It’s time for a reader discussion/open thread and today’s question is:
What is the Biggest Mistake That You’ve Made as a Blogger?
What in your time as a blogger do you look back on with regret, wish you’d not done or wish you’d done differently?
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Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I started way too many blogs to maintain, so they all turned into splogs where I was just posting affiliate letters to try and make some money. None of the posts were even good content. I totally lost the focus on all the blogs.
I have cut back to just a few and I’m trying to sell the domains for a few of the ones with potential, then I will just focus on just my main blog.
Not starting sooner.
Maintaining too many blogs and cluttering the site with ads.
Hi,
I hope my comment still has space here.
My biggest mistake so far and still suffering from it is my long URL i guess. Although sometimes I land on Google’s first page and somehow have regular visitors, I still believe my traffic would have been better if I made my URLs ( my other blog URL is also long) is quite shorter.
Thank you for asking, and hoping for a clear advise.
My biggest mistake was changing my permalink structure and didn’t use the right plugin – it broke my links and after 9 months of blogging (and just starting to receive some decent Google traffic) I think I was effectively sandboxed again and it’s taken another 5 months to get Google traffic back again.
A tough lesson to learn, but hopefully no matter how annoying it felt at the time, it didn’t actually put my blog’s development back a full 5 months.
I supposed mine is not starting a blog sooner, way back in 2004.
My biggest mistake was probably not starting my own blog sooner. I could have ended up with more content by now.
yeah, same here. should’ve started earlier.
The biggest mistake for me is not deciding on what to focus my blog content on and to whom. I must have spent months trying to figure out how I wanted to talk about my topic and who my audience should be. Just took to long to figure this out and I lost out on some serious content development time.
I am going to echo the sentiments of many bloggers–my biggest mistake is letting my blog go pretty much idle after being selected as a blog of note by blogger. Thus, I effectively let my blog content go stale. I saw many other blogs who started after me, quickly surpass me in viewership (because of their content). However, it is a struggle to balance the demands of life and a blog. I was getting married at the time to a long distance finance and planning the destination wedding, so I let go of my obligations to my blog.