The 5 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Starting My Craft Blog

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I’ve read a few too many how to make money from blogging posts. And you know what? I swear they’re all the same. Useless, generic information that means little to nothing in the grand scheme of things.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Your Craft Blog

I literally spent the first six months of my blogging career spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. Why? Because I was trying to do things just like everyone else and that definitely didn’t work out so well for me.

There are quite a few things that I wish I could go back and change as far as starting my creative blog. Obviously, life doesn’t come with do-overs, though. Wouldn’t it be awesome if it did?

The best I can do is to keep you from following in my footsteps. Check out my list of the 5 biggest mistakes I made when starting my creative blog on the next page.

Did you make any of these mistakes when you started your creative blog?

Starting with Blogger or another free platform

Starting with Blogger was just stupid as far as I’m concerned. I spent the first month or so of being self-hosted trying to figure out how to switch things over to WordPress and how to reformat everything that didn’t do well with the transition.

Talk about a ridiculous amount of extra work that could’ve been avoided. Side note: If you’ve ever made this mistake, hire someone to do the Blogger to WordPress transfer for you, especially if you have a lot of content. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Not investing in myself from the beginning

I wish I would’ve realized sooner rather than later that you get what you pay for, especially when it comes to education. There are literally hundreds of free ebooks and webinars related to blogging. Don’t waste your time.

Pick one high-quality ebook or online class and work through it. That means every chapter or every lesson. And yes, you actually have to do the work. It wasn’t until I started investing in myself that I saw an increase in my income. You can see the resources I used to go from 4k page views to 40k here. 

Thinking that I’d be able to quit my full-time job within a few months

This is a joke. Seriously. Blogging is definitely not a get rich quick scheme by any means. Occasionally, you stumble across a blogger who appears to have just gotten lucky. That’s the exception and not the rule, though.

Trust me on this one. If you think you’re going to start a blog and make a full-time income within a month or two, think again. Most bloggers I know who are making 2-3k+ each month have been doing this for at least a year.

Not treating my blog like a business from the get-go

For the first six months or so, I posted once a week and shared my post on Facebook. That’s what I thought blogging was. Obviously I was sadly mistaken, wasn’t I? Lol… Seriously, though. If you can’t dedicate 10-20 hours a week to your blog, it’s totally not worth the time or money you’re going to be investing.

Once you start earning an income, your blog is a business. Don’t forget to treat it as such. Set aside time to work on creating and promoting content and stick to a schedule. You are only limited by yourself.

Writing about anything and everything and having no clear focus

I was horrible with this at first. For some reason, I thought a blog was basically just a journal and I could get away with doing nothing more than throwing up a post every now and again. Ha. At that point, there was really no rhyme or reason to it.

I got serious and took a good, hard look at what I was doing. I created categories and sub-categories and these days I make sure that not only do my posts provide value to my readers, but that they also fit into one of those categories/sub-categories. It’s as easy as that, y’all!

What were the biggest mistakes you made when starting your creative blog? Leave a comment and share.

This post is part of the Creative Mistakes mini-series. You can find the other posts in this series here:
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Organizing Your Creative Space
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Scheduling Your Creative Time
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Planning Your Creative Budget

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Thanks so much for visiting. Have an awesome week!