Adding a widget to your site is also a great help:

1. It gives the site a look you want to have.
2. Sometimes plugins are too heavy for the site, and a few plugins don’t work that well with the Theme you have.
3. Widgets help you get that design on your site.

So I never underestimate the power of widgets. Before installing any plugin, always check for a Widget instead.

For example, Pinterest plugins never worked on my site for some reason. It also slowed down the site. I wanted to have a save button for my images and my Pinterest board. So I used a widget, and it is working perfectly fine. 

SEO and Keywords for blogging

As I mentioned earlier, deciding on your blogging niche before making a website is the best thing to do. Being clear on your blogging niche will help you choose the right keywords and help SEO juice flowing on your blog posts. 

Right keywords will push your website towards the right audience, which will lead to organic traffic. And the more organic traffic you have, the faster you will see your website growing. 

SEO(Search Engine Optimization) – Ranking your website is not an easy task. This requires many accomplished factors like

1. On the site, the length of the blog post matters. This is what I learnt that lengthy posts work better towards organic traffic. Short posts are great for higher engagements. But I kept the length of my blogs according to the relevant content I had. Of course, no-nonsense but primarily necessary contents.
2. Proper tools and plugins. – Tools like Yoast SEO, Ubersuggest, Youtube search, Google analytics, search console are a few plugins my whole website relies on. And all of these are free tools. Yay!
3. There are many other factors like on-page and off-page SEO.(this one is still above my head!)

Keywords and SEO’s are vast subjects to learn and understand. For my SEO inspiration, I follow SEO Guru Neil Patel, who also created a super-helpful tool called Ubersuggest. Which is more than SEO and keywords. 

I am still learning about SEO and ranking, plugins and many more. 

It is kind of a never-ending process for having a website. The constant use of the right tools, keywords, patience, and practice will take your website to the next level. But again, this is not as easy and quick.

Noteworthy Tip: This is a slow process, but you will start seeing the results once it starts working for your site.

Connect with other travellers

Making some connections with other travellers on social media I found very helpful. The online community helps to find solutions for problems and for many more hacks to save time.

Getting exposure for the website 

To make my website’s presence on the internet worldwide, I started having my appearance on all sorts of social media. Most of them I don’t even touch. 

So this is what I learned, showing up on social media helps, but we can not keep up with it all. All the platforms are unique in their algorithms and way of working. So working the same way for all will never show results. 

But I am trying to survive by frequently posting on social media. Keeping my site alive and in front of peoples eyes as much as I can.

My content on social platforms is mostly travel related. Posts like our travels stories and travel hacks show the audience that my contents are travel-based. And attracts the interested crowd.

Making my brand 

I had no idea how to make my brand. But watching Youtube videos and practising some of the tips and tricks helped a lot. 

There are great hacks to make your brand. It is essential and beneficial for making your blogging a business. Making your brand stand out to get specific and huge audiences sounds daunting, but I am continuously working on it. Sticking to similar content with specific niches will save a hell of your time to make the brand.

Why work your ass off to survive on social media?

Because these are the tools going to get your website an audience it is striving for. Before a blog website, I was hardly active on social media, but I did get visitors to the site. These visitors are not huge in numbers, but still, they give you that confidence to keep going.

• Pinterest is the best friend for bloggers and beneficial in drawing referral traffic to the website.
• Instagram also a significant help in making that brand name you are looking for.
• Facebook page is helpful, too but having a group is much better on Facebook. (this is my opinion)

More on how to get exposure to your website –

1. Make a page on Facebook or join in forums.
2. Writing a guest post for other sites, magazines.
3. Also, precise SEO keywords help to get tons of exposure to the website.
4. Make sure your site is responsive, fast loader, 
5. Have your posts internally linked. Check the on-page SEO.

Backlinks 

Backlinks are essential, pretty hard to collect and takes lots and lots of time and patience. To get some organic traffic to the website, we need to get a fair amount of backlinks to your whole website and posts.

There are many ways to get backlinks for your site. 

There are many ways to get backlinks for your site. 

1. Among many, for now, I am only collecting backlinks by commenting on other sites and interlinking my posts(my honest confession). 
2. Well, Guest posts are also one way to get backlinks. 
3. HARO and SOURCE-BOTTLE are also excellent way to get backlinks. Just that these sites will take much of your patience to reply to those questions are asked. Sometimes it is a pretty straightforward question, but it depends on the publisher if they choose your response or not. If they do, then you may receive some backlinks from there.
4. If you follow Neil Patel, you must be aware that he also tells you to contact other websites and ask for giving you the backlinks, but before that, make sure your content is as impressive as the one they already link to better than that. (For more backlinks ideas, just read his blogs or watch Brian Dean Youtube videos)

Noteworthy Tip: It is a lot and a lot of hard work. So, have patience. There’s a hell of many ways to implement, and it doesn’t happen right away. Getting backlinks are really exhausting and not quick. 

Consistency 

Consistency is something I learned over time. 

Within a few months of blogging, I checked my organic reach whenever I posted a new blog. Then again write one more post and recheck the organic reach. I kept doing that and understood I need to be consistent in posting new blogs. My blog posts should contain relevant keywords to reach the right audiences.

Things I learned from one year of blogging – The survival guide for the first year

While writing my first blog, I thought of many things. I was looking forward to our upcoming vacations. So I would write blogs based on the trips. And that’s how I wanted to proceed with my blogging thing.

But, we all know what the year 2020 did to all of us. We all spent most of the time indoors, maintaining distance and keeping every possible thing clean. 

What a year to launch a travel website when travelling was the most restricted. ugh

So, how I survived my first year of blogging when we didn’t get to travel at all.

I wrote about the place we live in, 

I wrote about our former travel experiences and incidents as stories we came across during the vacation. One of my friends suggested I write about my son’s birth in Seychelles. And so I also wrote a few related to mommy things.

What I learned is consistency is the key. Keywords and quality content can’t be ignored.

Things I learned from one year of blogging –

Keep learning –  

Look on the net for free courses. There are many influencers out there who are offering free classes to promote themselves. You can take the time and choose the things from the course to implement on your websites. 

If you like to have quick results, you can go for paid courses as well. I haven’t chosen this option yet because I want to try to make it work myself first. 

While writing my travel blogs, I realized there are so much to capture around the world. 

Start small and keep doing it. I am motivated even more and looking forward to having some great vacations this year. 

Overall, travel blogging or any blogging is fun. I love what I do. Though it demands a lot of hard work and patience. But still, keep doing is what my idol travel blogger had once told me. Taking my blogging to the next level is my short term goal, and I work bit by bit every day to achieve it. 

I made many mistakes blogging and still do, but I love the way it’s going. 

I hope this article inspires you too, and you also achieve what you really love doing. 

If you like it than save it for later!