12 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started Blogging

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The biggest reason why people fail to make money and be successful at blogging is that they don’t know the fundamental principles of success and they waste their time with actions that bring no results.

After a few months of no results, they give up. 

As I started blogging just over a year ago, I clearly remember the feeling of trying to write blog posts and having no clue how to do it.

I want to help you out and give you a shortcut to building a successful blog, therefore I decided to share these vital factors with you.

I would have been really happy if someone handed over this blog post to me at that time…

Most Bloggers Never Make Money

Over 90 percent of bloggers never make more than $100 from their blogs. The ones that do don’t want to tell you the secret.

Related: 9 Successful Bloggers Share Their Secrets

When I started my first blog, I spent a lot of time setting it up. I wrote some blog posts and I waited for Google to send me the readers.

I really needed the money, I had no job and I was hoping that blogging and promoting affiliate offers would save me. 

I fell flat on my face. I had zero visitors. I made no money. I was really disappointed.

I was reading all the blog posts that told me how easy it was to get visitors and how easy it was to make money with affiliate marketing.

They lied.

I know exactly how you feel and I want to explain to you why you are failing and how you can turn things around and be successful.

Gary Halbert, one of the most successful internet marketers of all times, said that it normally takes people 10-12 years of trial and error and repeated failure to develop the necessary skills and experience to become a successful marketer. 

Related: How Bloggers Make Money

How I Made My First Thousand Dollars

This post isn’t about six-figure income. That’s not your next step.

I simply want to dispel some myths and show you the big picture.

I built up two blogs to the point where they are getting stable organic traffic from Google without me lifting a finger. They are not the greatest blogs – I made all the mistakes that can be made. Hopefully, you will listen to me and won’t repeat those.

Both of my blogs are averaging about 1,000 visitors per month. One has 44 blog posts, the other one 70. The first one has 10 blog posts that get all the traffic that I just mentioned, the other one 5 or so.

I wasted all the other blog posts (and the time) in terms of getting traffic, despite the fact that the information in them is extremely useful.

The first blog has made me no money, despite all the visitors. I didn’t have a concept on how to monetize it and by the time the traffic came, I lost interest in the niche.

The second one (10 months old) I haven’t touched for 4 months. I felt that the competition was too strong, I put it aside and I started to build a web store and two more blogs.

However this second one started to make money each month, and when I saw this, I had to think it over.

Yes, it made its first thousand dollars.

It is from one affiliate program and one single blog post that got 390 page views last month.

Now imagine if you could intentionally generate this result for all your blog posts…

The Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started Blogging

1. You are a beginner

You are in the first phase, you are a beginner. You are completely lost.

You feel psychologically uncomfortable, therefore you may fall for “get rich quick” opportunities. You can’t tell what’s true and what isn’t.

Realize that if it is too good to be true, it probably is, don’t buy it. There are experienced marketers that will make money from whatever they touch. However they are pros, the same strategies won’t work for you. You need a beginner’s strategy.

You will feel like you are in a rat race. A lot of motion, a lot of work, spending a lot of time, maybe money, but no results. You are going nowhere.

Most beginners never get out of this.

2. The competition on the internet is huge

New bloggers seldom recognize this in full. Just take a look around in Tinylovebug’s Facebook Group Blogging for New Bloggers. Tons of people. There are millions of blogs on the internet.

Do a search and see how many people are writing about making your first $1,000 blogging, or how many are trying to sell a Pinterest course or an SEO course. Far too many. Chances are you are not going to beat them because they know much more about the subject and you will feel that you are cheating your readers when you try to sell them something. 

3. Always blog about a burning problem that concerns a lot of people 

This is the first key to success.

The only other option you have is blogging about how to get great pleasure out of something. People spend a lot of time and money on their hobby and passion – things like golf, music, etc. 

Don’t waste your time writing about things like why you didn’t finish college. It’s not an evergreen topic.

4. Find an area where you are a pro

This is true about your blog and all your blog posts.

You probably haven’t come across John Meese at Platform University.

He became a self-made pro on how to use a specific WordPress theme that a lot of wannabe marketers bought, but they had no clue how to use its potentials. He built courses for these people and he is now making 6 figure income from this. 

5. The Google sandbox

Your first results of SEO will be seen in 2-3 months. Google does not rush to add new sites without a reputation to its top results. This is called the Google sandbox.

At first, the blog will start appearing at the lowest positions and for the longest queries. The search robot will closely monitor the behavior of your rare visitors: how long they stay on your site, whether they go back to the SERP, continue searching, and so on. These and other factors will determine if it is worthwhile to raise your blog in search for each specific request.

Therefore don’t go for keywords that are searched for thousands of times per month. Not even a hundred times. All the keywords that bring traffic to my blogs have a search volume of 20-30 visitors per month. These have low competition and they are much easier to rank for. Do this instead of begging or paying for links.

These low search keywords bring me 60-80-100-400 page views per month for a single blog post because after a while they also start ranking for related keywords.

Don’t waste your time writing. Write fewer blog posts, but with correct keyword research. That way you will have more time for things that are important. You want ALL of your posts rank in Google, not 5 out of 70. (I am violating this rule in this post, I haven’t used any keywords, but this is an exception.) 

6. Use social media and connect with other bloggers

If you use social media correctly, the visitors that come from there will speed up your blog’s rankings. As I mentioned earlier, Google takes note of your visitors’ behavior.

Connect with other bloggers that have traffic, with those who own Facebook groups, those who have a promotional machine in place. They are your best chance to get a jump start on traffic (and also on sales). Just make sure that they also get something out of this connection.

7. Always give lots of value

People want visitors, subscribers, and sales, however, they forget that there must be a reason for these to come. I always make sure that even a simple blog post is so good that I could charge money for that information.

When you talk about lead magnets, forget about e-books, checklists, otherwise, you will completely miss the boat. Give something so valuable that people would be willing to pay money for it, that’s how you get subscribers.

8. Build a tribe

At the beginning don’t worry about making money. Build a list. Build a group. Then find out what they need and sell it to them. Sell them more than one thing. This way you get repeated sales. That’s how you make real money. Not with selling ads.

Products don’t matter. Your audience does. Ask them what they want, give it to them. They will throw their money at you…

9. Build a sales funnel

Your sales funnel is a profit multiplier. The average sales conversion rate is around 1 percent. With a correct funnel, you can increase this to 8-10 percent, which is 8-10X increase in your revenue from the same number of visitors.

10. Don’t try new ideas

Don’t write your own squeeze page or email sequence. Look around, find a few that others are already making money with and implement it (but don’t copy it) for yourself.

Never assume what works. You don’t know. Put it up and test it. Only the numbers tell the tale.

I had lots of great ideas that failed and I never expected success from some of the things that worked out great.

Always monitor and tweak the existing one and make it better. Internet marketing is not a passive game.

Eventually, you will become a pro. But that doesn’t mean everything will be a success. It just means that you will get more wins than losses and you will make money with constant monitoring and tweaking.

11. Don’t try to do it for free

This is one of your biggest mistakes.

All businesses need some investment.

The reason you don’t want to spend money is simple: Your blog is set up for loss, it is not set up for profit. If you put in a dollar and got 3 dollars back, would you hesitate to put $1,000 in so that you can get $3,000 out? The answer is obvious. 

Learn how to do it. Then hire others to do it for you. That’s the formula for scaling your business.

12. Don’t do it alone.

Connect with others. Get a mentor. Outsource.

The chance that you will win all by yourself is very close to zero. It will take you a long time to realize that you failed.

Get a mentor who knows. Follow his instructions to the letter.

Get help from Business IT Support or Content Marketing Freelancers. 

Never be afraid to ask for help, this is a friendly industry.

The Main Problem Bloggers Face

I hope that the above is useful to you.

I found out that the No. 1 problem new bloggers complain about is getting traffic to their blogs.

Let’s dig a little deeper. 

Your main problem is that the actions you take don’t result in traffic, or, for that matter, anything tangible, except for a bunch of words on your blog that no one reads.

Let’s do a little bit of math. Take the number of hours you work on your blog every week and multiply it by an average hourly wage. That is how much “money” you are investing in your blog – simply because time is money and if you were working somewhere else, that’s how much you would get paid.

Let’s take this a bit further. Take a look.

How many blog posts do you have on your blog?

How much traffic does your blog get? How much money does your blog make?

Now divide the money and the traffic by the number of blog posts.

Are you happy with this number? If not, can I point out that you are wasting your time and you need to change something?

I would like to point out that your blog posts are not doing their job.

The best thing you can do, instead of trying to invent the wheel by yourself, is to see what works for others, analyze it and implement it for yourself.

entioned above that one of my blog posts made me a thousand dollars so far. I am now going to show you what this blog post is so that you can see what I did. The post is about WordPress sales funnels. 

Open Your Eyes…And See The Problem

Don’t just keep writing blog posts. STOP!!!

Before you write one more word, I want you to stop for a moment and take a look.

What is the next problem you are going to solve for your readers?

It better be a big burning problem. And it better be based on some keyword. Otherwise, you are just wasting more time.

That’s how you will get traffic, and that’s how you will be able to make money with your blog.

Money comes from selling something to your audience that they have problems with.

I am going to give you an example, and I want you to follow me with this exercise.

I noticed that online courses are becoming increasingly popular these days. Many bloggers sell them because it’s a good way to monetize your blog. It’s much better than an e-book because it is more difficult to copy it and it is much easier to add photos and videos.

The problem is that it costs a lot of money. If you subscribe to Teachable, the Basic plan costs $39/month. The Professional plan costs $99/month. You also need to pay commissions for your sales.

If you are a new blogger and have no experience selling a course, you are not going to take this route, because you are not going to throw money out the window. However, this means that you will need to give up the perfect way to make money with your blog.

Do you see the problem?

Now I want you to do a little bit of brainstorming, looking around in Facebook groups. I want you to state two or three big problems that members of your niche have.

Are you selling diets? A big problem could be that they don’t have any delicious desserts and this is really demoralizing – no pleasure in the diet.

Or look at this very blog post – I am talking about the burning problems you have as a blogger.

Now come up with some problems.

Solve The Problem

Now it’s time to find a solution and turn it into a blog post.

What was my solution? I built my online course on own blog. I wrote a very detailed article, online course plugin – Thrive Apprentice Tutorial.

If you look at this post, you will see that it is over 3000 words long and it is a very detailed guide that exactly show how to build the course with the plugin, how to set it up so that you can sell your course with a membership plugin (and I give 3 choices), and I also show how you can set up your own affiliate program with the course.

The solution costs a lot less than paying for a professional platform, with the added benefit that people can do the course on your own blog, which increases page views (traffic). 

I am also an affiliate of those plugins and that’s the way to get affiliate income.

Now I invite you to search Google for “Thrive Apprentice Tutorial”. You will see that the first four search results are from the same site, which suggests that it is very easy to rank on the first page for this term.

In fact, I wrote the post and a week later it was in the middle of page 1 and started to get organic traffic. This was without any link building.

This is how you should blog. Quality first, with the right strategy, then quantity.

This saves you countless hours of useless work. If you follow it, you will feel that you are getting somewhere.

Of course, this is a little bit simplified, there are a lot more details.

I actually put together a very affordable course that is extremely detailed and will teach you all the details. It is called Blogging On The First Page of Google. Check it out.