Newbie Blogger’s Blunders: 7 Lessons Learned from My Early Mistakes

I began blogging just over a year ago. I was fascinated by the business model and the potential for a location-independent lifestyle it offered.

So, I dove in headfirst. I purchased a starter site in a niche I was interested in, in order to bypass the Google Sandbox period, but without spending too much on an industry I had no knowledge of. I chose a cute little site that published all things about air fryers.

Since then, I’ve made every mistake a newbie blogger can make. In this article, I will share what I learned so that you can avoid these mistakes

Perfect is the enemy of the good

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a newbie blogger was striving for perfection. I wanted every post to be perfect, every sentence to be perfectly crafted, and every image to be perfectly curated.

I spent hours upon hours editing and re-editing my content, trying to make it as polished as possible. But what I didn’t realize is that this constant pursuit of perfection was actually holding me back.

I thinks Voltaire’s phrase “perfect is the enemy of good” applies perfectly to blogging. As a blogger, it’s important to remember that you are not writing for a literary magazine or a scholarly journal.

Your audience is looking for helpful, informative, and engaging content, and most importantly, they want to find it as soon as possible

Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely important to consistently produce high-quality content that your audience will find valuable. However, the key is that it’s much better to publish a good article every day, than to publish a perfect one once a week.

Additionally, by striving for perfection, you may neglect other important tasks related to your blog such as building backlinks, interlinking your content, and improving user experience.

It’s also worth noting that if you have big plans for your blog, eventually you’ll want to delegate and build a system. But if you are always striving for perfection, it will be impossible to do so

So, as a newbie blogger, remember that it’s okay to make mistakes and that your audience will appreciate the value you provide rather than the perfection of your writing. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection hold you back from creating and publishing content.

Too many affiliate links

When I started, I was focusing on affiliate marketing as my main source of revenue. I was putting them everywhere it was possible. Why wouldn’t I, I assumed.

The guy checking my recipe might just want to buy something from Amazon. Why would I want to miss out on a few bucks?

Well, I learned the quite dramatic way that Google hates affiliate links. After I put affiliate links on 90% of my posts, my visitors dropped by 80% in a few days. This was the point when I wanted to quit every day for months to come (it was quite a melancholic summer, haha).

After searching extensively for answers, I found an SEO expert who just made sense. He said Google hates affiliate links. They don’t get any revenue from it, and they suppose you’re only in it for the money and not for giving helpful information. Also there is a track record of updates that crashed affiliate sites brutally. So it all made sense.

I started cleaning up affiliate links on non-relevant posts, and voila, my site started ranking nicely.

Not building backlinks

I found so many blogger gurus on the net who preached, “Just focus on writing good content and the backlinks will come.” I believed this one for months. It might be true, but the time frame is very important for a newbie to see results.

Also, it depends on your domain authority. If you have a DR50 site, then I believe your only focus should be high-quality content.

Well, I had a DR0 site with a lot of good content (yes, you are reading that right; it was a big round zero). It is like buying a house on a remote island that has no roads or ferries and expecting a thousand visitors every day.

So I started to outreach to a lot of bloggers, whom I’ve built up quite a good relationship with. After building some valuable backlinks, my rankings were growing decently after a few weeks. I didn’t have a blast-off in visitors, but the trend was great.

Not having an opinion

Building a large, active following as a blogger depends on having a strong opinion. Your readers will be more likely to return to your site when you have a strong point of view and aren’t afraid to share it. They are aware of what to anticipate from you, and they value your openness and sincerity.

In a competitive market, having an opinion also makes you stand out. Making your blog stand out from the numerous others out there might be challenging.

However, if you have a distinctive viewpoint and are eager to express it, you will stand out in the eyes of your readers and be more likely to be shared and recommended.

Writing for Google

It is important to remember that SEO optimized content is crucial, but the priority should always be your readers.

While it’s important to make sure that your blog is easily found by search engines, it’s even more important to make sure that it’s easily read and understood by your audience.

Google is constantly monitoring how engaged your visitors are and these metrics are becoming more and more important in the future. You are not the only one who monitors the numbers in your Analytics.

It’s also important to remember that content is your product. You want to make sure that you are “selling” a high-end product, not a cheap knock-off. This means that your content should be well-written, informative, and engaging.

When you focus on providing high-quality, informative, and engaging content, you’ll naturally attract more visitors to your blog. In turn, this will help to improve your search engine rankings, as Google will recognize that your blog is providing valuable content to your readers.

Critical thinking

I learned everything from the internet, from either free or paid resources. There is a huge amount of information out there, which I’m sure you are familiar with by now.

Blogging was the most confusing industry I’ve ever gotten into. It’s like football and politics. Everybody has an opinion. And usually they are contradicting opinions.

So who should you believe? Trying out one strategy and see if it works can take you six months at least when it comes to SEO.

The only thing that works for me is critical thinking and trial and error. If the tip or strategy makes any sense to you, you should go for it.

Let’s take the example of backlink building. Two contradicting opinions:

• Just focus on creating good content and don’t worry about backlinks because they will come.
• Link building is crucial. It has always been a major deciding factor in Google rankings. Why would anyone link on their own to your site if no one can find you and you are not an authority? They don’t even know you exist.

From this one, the second made a lot more sense. I tried it out, it worked, and I’ve been implementing it ever since.

This is how you will learn most of the concepts in blogging: with critical thinking.