15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started Blogging

I’ve been blogging going on twelve years, and the truth is I’ve made money during most of that time. Whether it was full-time income or just enough for a drink at Starbucks. But feast or famine I’ve maintained this site to some degree. But that is truly something I want to change, I love Not Your Mom Blog, I’ve grown it as my kids have grown and I always wanted to keep it up as a bit of a different place. I’ve never really felt like a conformist mom, and I wanted to make this a cool place. Well, my goal is to keep growing and evolving and to be more oriented teaching others about blogging while maintaining things I love about this site such as food posts and my love of books and reviews.

So I figured I would start with sharing a list with you all of things that I wish I knew before I had started.

15 Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Started Blogging

1. Organization – I had no direction.
2. Niche – My first blog started as a scrapbooking blog before it evolved into a little big of everything blog. I only did that because I figured out I could make money writing about anything. With a well thought out niche, you can come off as an expert with a laser focus. This is also important.
3. SEO – It has to be done. No matter how hard I’ve tried to put it off.
4. Going for quality over quantity. – At the beginning I would do 5 posts a day if they would bring in money.
5. Being a better photographer. – Sure I’ve gotten way better. But seeing some of the things I posted in the past makes me want to die of embarrassment.
6. Networking more. – I should be more active in related Facebook groups.
7. Built my email list from the start. – I will give myself credit that this wasn’t as big a thing when I started as it is now. But when it started I should have gotten on the bandwagon and did this like crazy.
8. Video. – I think most bloggers can agree that they should have done more video when they started.
9. Make a plan! – I’ve got my Happy Planner now and this is my most favorite thing, I use it to plan my time monthly and weekly.
10. Maintenance. – This takes time and work and I should have stayed on top of this more.
11. Resharing Old Content. It absolutely helps traffic and shows new readers old stuff. Now, this is something that I’ve started doing, especially old recipes. I will update photos and things I’ve changed about the recipe.
12. Diversifying my income streams. I would have done this way earlier. I started with sponsored posts and ads. E-books and courses would have been done a lot earlier if I had been smarter.
13. About Me page. I have this but up front you need to know to have a contact form AND your email address on it. People who might want to work with you like to be able to just click your email and email you.
14. Ignore the haters. I’m serious. People who want to correct you for silly things. OR people who call you tacky because you included your own book in a roundup. They are tacky. Because part of being a blogger and a writer is shameless self-promotion.
15. Don’t install every plugin that sounds neat. I used to have so many installed, you don’t really need that many. It’s okay to keep it simple with plugins.

I’m sure this list could be a lot longer. If you are a blogger and can think of anything please let me know.

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Enjoy!