How to Start a Blog and The Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Disclosure: Advertising and affiliate services, including Amazon Associates, help the cost of running my blog. Clicking ads or making purchases through affiliate links may, at no additional cost to you, earn me a small commission. I appreciate your support.

Have you ever thought about how to start a blog? My blog has been up and running for a full year. Twelve months. My own little place on the internet where I have been able to write about what I love. Travel. All it takes is looking back to some of those first posts to see how far I’ve come. I almost cringe when I see some of the ways I went about blogging to begin with. Blogging isn’t always easy. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but you have to be doing it for the right reasons.

If you’re in this to make money instantly, quit your job and haul your bags of gold coins onto a private jet to Tahiti then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. That may happen, but your first year is likely to be a little slower. More about finding your groove, your writing style. Learning about your audience, and not to mention shamelessly plugging yourself to within an inch of super awkward.

How to start a blog: mistakes to avoid as a new blogger

If you’re here because you’re wanting to know how to start a blog, then great! I hope I can point you in the right direction, share some pearls of wisdom. If you’re here to see what I did to see if you should change your strategies, also great. I’ve done the same along the way, checking out other bloggers. It’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. That’s just one of the mistakes I made in my first year. But there are plenty other mistakes to avoid, and of course some of the things to make sure you do.

Not planning ahead

One day I was wondering how to start a blog, and the next I was knee deep in websites and wordpress. Within a couple of weeks I was up and running. Sounds great you might think. But I spent more of that two weeks agonizing over what my blog would be called. While this is important, it meant I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for when my blog launched.

If I have learned one thing over the last year it’s that you don’t want to always be playing catch up. I made a personal goal of posting twice a week, but with a full time job and once I realized how much work goes into each blog post, I realized this was unsustainable. It may have been more sustainable had I written a few posts before I launched my blog. Had a few to slowly release as I continued to work on others. That’s what I would recommend before you launch your blog. Have a few posts ready to go so you can continue to write and promote as you go.

That first time you are sick or go on a vacation where you can’t spend all your time with your laptop, or get busy at work. That’s when you’ll realize how nice it would have been to have a post ready to just hit Publish on. I still play catch up sometimes, but I put less pressure on myself to post twice a week and now aim for once a week. It makes things less stressful and means I’m putting out better pieces than fluff pieces I wrote just because I felt I needed to post something.

Forgetting to self promote

When I first began my blog, my number one promoter was my boyfriend Jeff. He strong armed many a friend, family member or coworker into subscribing to my blog. Everywhere we went he mentioned my blog. We all need that person in our lives, like Barney Stinson with his “Haaaavve you met Ted…” in How I Met Your Mother. But the problem was, I wasn’t doing this for myself.

Sure, when a new post went out I let my followers on social media know, I self promoted through the influencer tweets and facebook groups. But I wasn’t doing it in real life. I found it awkward because while I’m putting my life out there on the good ole interwebs, I’m pretty shy in real life with people I don’t know. The thought of mentioning my blog in a conversation with someone who didn’t ask about it was terrifying.

But in order to grow, and get people to know about you, you have to do a bit of shameless self promotion sometimes. I now have business cards so if I’m talking to someone new and my blog comes up, I can give them my card to check it out. I recently had a couple of people at work say they had checked out my blog and really enjoyed a post I wrote. That feels really good, so why limit it by not telling more people who you are and how to find you.

Believing everything on social media

Oh social media. Both a blessing and a curse. It’s a great way to promote yourself, meet people who are interested in the same thing as you, and make you feel good about things you are doing. But it will also make you feel bad about how “boring” your life is at times. The trick is not believing everything you see there.

The “effortless” photos in perfect pastel shades are amazing, they show off the beauty of a place and the people in it. But to believe that it looks exactly that way in real life and because your visit wasn’t like that photo is a hard thing to let go of. Everyone’s life isn’t perfect, as long as you remember that you’ll be OK.

For me beginning to start a blog of my own it was hard not to compare myself to other bloggers. Look at the number of followers they have. Why did they get more likes/comments/retweets than me? If you constantly compare yourself to other bloggers you’ll never enjoy what you’re doing. Sure, healthy competition is good for you, but don’t get too wrapped up in the numbers to begin with. Establish your brand, your blog, and your audience. Let your writing do the work and put down the phone every now and again.

Playing it safe

It’s easy to write about things that everyone knows about, and sometimes you might think that is the best thing to do. Those places are popular for a reason right? It’s important to keep up with trends and lean into them sometimes, but it’s also worth thinking outside the box. I’m not talking about publishing your European Christmas Markets post in May, or a list of the worst restaurants in Venice instead of the best ones. But it’s sometimes telling when your readers start gravitating towards certain posts.

My three most popular posts to date have been:

• Trier Germany in a day and why that’s not enough
• Where is Luxembourg? 2 days in Luxembourg City
• 25 reasons why travel is good for you

Trier is a place I hadn’t even heard of until a month before I went there. I zoomed in on a map to see where was close to Luxembourg for a day trip. But I took some pretty nice photos, wrote a detailed piece, and it gained interest from people also wondering what there was to do there. If everyone’s busy writing about Paris and Rome (hey, I’ve done it too and you still should) remember to throw in some less visited destinations that grab peoples’ attention too which is what I did with Luxembourg.

I found that lists are well received too. Everyone wants a Top 5 things to do in London, or a Best Places to eat in Rome post. That’s when your popular destinations seem to work better for you. Or like mine, people want to know why travel is good for you, what the benefits are…so we can justify doing more of it. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your writing and see what works.

Not having a support network

I don’t know if I’d have come this far without a support network. Friends and family support means so much. Asking them to like or share your post will give it more visibility with the people they know that you don’t. But you can’t sustain a blog on friends and family alone, especially if you at some point are looking to monetize. That’s when blogger networks come in.

I am part of a number of Facebook groups. Some for travel, some for bloggers, some for bloggers who travel. One has Blog Post Saturday where each week you share a post for people to visit and share through social media. You reciprocate, thereby both reaching new audiences. Also helpful for when you’re lost and confused about something and need to ask advice from others who may know more than you. Here are some of the Facebook groups I’m part of and that I would recommend:

• Girls Love Travel
• Wandering Women Travel Bloggers
• The Blogging Tribe
• Boss Girl Bloggers
• Ultimate Travel Group

Pinterest has group boards where you can pin and reciprocate shares for other people. Twitter has Twitter Chats and other daily and weekly threads where you can share latest posts or links to other social media sites.

I have made some great online blogging friends, a lot of them who started around the same time as me. I even met up with one of them recently when she visited Vancouver (shout out to the Travel Addicted Unicorn). Having blogging friends who support you and who you can support is incredibly rewarding especially when you figuring out how to start a blog of your own. Get involved. Don’t just drop your links and walk away, make the effort to visit, comment, share and like your fellow bloggers’ work.

How to start a blog: things that have been working for me recently

While these may not all work for everyone, these are some of the things I have focused on in the last few months. I have started to see an increase in traffic as a result of some or all of these.

Tailwind

If you’ve been working on Pinterest you’ll likely have heard of Tailwind. Pinterest took me the longest time to understand, but in the last few months I have started to notice a big difference. I took a Pinterest course and feel like I have a better understanding now. I invested in Tailwind, at first with the basic package, now with the Plus package. The difference being how many Tribes you can join and how many pins you can share with those Tribes. Tribes are groups of like-minded pinners where you help each other grow. I now have the Plus package where I can join up to 10 Tribes (versus 5 in the basic package) and share 80 pins a month (versus 20 in the basic package). Currently over half of my web traffic per month comes from Pinterest.

Blogger Tip – Tailwind offer a free trial so you can see how you like it. Check out more here.

Attending a travel blogger conference

Attending my first conference was so much fun and beneficial. I got to hear from others who started where I was, the tourism boards that bloggers pitch to, and people who have used affiliate marketing to monetize their blogs. All helpful information, and another great chance to network. There were even people there who were just trying to figure out how to start a blog, they hadn’t taken the leap yet.

I went to TravelCon which was a travel blogging conference run by travel bloggers, but there are other conferences out there such as TBEX which I might also look into. I loved TravelCon so much, and got so much out of it that I already signed up for 2020. It’s in New Orleans in May so maybe I’ll see you there.

Read more about my experience attending a blogger conference for the first time

Writing about what interests me

When I first started blogging, and I was rushing to get my two posts out a week, I sometimes wrote just for the sake of writing. If you can tell that you’re writing a fluff piece, I’m sure your readers can, and it shows in your stats. I can see which of my posts have done well and which have tanked, and the ones that are at the bottom are generally the ones that I didn’t care as much about but felt like I should write something.

Now I make sure to write what I am interested in. I try not to force things. If I haven’t been somewhere in a while I write about things in my own city. Vancouver is an amazing place and I believe everyone should see how good it is. So I write to promote my own city. I constantly take notes when I’m out and about and if I think of something that may make a great post, I write it down. When I have written fluff pieces I find I’m not as detailed. The better posts take longer to write but they mean so much more and get way more attention. Blogging is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Figure out how to start a blog the right way.

Using social media to my advantage

Maybe I’m not at the stage where I want to or can pitch to a tourism board, but that doesn’t mean I can’t let them know I’m here. Tagging in accounts of things I am writing about helps me get exposure. If I write about Vancouver and post something I tag in Tourism Vancouver or Destination BC. If I write about an amazing hotel I stayed at, I tag them in it. What’s the worst than can happen…they don’t hit the like button?

I’ve had them like or comment on my posts, my tweets, my instagram photos. And the ultimate goal is for them to share it with their (usually) tens of thousands of followers, thus getting you more exposure. This is something I learned at the conference from one of the tourism boards. If you let them know you are there and willing to write about them because you are interested, they are more likely to want to work with you later.

Monetizing my blog

I’m not making millions (I wish) but this year I got my first paycheck from blogging. Even if it’s not much, that makes me so happy and feel like I’m getting somewhere. Monetization can be difficult, it’s not going to happen overnight. Some of the main ways you can monetize are:

Affiliate marketing: I use booking.com, CJ Affiliate (skyscanner, tripadvisor etc.) and ShareASale. I can even use booking.com to book my own hotel stays and get commission on those. Be careful as some affiliate programs do not allow this. One thing I have decided recently is to get rid of Google Ads. It was the easiest thing to sign up for at first but after nearly a year, my clicks have garnered me about $25, and you don’t get paid out until you reach $100. Google Ads I find also clutter up your site, they put ads where they want, not where you want them. It may seem like easy money but it’s worth weighing what means more to you and how it impacts your site.

Creating a product: This year I launched my own product, a range of travel themed gift tags. I hand make the tags with vintage maps, and sell them on my site. This took a while for me to figure out, but you too can sell things on your site (physical product or digital) and make money. Pinterest and Instagram stories gave me an outlet for some advertising which seems to be getting some good responses, and I even held a giveaway on Instagram to get more exposure.

Sign up with ShareASale affiliate marketing site and start making money on your blog today

How to start a blog: first year blogging numbers

I know I said it’s not all about the numbers, but while it’s not healthy to focus solely on the numbers, it’s still good to see how far you’ve come. Especially when a year ago I didn’t even know how to start a blog.

I wrote a post after my first month of blogging. Here were the numbers I had after one month vs. where I’m at now after one year:

• Twitter – 420 followers. Now 3030 followers
• Facebook – 81 followers.Now 150 followers
• Instagram – 200 followers. Now 820 followers
• Pinterest – 15 followers/150 monthly views. Now 900 followers/85k monthly views
• Subscribers to blog – 20 subscribers. Now 90 subscribers
• Overall views on blog – 500 views. Now 9500 views
• Monthly blog views – 450 views/150 visitors first month. Now 1450 views/1000 visitors

How to start a blog of your own

I’ve lost count of the number of Youtube videos I watched on how to start a blog. I am not a tech genius by any stretch of the imagination. Learning how to build a website from scratch was not easy. Themes, hosting sites, ads, code, and everything in between. It all required endless videos, pausing them to make sure I was doing things correctly. What should have been the simplest task took me forever, but you know what? I did it, and by myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with hiring someone to do this for you. In fact if you have the money, it might be better. I am still thinking about that for when I want to update my blog. But if you want to do it yourself like me, here’s a few tips to get you started.

Find a hosting site

To create a space for your blog you will need to find a hosting site. I had no idea what this was when I first set out so don’t feel bad if you don’t. The simple explanation is that the host holds all the files for your website. You are essentially renting space from them. The host also assigns an address for your files so that others can find them. Most hosts will also help you register the domain name and you can do both at the same time. I went with Bluehost. It seemed like a one stop shop for me to use them and register my website name at the same time. If you are looking at starting your own blog and want to set up a hosting site and register your domain name then they couldn’t be simpler.

Blogger Tip: follow this link to Bluehost for a special introductory offer and begin learning how to start a blog of your own.

Themes and wordpress

After picking a hosting site and choosing a blog name (probably the hardest part), I had to select a theme for my site. That’s kind of like the template and look you want your site to have. You can choose from a whole range of themes. Anything from artistic to feminine, photography focused or modern. I went with one of the free WordPress themes to begin with. Primer is the name of it. I recently hired a web developer friend of mine to redesign my blog and make it look more professional. It was an investment I was ready to make, and it has really made a difference and is now something I can be really proud of.

Once you have signed up for your hosting site, you can install WordPress from there. It’s simple enough to use, but you might need to try a few things out before you fully get the hang of it. I learned how to upload photos to WordPress so that I could use them in my posts. Hours of research into Categories and Tags to try and figure out what I was meant to do with those. I spent my first week watching endless Youtube videos on anything I didn’t fully understand so you can imagine I watched a lot of Youtube. It was a slow process for the first couple of weeks because I was learning as I was going, having no previous experience on how to start a blog.

Install some plugins

Plugins are the best way to get things done a little quicker and a little more consistently. I have a few helpful plugins on my site. The best one I would recommend to start with is Yoast SEO. I didn’t really know what SEO was and until recently hadn’t focused on it too much, but Yoast SEO is a great tool to help you. Yoast SEO checks the readability of posts, checks for subheadings, sentence length and structure. Then you can input your focus keyphrase (how you want people to find your post if they search for something) and it will guide you to best inclusions to make it more SEO friendly.

When I started experimenting with Affiliate marketing I had no idea how to insert ads into my site. Hey, guess what? There’s a plugin for that, Ad Inserter. I added a plugin to make my images smaller so it won’t slow my site down, Smush. I found a plugin that helps make images on your site pin-able for Pinterest, Pin It Button. As I mentioned above, I have recently created my own product on my site and in order to sell this I had to use the plugin WooCommerce. Plugins can be really helpful so make sure to look for some useful ones.

Write a few articles in advance of launching

Don’t be like me, be more prepared. If you’re planning to start a blog, I would say have a handful of posts ready to go. The writing doesn’t take half as long as editing and adding your pictures. I launched my blog with my first post, and while working on my second. In hindsight I should have had at least half a dozen posts ready to go so that I could continue to write while learning everything as I went along. As I mentioned before, you’ll likely be slower at first as everything you do requires learning a new thing, and a bunch of videos to watch to understand that thing.

While you think you might be able to write a post in a couple of hours, that may be true, but editing it will take twice as long. Then adding in your photos. You’ll check it for SEO and do a million little tweaks before you hit that PUBLISH button. You might be eager to hit launch on your site, but take the extra week or two and write some content so you’re not pulling your hair out with panic in your first week.

Set up social media sites you are interested in

At the time you go live you should have your social media sites set up. I wouldn’t do every single social media platform out there, but choose the ones that are right for you. I recommend Twitter, it’s actually my favorite platform. It has the most engagement, the biggest growth rate and the most supportive people. If you like photos then set up an Instagram, but don’t get too hung up on how long it takes to grow as this one can be frustrating. Facebook is a great tool for personal development (see Facebook Groups above) but as a platform for your blog I’ve found it’s hit and miss.

Last but not least I would recommend Pinterest. It can be confusing if you’ve never used it before, but like I said before it’s my biggest referrer. Once you get it, you get it. Tailwind helps a ton if you’re willing to invest a little in your blog. As I mentioned earlier, you have to pay to use Tailwind, but having an app doing your pinning for you while you work, sleep and write more awesome blog posts is a weight off your mind. It means you don’t have to be glued to your phone 24/7 and chooses optimum times during the day to pin for you.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

Network, network, network

You’ve picked a kick-ass name, theme and hosting site. You figured out how to start a blog and launched it with an awesome first post. Now it’s time to find people to read it. While your family and friends will be (hopefully) lining up to read your latest post, you’ll need other readers too. You’ll have to be networking all the time. That means promoting your blog on your social media accounts, talking about your blog to people you meet, reaching out to people online to discuss your blog and so much more. I found a great way to get recognition is to guest post for other bloggers. Write a post that they will use on their site, which would typically be more established. It means they get a free article to post, and you get more exposure with usually links to your blog.

Self promotion is not always easy but it is essential to survive in a world where there are more bloggers than you can shake a stick at. If you’re serious about blogging then get some business cards, attend events (blogger events or just events around your niche), sign up for a conference. And most importantly if someone says something like “gee I really wish I knew what to do on my vacation in Thailand” it’s a great opportunity to remember you’re a travel blogger and help them with a “here’s my card, check out my post on 3 days in Chiang Mai, that’ll help you with your trip.”

How to start a blog: welcome to blogging

And that’s a lot of the basics you need to start a blog, and hopefully get off on the right track. Blogging is a bit of a minefield at first, and there’s a lot to learn, but you’ll get the hang of it. Soon the words SEO, code, affiliates, unique views and blogcation will all make sense to you. Well the last one I just made up so it might not, but it’s my new word for blogging as a vacation (like a staycation) so I think I’ll start using it. Whether you choose to start a blog now, or in a few months, there’s a network of bloggers waiting to connect with you.

There’s been nothing more rewarding for me than meeting new people while blogging, and learning new things. Watching my blog posts take off and having people read them is a wonderful feeling. It will take time and you’ll spend a lot of time in front of a screen at first, but as a travel blogger I like to balance screen time with making sure I get to try new experiences in the real world. It’s always fun to plan a trip and get excited about how you’re going to write about it.

If you’ve enjoyed this post then please leave me a comment or share using the social media buttons below. Are you looking to start a blog or have you already started one? I’d love to connect with you on social media.