Flashback time. Time to also realize how dumb, and how wasteful we’ve been when we started out.
But wait, there’s nothing to shy off. It’s normal – its being a beginner, being a human being.
Blogging is an exciting thing. Even more exciting is being a newbie blogger – beginner blogger. Every matured living being passes few stages before becoming so, right?
For instance, there is a single cell stage, an embryo, new born, child, teen and so on. Similarly every blogger is a newbie before becoming a matured blogger.
And there are certain stages every newbie blogger passes through.
Here, I discuss 5 stages every newbie blogger comes across (yes, myself included).
This is the very first step of every newbie blogger. You almost cannot miss the initial excitement when starting to blog.
It won’t be inappropriate to call it over-excitement. In this over-excited state, as a beginner blogger, you can go as crazy as you can.
For instance some or all of the following things can happen:
The list is not all. Even more crazy things can happen.
At this stage, you are either excited about your own blog or even sometimes excited about an A-lister’s blog.
The first thing most beginner bloggers do after launching a blog, even before publishing a single blog post, is to check stats.
That is purely human nature to be curious about who is visiting the blog.
But this curiosity takes over everything else during the earlier stages of blogging.
Checking stats becomes a beginner blogger’s irresistible thing.
Even without concentrating on writing blog posts, even without worrying about the design and the misaligned pages of the blog, even without taking into account that it has been just one week after the blog has been launched, you perhaps couldn’t resist checking the stats every hour.
When there is one new visitor since the last check that is great motivation.
But if there are no visitors to the blog, which is quite normal at this stage, you can easily becomes disappointed and frustrated.
This is a big factor that greatly affects the development of your blog, especially at its initial stage when extra care and effort are needed to build the blog without worrying about the stats.
At this stage, you are most likely to do Google searches (hundreds of them) to learn about all types of monetization techniques for your blog. PPC, CPC, CPM, PPM, ABC or XYZ… whatever!
Beginner bloggers at this stage learn a lot about all sorts of advertising.
You most likely struggle hard to get an Adsense account approved.
If this step doesn’t turn out to be successful, you move on to look for “Adsense alternates”.
As always there are a bunch of them available.
So as a monetization phobic blogger, you start accounts in all of those advertising websites, put all those banners on the blog and BOOM!
One gets a beautiful site that has misaligned banners which blink, change colours, flash kisses at you and sell you stuff.
That is not all. There are places where one can do direct selling of ad banners. There are also in-text ads, strip ads, interstial ads, you name it.
As a monetization phobic, you sincerely try them all out and get frustrated to see that the earning for the past three months is $0.50.
This stage is when the excitement is down a little bit. Your focus as a blogger is now not on writing for your own blog(s) but to know what others are writing about.
That is good, but it is actually over done or done endlessly at this stage of blogging.
The blogger starts reading a killer article on the topic “how to blog successfully” from a popular blog; the article ends and there are a bunch of related posts.
Oh there is that interesting post about “how to earn $1000 dollars from your blog in less than a month” and that article gets a click.
This goes on and on- reading comments, related posts, about the products the A-lister is offering and so on.
And, now you look at your clock when it is almost mid-night. You feel so tired and hence go to bed. Great!
This is the stage when the beginner blogger becomes a matured blogger.
I call a blogger who is at this stage as a matured blogger not because his/her blog is now getting 10000 page views per day but the blogger is somewhat aware of what blogging is really about.
As a stat-free minded blogger, you exactly know what it takes to develop a good blog, what it is about to write quality content, what are the factors that are to be taken care of at this stage of blogging, and what are the things that are not to be taken care of.
You come to know that blogging is not about building it, forgetting it and earning while snoring.
It is about developing a good quality blog which has useful and valuable content, developing trust and good relationship with the readers, maintaining the motivation at a consistent level and sticking to it without worrying about anything else.
How about you when you were or are a newbie (beginner blogger)?
Now leave a comment and let me know – do you still hold on to any of these beginner blogger traits?
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Hi Jane,
Great read and yes, I remember the first time that I created my very first blog several years ago. I no longer own that blog because it failed.
I've actually started several other blogs and failed with those.
Yes, it took me a while to realize what it takes to grow a successful blog. You're right, high-quality work that actually helps your audience is the what it takes.
I've also learned that it takes consistent daily action and treating your blog like a business. This means that you can't be scared to spend money on things that will help you cut your learning curve in half.
Don't go crazy and buy everything, otherwise, you'll go broke. Spend money on the things that will help you move forward.
With my current blog, while I am not at the 1,000 pageviews per day. I do consider myself the matured blogger.
I am no longer chasing the money nor am I checking my stats every day. I just check my stats at the end of the month to see what I can improve the next month and which posts performed well.
These are definitely great tips for new bloggers. I wish I would've been told this years ago when I started my first blog.
Who knows where I would be today, had I followed these stages.
I'll pass this along to help the new blogger who is confused and getting ready to throw in the towel.
Have a great weekend :)
Susan