Recently we asked established bloggers what they would tell themselves, if they could go back to Day 1 and start their blog again. We’ve categorized and published their answers below.
This post is updated frequently, and if you would like to contribute, please send your advice to us using our Google Form.
Advice on Getting Started
My best piece of advice would be to invest in a site that is already earning income! It’s much easier to grow a site that is already getting traffic and earning money through ads or affiliates than starting from total scratch.
Richmond Howard, MealPrepify.com
Work on it more. Please do not think the first 3 months will be the revenue in the future. It is going to be successful.
Anonymous
Time is your most valuable resource and you need to spend it wisely. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by shiny objects, clever marketing or squirrels… Or by trying to make decisions on the fly. Split your time between strategic thinking/planning time and worker bee time. Never mix the two and you’ll make great progress towards your goals of monetizing your site.
Nina, MakingofMom.com
Advice on Publishing Content
Write lots and lots of content, including how to articles where you can recommend products.
Anonymous
Be consistent with writing and publishing new posts each week. It wasn’t until I had around 70 articles on my blog that I qualified for Mediavine and started making decent affiliate commissions.
Kelly Martin – Urbangardengal.com
A lot of bloggers recommend writing content that is “useful to your readers”, and that’s what I started out doing. However, if you cannot rank in Google for those topics, people will not get a chance to even read it. In order to successfully monetize your blog and gain viewers, you have to learn SEO well AND write useful posts.
Martina, Stackyourdollars.com
Niche down! Don’t try to write about everything, and pick the topic you enjoy the most because you’re going to be thinking, writing, and talking about it a LOT for the foreseeable future. That being said, it’s ok to have subtopics as long as they’re all related under one main niche (and no, I’m not counting “lifestyle” as a niche).
Crystal Martin, Marchingnorth.com
Don’t use emojis in your posts. They look stupid and make you look like an unprofessional teenage influencer wannabe.
Anonymous
Advice on Blog Monetization
Don’t shy away from ad revenue. Apply for Adsense and implement it as soon as possible. This helps readers get use to seeing ads on your website, which makes it easier to transition to Mediavine when you reach 50k sessions in the future. Ad revenue can be an easy way to monetize your site early on, especially when you’re providing great content for free.
Idalia, Perfectstylishcuts.com
I would have diversified my income streams sooner. Just like the stock market, diversification is key to growth and stability.
Debbie, TheFlooringGirl.com
Don’t stay or “be loyal” to a specific ad network. Move on as soon as possible. You can miss out by hundreds by not researching and upgrading regularly.
Ryan McKenna, qtoptens.com
Don’t bother until you have a substantial amount of content worth monetising. Stuffing ads into a bunch of badly optimised pages is a waste of your time. Get the content and focus right first before trying to make money off it. The problem is knowing when you have done things right. Generally, a steady feed of organic traffic is a good sign you are doing things right.
Anonymous
That advice would be to spend more time focusing on the things that are or will make me money, and less on the things that don’t. I think a lot of bloggers – especially first timers – get hung up on vanity metrics, making their site look good, and all kinds of stuff that have zero impact to their bottom line. Zero in on what’s going to move the needle, and double down there.”
Anonymous, From Earningfinancialfreedom.com
Advice on Growth & Audience
It’s true that SEO doesn’t give the quick win like other strategies in terms of growing your traffic quickly. But it’s going to be worth much more to you in the long run when you do reach the point of being able to monetize, which is why focusing on this when you start your blog sets you up to earn serious money down the track.
Anna Barker, Logicaldollar.com
Take the time to build a strong community first. An audience that trusts you converts.
Christine Jerry, Virtualcollabhub.com
Focus on creating as much in-depth content as possible that really solves a problem for your audience – and, ideally, which is optimized for SEO. You won’t be able to monetize your blog from day one but you can lay the foundations for it to be effectively monetized in the months and years to come and the best way to do this is through good, SEO-optimized content.
Anna Barker, Logicaldollar.com
When learning about keywords and SEO’s, you might feel overwhelmed by the saturated blogging industry. Remember that you have a unique voice. Just because a question has been answered before on other sites, doesn’t meant that you don’t have something equally as valuable to contribute.
Heather Hart, Relentlessforwardcommotion.com
I would’ve told myself to first focus on creating a FABULOUS freebie optin so that I could collect email addresses. Converting traffic to your blog into subscribers is the KEY to monetization so that you can sell to interested people over and over and over again whenever you hit the “send button.” People always say the money is in your list and it’s soooooo true!
Stacey Stewart, Blogsmartnothard.com
Learn SEO – learn how to optimize your blog content for search engines.
Cate Rosales, SweetandSimpleLife.com
Select carefully the keywords you invest time in. (I still have traffic for useless keywords)
Julien, Openest.io
Learn much much more about SEO
Matt, SearchRankingInstitute.com
Place the Facebook pixel earlier
Justin – ChemistryNotes.com
Other Advice
Start on self-hosted WordPress, and choose one topic to go deep on before covering other topics.
Sadie, Themadmommy.com
Focus on building content and traffic first and foremost. It is easy to get caught up in the theme design, or in trying to learn all social networks and find ways to build followers, but Pinterest and SEO have both been more beneficial than anything else, and much of what I focused on early turned out to really just be distractions from creating great content that ranks and performs well.
Mary Ware, Themomfriend.com
Just get something up there! Get an offer! You can’t get any money if you don’t have a way to get it. Put up an affiliate product post, or create your own product, but you need to give people a way to give you money. Don’t overthink it – take action, and learn as you go!
Anonymous, Thesuccessmountain.com
Do not simply write anything that pops into your mind because you feel like writing about it. Learn at least basic SEO and keyword research. You have to have at least some viewers to make money and you won’t get the views you want without writing content that people are looking for.
Natasha Nunez, Natashalh.com
Final Word
If you’ve read through all the above advice for new bloggers, you can probably pick the theme. Essentially, take the time to create great content, try to remain motivated and consistent, monetize early, and learn some basic SEO skills.
Since we update this article frequently, we’d love for you to contribute. You can access our contribution form here. We prioritise comments that are well thought out, and will provide credit if it is asked for.
