My Blogging Mistakes so You Don’t Make Them, Too
Congratulations to me! This is my 100th published post on Paul Passing Through. Rather than take this opportunity to celebrate how far I’ve come, I’d rather take the chance to talk about the many blogging mistakes I made along the way to help new bloggers out.
This post is a way to highlight some of what I think are the most important blogging mistakes I made to prevent you from having a ton of headaches later on down the road!
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, I will earn a small commission. This occurs at no added cost to you.
Blogging Mistake #1 – Picked a Cheap Server to Save Money
This first point is one of my biggest blogging mistakes because it literally ended up costing me money. When I started my blog, I picked a budget server, Bluehost, to host my blog.
Now, to be fair, I was able to go with Bluehost at a huge discount. Had it not been so cheap (and had I not had a few beers that night), who knows if I would have ever pulled the trigger on starting my travel blog. That low price was a huge motivator.
However, I came to find out that there was a very good reason why Bluehost was so cheap. It frankly isn’t very good. Bluehost has slow servers (causing slow pages and who wants to wait for a slow page to load?) and poor customer service.
With site speed being a big factor in determining how well your website does on search engines, I had to make a change. Unfortunately, that meant switching to a new server when I still had several months paid for with Bluehost.
When I switched to Lyrical Host, I noticed a significant and immediate improvement in both site speed and how my blog was ranking on Google.
The customer service I’ve received at Lyrical Host has been on a whole other level. With Bluehost, I basically had to hope nothing ever went wrong. Lyrical Host is always readily available to answer any questions and to help with enacting structural changes to my page. I couldn’t be more impressed with them.
If you decide to go with Lyrical Host, make sure to use my discount code! Just enter paulpassingthrough10 when checking out for a 10% discount off your first hosting plan!
Blogging Mistake #2 – Assumed I Understood SEO
Asides from picking a reliable server, knowing what SEO is and how to optimize for it is the most important part of blogging. Being optimized for SEO is what determines whether your content actually gets seen. Unfortunately, of these blogging mistakes, this one is fairly common among new bloggers.
While content technically is king, it doesn’t matter how great that content is if Google’s crawlers don’t think it’s worth showing on its search results.
I knew what SEO was when I started, but what I knew was only scraping the surface. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know, which was a lot. In what is a common thread in this post, because I didn’t know so much, I am constantly having to go back to fine tune old posts.
Now, unless you have an education or background in web design, you’re simply not going to know everything when you start your first blog. It’s the type of thing where you have to actually get some experience to start figuring things out. Still, you should try to learn as much as you can before you start to minimize how much you have to fix later on.
The three areas of SEO I wish I had known more about were page speed, image quality and keyword utilization.
Blogging Mistake #3 – Didn’t Optimize Images
This is perhaps the most frustrating of these blogging mistakes. The pictures on my blog were – and still are – probably the single biggest thing keeping my site from being successful and reaching wider audiences. Because of how I added photos, they weren’t SEO-friendly and they had huge file sizes. These massive payloads were a major drag on my page speed.
Going back to optimize my pictures has taken more time than anything else on my blog. If blogging is a labor of love, then this part of it has really put that axiom to the test.
Here’s what happened. I basically just took pictures from my iCloud and uploaded them to my page. That’s it.
Here’s what should have happened. Before downloading photos from my iCloud, I should have cropped them to be a more web-friendly aspect ratio. After downloading them, I should have resized them to fit my theme’s optimal dimensions and renamed them to include my keywords. Next, I should have thrown them into TinyPNG (more on this later) to decrease their file size even further. Finally, they would have been ready to add to my site.
But they still wouldn’t be fully optimized! Once on my site, I still should have added alt text with more keywords and captions. Whew. And to think, I did none of that.
I’m still going back through old posts to fix these issues. Don’t be like me: Optimize your photos!
Blogging Mistake #4 – Spent too Much Time on Social Media
Maybe five years ago this wasn’t as true, but with how social media and its various algorithms are now, it’s very hard to gain a substantial following for your blog from this source.
Even when I started in April 2021, it was much easier to get engagement with posts than it is now. What’s worse, things seem to change almost weekly. One week I get lots of engagement, the next I get nothing. It’s maddening!
Besides that, people don’t tend to visit blogs from social media. Social media platforms are designed to keep people on the platform, not to have them click away from it.
But that’s not why you shouldn’t worry too much about social media.
You shouldn’t stress out over social media too much because it’s time consuming and a distraction from your blog. Between actually writing posts, optimizing everything for SEO and all the behind-the-scenes maintenance, it takes a lot of time to manage a blog, especially if you’re trying to have it be profitable. Trying to grow social media accounts will take away time that could be better spent blogging.
If you want to be a social media influencer, then don’t start a blog. Focus on social media instead. If you want to be a blogger, have a social media presence, but don’t rely on it. Use it more as a source to engage with other bloggers and as a way to have some fun with your brand. Don’t worry about likes and followers.
With all its recent controversy, Twitter is still the best platform to engage with other travel bloggers. As long as you curate your feed, you can tailor your feed to be mostly travel-related, which will give you exposure to lots of other bloggers willing to help you out.
Blogging Mistake #5 – Stressed too Much About Photos
Photos are a big part of successful travel blogs. People want to see the places you’re describing, and a lot of time, they may just skim till they see a picture that interests them.
Despite that, you shouldn’t spend a ton of time worrying about minor details in your photos. I used to spend so much time deciding on which photos to include in a given post. “In this photo, I can see the building from this angle, but in this photo, the angle shifts slightly to the left.”
I’ve come to realize no one really cares that much except me. For that matter, they don’t even know the second photo exists! Just pick one that looks decent and go with it.
Furthermore, your photos don’t need to be perfect. In fact, I sometime think people appreciate things that aren’t perfect because it looks real (at least, that’s what I’m telling myself, and I’m sticking to it). Odds are, whatever you’re photographing already has thousands of photos online. Get yourself a good picture, but don’t spend so much time taking it that you ruin your trip.
Blogging Mistake #6 – Worried About a Self-imposed Schedule
When I first started Paul Passing Through, I made it a goal to publish a new post every Wednesday evening. Every. Single. Wednesday! If that sounds like a lot, I can assure you, it was.
Fairly early on, I realized that wasn’t sustainable. So, I continued to make it a goal to post every Wednesday evening except for the last Wednesday each month. Along the way, if I missed my self-imposed deadline, I’d either rush content or else work late into the night to get something published.
It was all very stressful and, at times, exhausting.
I once read someone say that no one else cares or knows about your posting schedule except for you. It took me a long time to really understand that and take it to heart.
We’re not out here writing for National Geographic where audiences have years of expectations we need to meet. Set some general guidelines if it helps to keep you on task, but don’t fret too much if you miss your goal by a day or so. No one else will know or – if I’m honest – care.
Blogging Mistake #7 – Waited to Get Ads and Affiliates
Seriously, don’t wait any second longer than you need to before you start adding whatever affiliate links and ads you want on to your blog. You really have no reason not to if you’re trying to earn money from your site.
I had two concerns about adding these to my site. The first was I thought I needed to have a bigger audience to make ads and affiliate links worthwhile. Obviously, more viewers equal more potential earnings, and you need to have a minimum number of views for some ad and affiliate platforms. Those things are both 100% true, but once you meet that minimum threshold, there is no reason not to start adding them.
My other concern was that adding these things to my site would create negatively impact the usability of my site. My fear was this would lead to people opening my site and then quickly leaving because of all the ads.
What actually happened was my views have only increased while my engagement time and bounce rate have both stayed relatively the same.
Instead of the concerns listed above happening, I experienced two major drawbacks by waiting. I missed out on any potential earnings for a long time. Sure, I likely wouldn’t have made much, but something is better than nothing, right?
The much more frustrating thing that happened is I had to go back through all my old posts to add affiliate links, troubleshoot them and do speed checks. It added a lot of work that I could have pretty easily avoided.
Blogging Mistake #8 – Picked Fancy but Slow Page Effects
It’s easy to think when you’re starting your blog that you need fun effects and widgets to draw people in and keep them engaged. I certainly thought that. I had it all: my Instagram feed, my Twitter feed, slideshows, mosaic galleries, everything. You name it, and I tried it.
Unfortunately, all those jazzy effects come with a cost. They may look fun, but they require a lot of coding that slows down your website. The longer it takes your blog to load, the more likely it is that people aren’t going to stick around no matter how good your content is.
Another issue with these effects is they often don’t translate very well to mobile devices, which is how many of your readers are viewing your site. The different photo galleries I mentioned above can become distorted on cell phones, which will negatively affect the user experience.
I can’t tell you how long it’s taken me to go back to all my old posts to remove these features from each post. It’s been extremely tedious and monotonous. Don’t be like me: Keep things simple!
Blogging Mistake #9 – Didn’t Familiarize Myself with Helpful Resources
When I started my blog, I mostly only used WordPress in my workflow. The only third-party tools were a free keyword search and an SEO plug-in. Like with SEO and image optimization, I just didn’t know any better.
Fortunately, with the help of fellow travel bloggers, I’ve discovered several other free tools that have been helpful in developing my blog. Below is a list of the free blogging tools I use most frequently.
This tool does exactly what it says: It lets you generate an unlimited number of searches of various keywords. The downside is that it isn’t as accurate as keyword search tools that require a subscription, but it’s still a fine place to start.
Semrush also has a free keyword search that is much more accurate than the one at Ahrefs. The downside to this one is you can only do 10 free searches per day. I like to start with the generator at Ahrefs, and then finetune my keywords with Semrush.
The Google Search Console is a must for any blogger. It provides all sorts of helpful, easy-to-understand metrics about your site while also showing you areas to improve. It’s also the place to go to get your posts indexed to show up in Google’s search engine.
Like the Google Search Console, Google Analytics is another must-have tool. This tool is where you’re going to get all the information you could ever want and then some about how your blog is performing.
I try to keep the number of plug-ins on my page as low as possible to help with page speed, but All in One SEO is one I’ve kept around because it helps me optimize my page for SEO. It provides real-time info while writing posts about its SEO. It also has a subscription version, but I’ve found the free one to be more than enough.
Of the three tools I’ve tried that measure page speed, GTMetrix has been my favorite (it’s also the one Lyrical Host recommends, and since they know a whole lot more than me, I’m not going to disagree). In addition to measuring page speed, it provides information about how your page is performing and suggestions on how to make improvements.
TinyPNG is one of my favorite free tools. This page cleans up your images to reduce their file size, which helps enormously with page speed. Just drag your pictures into its dropbox, let it do its job, and then download the zip file.
Autoptimize is the only other plug-in on this list I use because of how helpful it is for page speed and performance. It does two main things for my site: It reduces the amount of coding and it lazy loads all the images on my page.
Three More Helpful Tips to Grow a Blog
With all my blogging mistakes out of the way, I want to provide a few general tips for those of you thinking about starting a blog. Whereas everything I described above relates more to the technical side of blogging or helping with your own efficiency, these tips are related to the actual writing process.
Because Paul Passing Through is a travel blog, these tips are writing for prospective travel bloggers. Nevertheless, a lot of this advice can be used for any bloggers-to-be.
Be concise, succinct and consistent. While those three words aren’t very sexy, they are probably the most important things when it comes to writing for an internet audience.
Some people may like wordy essays that describe everything in vivid detail with lots of metaphors. On the other hand, most people will see all that, their eyes will get blurry, and they’ll go back to Google to find an article that better suits their needs.
Most readers on the internet just want to find a quick answer to a question. Don’t ever forget that. No one cares about the emotions you felt watching the sunrise in a sleepy town in the French Riviera. They want to know where the sleepy town is and how much it costs to stay there for a night.
Insert personality judiciously. With that said, you can and still should insert your own personality into your posts. You just have to be judicious with it. I know it sounds a bit fickle, but there’s an art to it successful bloggers have perfected.
I’m not saying I’m one of those successful bloggers, but I do think I’ve done a pretty good job at balancing helpful information with personal experience. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at describing where that line is.
Basically, I only add more personal anecdotes if it answers one of these three questions. Does it somehow elaborate upon a point I’m trying to make? Is the personal story interesting in some way? Is my personal experience going to be helpful when others are deciding how to spend their time?
The only other time I add a lot of personal anecdotes to a post is if it’s a blog dedicated specifically to my own experience. For instance, I wrote a post about how remarkable it was exploring Venice by myself in the early morning hours because that experience was special to me. I still made sure to write it in a way that offers some guidance for people visiting Venice, though.
You don’t have to be a digital nomad or 24/7 globetrotter to write a travel blog. It’s easy to get imposter syndrome when you’re starting a travel blog. There are always other bloggers out there who have traveled way more than you have.
The good news is that doesn’t make your experiences or tips any less valid than theirs! Sure, it might seem like you have to have extensive travel experience to be a good travel blogger, but, while it might help, it isn’t a necessity. You just need to have something to say and have an interesting way of saying it.
If that describes you, it’s important that you develop an appropriate niche to cater your content to. For me, I write my content specifically with first-time American travelers in mind. Not all my content is geared towards that audience but most of it is.
It’s also important that you’re honest in your writing. Don’t pretend like you’re something you aren’t. Even general audiences will pick up on that pretty quickly preventing you from building a reliable audience.
Thank you for reading this post. Paul Passing Through is a labor of love to which I’ve dedicated a lot of free time. If you’d like to show your support for my blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee to help fund the future of Paul Passing Through. I appreciate any contributions!
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