2011 was quite a while ago and I've been blogging on this very site since then, but I've learned a lot along the way, most of it since 2018 when I realized that blogging had shifted majorly from a personal web log you kept to showcase your daily life and blurry photos to something new. These days, blogging can be a business, a major source of income for some people who put a lot of work into it. For some people it's still a hobby, but they can and do make profit off of it. Many people start blogs now specifically to make money, and succeed at it.
Some days I want to kick myself for not taking it seriously sooner. Friends have told me that you live and you learn, and ugh, they are right. I decided this year would be the year I turned my blog into a business and since I've delved deeper into how these professional bloggers have been doing it, I've learned some blogging secrets that every aspiring blogger should know. Here are blogging secrets I've learned rounded up in one handy place!
You Need a Lot of Content
When you're starting out (or starting to take your blog seriously), you will need traffic. Traffic comes from content, and content comes from posts, and lots of them. Your first year blogging, you'll need to churn out a large amount of content, even a post a day (on weekdays at least). No leisurely two blogs a week, if you're looking to bring in the traffic numbers that get you the ad views that bring you checks in the mail deposits in your bank account. Is it grueling? Yes. Is it worth it? That's up to you.
You Need to Pin a Lot
All that content is also going to need pins! People more expert than I suggest putting at LEAST one new pin on Pinterest a day, but recommend more. A mix of 80% your pins and 20% other pins has been suggested by multiple bloggers whose blog advice I've read or their podcasts suggest. I had eight years of content and recipes to make pins for and needed to stay organized. I printed out a list of every recipe I ever made (and wanted to keep and promote) and started making pins, up to 10-20 per evening after work.
I started scheduling then on Pinterest, and eventually plan to get a Tailwind account to keep up with daily maintenance. This is a good goal, because I didn't want to spend money on Tailwind before I had stuff to populate it with. Yes, you'll need to pin a LOT, whether it's manually, with Tailwind, or a mixture of both.
As a visually oriented site, you'll probably get the most traffic from Pinterest with your beautiful pins. If you suck at design, Canva can help. You can pay for their service and make templates to make making pins even easier, but I don't do this yet (though I might soon, I want to get more comfortable using the free version before I have even more options for pin creation).
Update the Junk
This means go back through your old posts and get rid of stuff that you can't even with anymore, if you have an older blog. We all have old stuff that just needs to be gotten rid of. Delete or archive the dorky posts and awful photos. Make a list of posts where the content is useful but the photos suck, or vice versa. Then update those things to make them match your current level of blogging and photo skills. Thankfully, even cell phone camera photos are better now than some of the digital camera trash pics we took back in the day. Not all of your old content is trash, but more of it than you wish probably is. #truthbombs
This also means changing the titles of your posts to not be ridiculous song lyrics or whatever nonsense we did back then. "I'm Onna Boat!" needs to become "10 Tips for Your First Cruise". If you want to change the permalink to reflect the new title (you should), you'll need to make redirects from your old URL to the new one. There are plugins for that, which I haven't used so I can't recommend.
SEO your Brains Out
With a trimmer list of blog posts, you'll want to tackle SEO. Install Yoast on your WordPress site and make the little lights turn green! I still use the free version currently though one day I'll upgrade. Read up on the basics of SEO writing and start using longtail keywords. Any photos you have that are saved to your Media Library as IMG_8009.jpg need to be renamed to SEO-friendly names that reflect what they are. Turn IMG_8009.jpg into how-to-cook-risotto.jpg. Use the Media Renamr plugin to accomplish this easily. Yes, it costs money but it will be worth spending the cash on.
Having good SEO and learning to write for it will help you with organic Google traffic, another huge traffic booster that is harder to get than Pinterest, but is worth it. One of my biggest traffic drivers right now is (totally unexpectedly!!!) this post on Trader Joe's Thai Green Curry Simmer Sauce. How did I get to be the first blog result for this? IDK! But it's helped a lot, and helps me in shaping new content. I have created other content based on this green curry sauce, and I have created more content based on Trader Joe's items that people may not know how to use once they impulse bought it.
Add Ads
Yes, I have ads on this site, and yes your eyes adjust after a while. I do try to not have annoying popup ads or autoplay video ads, my two most hated things on blogs. But ads make the money. I am still using Google Adsense but once I get to 25k sessions I am switching to MediaVine, which I hear pays more. So add those ads, and look at your site through the eyes of a user frequently to make sure you're not making the experience suck.
Seek Out Expertise
For me, seeking out expertise has been taking a few bloggers whose content and journey I want to emulate, and see how they did it. I go through their new and old content to see what's changed, see if they share blogging tips on their site, and creep their social media to see what they are doing that is working. Another amazing source I've started using recently is podcasts! I subscribe to a lot of blogging podcasts and listen to them when I go on walks during my work breaks, or when I am walking the dog in the evening.
Some of my favorite podcasts are Blogging Breakthroughs (my fav!), Just Keep Blogging, Food Blogger Pro, and Hashtag Authentic.
It Takes A Lot of Time
As you have hopefully gleaned by this point, it takes a LOT of time to grow your blog in a meaningful way. Some nights I come home from my desk job of writing, editing, and creating content to ... write, edit, and create content for several hours til bedtime. I do make time to eat dinner, take the dog for a walk, and maybe do a chore around the house. Some weekends I make a recipe extravaganza! That involves getting groceries Friday night, and waking up Saturday morning to cook, scribble recipe notes, style and shoot photos, upload and edit those photos, type in the recipes, create the blog content around the recipe, schedule it for publishing, make some pins, schedule those pins, schedule other social media, and then I do it all over again for a large chunk of Sunday too. I often come away from those weekends with eight new recipes, plus other non-recipe blog post ideas if not fully fleshed out content.
So no, blogging life is not relaxing or easy. This isn't a dabble twice a week experience. It's daily. It's a job just like any marketing person for a small company would do from 8-5 Monday through Friday. Except we, the startup bloggers, are doing it in our precious free time, because we love it and plan for it to pay off.
What do I mean by pay off? For myself, that means taking this puppy up to a full-time level. I want to have more than a year's salary sitting in my savings account, a goal I am actively working on every day. I want freelance money rolling in, a goal I am actively working on every day. I want to be making money from this blog through ads, sponsorships, partnerships, and influencer marketing. I don't want to be working for someone else, churning out content that makes them more money than I get in salary. And with that, I want to thank you for reading this, and by reading this, you're helping me make this dream that much closer to reality. So THANK YOU.
