Experienced bloggers share their first blogging struggle and the SOLUTION to it!

When I was just starting out (many years ago), there was a lot of hype around social media. A lot of the advice focused around adding social media widgets to our blog's.

This caused several issues.

Firstly, social media widgets would usually display follower counts. This is great for social proof if you've got a big following.

But since I was just getting started - this quickly turned into negative social proof.

Secondly, visitors were leaving the site and getting distracted. Follower growth was extremely slow despite rapid traffic growth.

The point at which things really turned around for me was when I started building an email list. 100 email subscribers > 2,000 Twitter followers.

Now, let me be clear. I'm not saying social media marketing isn't going to help your blog - it is. Just in a different way.

Since email is the most effective way of reaching my audience (some niches do vary), I keep the focus on building my email list and encourage my subscribers to follow me on social networks after they've signed up. 

The first ever blogging issue I had was to think that all my customers were like me and had the same issues as me.

I had been a professional advertising person all my 35+ years. When I started blogging, my target audience was also professionals, who are now into online business.

I wanted to write on content marketing for them. I thought people wanted to know more about what’s and why’s of content marketing.

But very soon I realized something that changed the way I approached my blogging. I saw that solo professionals-turned-entrepreneurs were a clear and specific audience.

But, their mindsets and psychology made them very different from me, and each other.

Not all had the same mindsets. Some wanted easier workloads than blogging would allow.

Some wanted faster results than blogging would allow. Some had a procrastination problem. Or, a self- discipline problem. Some were always unsure if their tactics were correct.

Some never continued longer than one week in any tactics and so delayed their own success.

I realized that it was not content marketing that people struggled with. It was the mindset and psychology of solopreneur content marketing.

The content marketing was what they were doing. It was the instrument of their success path. But their mindsets were their bottlenecks. Their saboteurs of success.

I changed my approach. I began writing more to help address the mindset-pains that content marketing was throwing up for solopreneurs.

That changed the whole trajectory of my business.

As a novice blogger, it was very easy to register a domain name, select an economical hosting provider and set-up a template based website.

But, after few months of consistent blogging, my blog has started to grow exponentially and faced issues like ‘higher Server response time’ and Database overloading.

As a financial blogger, I may be good at writing useful content for my blog. But, do not have an expertise to resolve these technical challenges.

Hence, to overcome these challenges, I had to take the help of a professional team (BHAD) for Blog/database maintenance, Speed optimization and customization.

When I first started blogging, I didn’t know the blog post format.

I found out about Jon Morrow’s guest blogging class and signed up for it. In all candor, I didn’t progress as far as guest blogging opportunities, however, I learned SO much about the blog post format.

I wouldn’t be the blogger I am today without their instruction. I remember arguing. I am an English teacher; I certainly thought I knew how to write.

However, I might have known how to write an essay but not how to write a blog post.

It was an expensive class but worth every penny. I’ll forever be grateful for the tutelage.

If your readers want to know more about the overlap between an essay format and a blog post format, they can find more information here https://www.mostlyblogging.com/essay-plan/.

I struggled to gain blog traffic as a newbie blogger. My solution involved both promoting other bloggers and commenting on other blogs.

Promoting other bloggers on my blog and through social media built bonds.

My new blogging buddies promoted me on their blogs and through social media, increasing my blog traffic.

Blog commenting strengthened my friendships and drove organic traffic via folks who enjoyed my comments, clicked through and visited my blog.

Both strategies are a cool 1-2 punch for driving traffic as a beginner blogger.

When I first started blogging over on blogger (the Google platform) my first challenge was understanding how it all worked. I hadn’t encountered any bloggers and really started alone.

Then after I got to know some great folks (bloggers) who I am still friends with today, I began to learn from them.

Back then I met Ileane Smith, Ryan Biddulph, Mayura DaSilva, Donna Merrill and Brenda Pace.

They were my mentors and Mayura is now my techie when I run into issues. I’ve met Donna and her husband in person several times in my travels.

Back then, I started reading from them that you had to have WordPress site. So, I jumped in!

The migration was a nightmare! I used a host provider that was from a 3rd party, never again! I switched to HostGator with 24 tech support and I still use them today.

Another struggle I encountered was setting up an RSS feed. Mayura came to rescue and helped me with that as well.

So, what is my advice for new bloggers? Get to know some bloggers who can help you along the way and realize you need to spend some money in your blog.

Read up as much as you can to learn all you can and last, but not least, have FUN!

The biggest struggle I had in my initial blogging days was my English. I had my schooling in government schools and that too Hindi medium.

I wanted to write awesome blog posts but my English always stopped me. I could never write good sentences, couldn’t use the impressive vocabulary and my writing flow was terrible.

This is a very common issue in India where people have the skills to express their thoughts, they have immense knowledge but because of this language barrier their cannot impress their audience.

I figured out in 2013 (after doing blogging for 2 years) that I will have to improve my English if I want to see myself in one of the top bloggers in India.

So I joined a local institute here in my city itself and spent 3 months improving my Grammar and writing skills.

Later I spent a lot of time to read many blogs on writing, copywriting and soon I improved my skills.

So from my point of view, we all have some strengths and some weaknesses. It’s your duty to identify them and work on them if you want the awesome results. I found that weakness and overcame it with time.

When I completed my CFP (Certified Financial Planner), I thought of starting a financial blog as others in my profession have their own finance blog.

Hence, I am being a Non-Technical guy, the biggest issue, I faced was which platform to use and how to start.

Because at that time, I was unaware about the WordPress, Themes, Plugins, SEO or Blog Speed Issues.

Hence, with blind and little bit of knowledge, I started my journey of blogging.

However, after 4-5 months of my blogging profession, one thing I learned is that being a technical fit to handle my blog is the first step of successful blogging.

Hence, purchased own domain, purchased Genesis Themes and with my trial and error I built my own blog which may look nice to me during those days.

Later I noticed that we have to concentrate on some backend technical stuffs like SEO, speed optimization, or the layout of the blog. However, these tasks are beyond my head.

Hence, luckily I came across Jane Sheeba. Slowly I handed her the backend task of design, speed optimization and blog management.

This way, I resolved my difficulty of managing the technical stuff of blogging and purely concentrating on writing content and acquiring the clients for my business.

The first problem was to get initial traffic. I started by writing relevant and contemporary content. The aim was to write content that people would search for.

At the same time, you would find articles about personal finance in prominent business dailies and there are many good personal finance blogs too.

To stand out and for better organic search response, I wrote deep and well-researched articles. I tried to cover aspects and niches that weren’t covered elsewhere.

To build visibility, I reached out and contributed to many business dailies. Sharing content on the various social media channels also helped.

You require a lot of persistence and patience because initially, it is like talking to the wall.

You keep writing content and there is almost no traffic. Fortunately, if stuck with the plan and the traffic picked up gradually.

My first blogging struggle was to start making money!

Everyone tell you to write good content, create a nice blog design, or build a mailing list. All good suggestions….But when can you start to actually earn a revenue?

It really depends from bloggers to bloggers, and their online approach.

My suggestion is to start making connections, since the beginning.

Good relationships are important in life, as well as in the internet business.

A good part of my revenue, comes from connections I created via email, social or Skype.

It can be a sponsored post, a project collaboration, a social media amplification campaign, or someone hiring me for writing a piece of content.

So yes, if you are new to blogging, be sure to start building your connections empire!

As like every blogging beginner, I too struggled in getting the traffic to my blogs. My wish is to drive the audience from the search engines as they are exact targeted traffic I always look for.

In the initial phase of my blogging journey, I made the content without doing any keyword research and was not looking at the blog posts written by the competitors. That was a big blunder!

I have realized this blogging mistake and started doing the keyword research to find out the low-competitive, rankable keywords. Also, I used to have a look at my competitors’ content to make my stuff better.

Once I have started doing the keyword research, inserting the long tail, low-comp search phrases and having an eye on the articles of my business opponents, I’m getting a ton of visitors to my blogs.

Thus, I would like to insist the emerging bloggers focus on picking a handful of appropriate keywords and making content quality superior to their competitors.

Increasing traffic from search engines: Yes, that’s the biggest struggle (almost every blogger faces) including me.

Even in the year 2019, Google is never short of releasing messy algorithm updates (recently released core algorithm update) to take down the traffic of most of the sites.

That’s why you always need to keep an eye on fixing your website issues (including technical and SEO related issues).

It’s always better to create long form and really detailed content instead of publishing a 500 word article.

Not only, search engines like Google reward such high-quality detailed articles but your target audience will also get benefitted from them.

Above all, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and try to diversify your traffic sources by being active on social media sites, blogging forums, Quora and so on.

I still remember the days I used to blog continuously and wait for people to comments on my posts.

I was foolish enough to think that out of nowhere, they will come and read my posts. It was just a new blog, and the information I provided was already published 100+ times on the internet.

In the end, I got only spam comments. But I decided I should figure out what went wrong and how I should overcome it.

These are the things I did: 

1. If I’m going to write about a topic, then I should Google and read the top 10 results for that, make my article is better than that, or updated than that. 
2. I can’t expect people to read my articles at the moment, no worries, but I should figure out the ways I can send my articles to them to read instead. 
3. I started commenting on various tech blogs; I asked them questions even when I knew the answers. It helped me a lot to build a connection initially. 
4. Orkut was the only popular social network at that time, maybe MySpace as well? But I preferred to use Yahoo! Answers for that. Whenever we answer any question, they have this section for keeping a ‘source’ link to that, and I just picked the articles I published, the ones which got the solution and kept it there. 
5. By the end of that year, Facebook started to grow, and I began to add as many bloggers as possible. I badly wanted them to know about me, make sure they know my name and that I have a blog. 

These are the five things I kept doing, and over a while, I achieved my results, but all these took time, but our blog’s growth matched it overall. 

My first blogging struggle is understanding keyword research. I have done this wrong for a very long period.

When you don’t aware of keyword research, you end up writing stuff which has no searches so it doesn’t make any sense.

In this case, people are only going to read your stuff when you share on social media.

There is no search traffic to your blog which makes you sad. I mean making me sad.

I read many articles to understand keyword research and ON page SEO stuff. And I thought now I understand but I didn’t.

When I started blogging, Events bloggers are making a hell lot of money and there are so many screenshots with real-time traffic stats at social media.

So I and Mohd Arif (my blogging buddy) decided to do event blogging.

We put our all efforts to rank it and make more money. And ending up with nothing.

After getting failed so badly, I analyzed all competitors’ blogs which ranked to figure out the reason of our failure or to know what we did wrong.

That’s how I learned I am doing all wrong, targeted such keywords that no one is searching or I must say there is no keyword at all in the title, URL, content.

We did event blogging once, but it was a game-changer for us.

In one line, I will say I believe in implementing and observing even I am not a good observer.

And that’s how I overcome with my blogging problems.

When I started my blog, like most novice bloggers, I struggled with getting visitors on my blog.

However, that changed when I started interacting with other bloggers by visiting their blogs, commenting on the latest blog posts, and sharing it on social media.

Most of the bloggers reciprocated with a visit to my blog and dropped a comment too. Not only that – most even promoted my blog and posts to their followers on social media.

Gradually my blogging circle expanded and my struggle to get visitors to my blog ended.

Concentrating on a specific blogging niche was one of the first struggles that I faced.

When I started, there were not many discussions about the importance of choosing the right niche.

Being a newbie it was very easy to get carried away with every topic you come across.

I also did the same mistake and as a result, my first blog got totally messed up with topics like personal finance, technology, recipes, life hacks, and what not!

And, gradually it felt challenging to continue the blog in that way.

After some discussions, I decided to split the blog into two separate ones – a recipe blog and another for personal finance, life hacks, etc.

As the niche was specified, it became easier to continue both the blogs with a clear focus.

Choosing the right and specified niche is the first most important factors while starting a new blog.

Not only it helps to sort things initially, but also helps to keep you focused for the long run.

As a beginner, I have faced multiple struggles. And I am sure these are common for everyone.

Although money was one of the biggest problems as we need that to buy hosting and domain, I don’t think that was the real struggle.

What I realized later is that distraction was the biggest problem at that time.

Most beginners start a blog after watching others success or inspired by someone.

In that case, they try to follow the same niche or idea and simply jump into blogging. The same thing happened with me as well and the result was an obvious failure.

Initially, we don’t know what kind of blogging we can actually do, what is the exact purpose and expectation from blogging.

Although making money is the prime goal for many of us, but many beginners don’t even know how many ways one can monetize their blogs.

E.g. when I started blogging back in 2009 I was aware of Google AdSense only. Then I started blogging to make money from AdSense and that took me to a roller coaster ride.

But when I came to know about affiliate marketing, I simply realized that affiliate marketing is what suits my blogging style and then I never looked back.

So, if I have to summarise my learnings from various struggles of my blogging journey then they would be:




1. Decide first whether you want to start a blog to generate income or just for fun or hobby. In case it’s for fun, you are free to do anything. But if you are serious enough to create a website which will earn money for you then you have to know how many ways a blog can generate income first.
2. Choose the niche which you can write content on till you die. If you are not comfortable with the topic, then it will be difficult for you to continue. You can hire content writers, but as a beginner, most people don’t know how to utilize them and rank a website.
3. Build a solid plan after thorough research and then start with WordPress from day 1. Don’t waste time waiting for the day you start earning money, do it from the first day itself. It’s pure business and you will get success only if you are ready to invest from day 1.

During my initial days of blogging, I had just started writing and was busy developing content for the site. Little did I know about file sizes (Image sizes), Genesis framework etc... After a few months, I could notice that the site was starting to slow down, Loading times becoming more and it was really frustrating.

Having very little technical knowledge, I took professional help from Jane Sheeba. I think that was one of the best decisions I have made for the site. She moved my site and made it run on Genesis framework and also did speed optimization to improve the loading time. It was a real turning point and the traffic started to spike from thereon. Its very important that things like hosting, server etc... is handled by a professional team.