My Year Of Blogging And What I’ve Learnt

Happy 1st Blogiversary, Procrastinating Mum!

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Is it weird that I just wished myself a happy Blogiversary? Today marks one year since I started The Procrastinating Mum, and what a year it has been! I’m going to say it – I am proud of myself! (I can hear my dad now – ‘self-praise no praise!’) I am proud that I have managed to keep up with this for a whole year – with a lot of motivation from my husband!

I’ve discussed my blogging journey before and explained why I started, so I thought today I would discuss what I’ve learnt from my year of blogging.

This will not be a technical ‘how to’ guide (that’s for another day), but more of a personal/emotional what I’ve learnt from blogging.

I Was Naive

I treated blogging as an online diary when I first started (which is fine if that’s how you blog!) Everything was spell checked and had a title. I knew that I needed a subject to write about and have a beginning, middle and end. But that’s it. I assumed that I could just write a post, and people would find me and my little blog.

I shared it on Facebook and waited to become famous.

via GIPHY

Yeah, blogging doesn’t work like that.

Blogging Is Hard Work

Like, really hard work

At first, I thought that blogging was relatively easy. I would spend the week working on what I wanted to write, and that was it. But there is so much more that goes into it, and to learn it can feel overwhelming.

I was fortunate when I started blogging as I had HUGE help from Lucy from Real Parent. She helped me with my website and theme and told me about SEO (search engine optimisation) and DA (domain authority) and what I need to do to improve my scores.

I also discovered the Queen of blogging, Jenny in Neverland and her excellent eBook A Beginners Guide to Blogging. Plus, all of her helpful blogging-related posts.

Lucy’s help and Jenny’s guides have made my journey so much easier!

Blogging Isn’t Just Writing

There is so much that goes into blogging behind the scenes! You can’t just write and be done with it, oh no:

There are pictures, headings, internal linking, external linking, paragraph length, sentence length, keyphrase, categories, tags, promoting on social media, creating Pinterest pins, keeping your website up to date, checking for broken links, alt descriptions, pictures, fact-checking, making sure that old content is up to date, buying your domain name, picking a hosting platform (honestly, I feel like a technical genius!) 🤯…the list really does go on, which takes us onto the next point.

Blogging Takes Up A Lot Of Time

Doing all the blog maintenance takes time! Writing also takes time! Like I said above, there is so much that goes into it, and they’re not 5 minute jobs. Once you’ve finished writing and doing the maintenance on your site, you then have to schedule the posts to go live, reply to comments, promote them, and take part in comment swaps.

Then there are the courses that you can purchase from other bloggers and experts. To have a successful blog, you need to have the knowledge. So when you’re not working on your writing, you’re completing a course.

Or you’ll be having a shower/washing up/reading a book/about to go to sleep, and suddenly a fantastic idea pops into your head. You need to act on that before the idea floats out of your head.

Or you’ll be taking photos for your blog or sourcing stock photos and cropping and editing those for your blog.

But then that’s also the fantastic thing about Blogging – you can be so flexible with your working hours!

You’ll Spend Money

I started off blogging on a website called Blogger. It was fine for just starting out, I didn’t have to pay for anything, but it didn’t do everything that I needed to look ‘professional’. So I moved to WordPress on one of their free options, which I preferred.

I then learnt that I would need to buy my domain name (funnily enough, ‘theprocrastinatingmum.co.uk’ was available for me to use😂). This has to be renewed every year.

You then need to pay a hosting company to actually host your website. I’m probably going to sound a bit silly now, but I didn’t actually realise that this was a thing. I thought that once you have your website and made it live, it just ‘went’ onto the World Wide Web. This also needs to be renewed every year.

You’ll then start paying for your blogging resources, such as ebooks, courses and anything else that will help you become more knowledgeable and a better blogger. You’ve spent a fortune before you know it, so make sure you try and stick to a budget!

You’ll Become Obsessed With Stats, SEO And Increasing Your DA

You can blog for fun as I do, but that doesn’t stop you from checking your views every 20 minutes when you’ve just published a new post. You’ll tell yourself it doesn’t matter how many views you get, but you really will become obsessed with checking.

DA – For my non-blogging friends, here’s a little bit on DA:

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages.

Moz

The better your DA, the more likely your website is to appear on the first page of Google. For example, Facebook is in the high ’90s, whereas new websites will start at one.

But it’s not just DA that determines that. It also shows how strong your SEO game is on the content you’re putting out.

What is SEO:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results.

Ahrefs

Good SEO is pretty much what I mentioned above in ‘Blogging Isn’t Just Writing.’ But, like, A LOT more goes into it!

Say you google ‘Panic Attack Toolkit‘. Well, depending on how well you’ve focused on SEO and the better your DA, the more likely you are to be on the front page of Google (currently, I’m on page 1 for this example). And getting onto that first page of Google is every website owner’s dream! How often do you scroll to page 5 or 6 of Google when looking for something? Exactly.

So trying to increase your DA is super important but also super difficult! You’ll work your hardest to try and increase your score, but it is not easy. I’ve been stuck on mine for about six months now. AND IT WILL NOT BUDGE!

I can’t even begin to tell you how it feels when you’ve worked really hard on a post, put your all into it, and you’re super proud, and it doesn’t get the views you were expecting.

Or when you’re on Twitter and new bloggers are saying how they’ve reached all of their goals for the year in 3 months, and they’re earning mega £££. It’s excellent, it really is! It’s impressive that they’re doing so well already! But it does make me jealous.

It makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong? Why aren’t people liking and sharing my posts? Is it what I’m writing? Am I not writing about the right things? Maybe I’m not funny enough or relatable? Maybe people don’t like my advice or take on things? You start to doubt yourself, and you’ll wonder if it is worth carrying on? But then the idea of not blogging is so horrible that I know I could never just give up.

The Blogging Community Is Lovely

When I joined Twitter in November 2019, I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought it couldn’t hurt. It’s only in the last few months that I’ve started to use Twitter more, and I am so glad that I did! As it turns out, Twitter is where all the bloggers hang out, and I cannot begin even to tell you how kind and welcoming they are! You need a boost, advice, anything, and they’ll be there to help if they can.

Conclusion

I was never particularly interested in (or any good at!) writing at school; I preferred reading. But I cannot tell you how happy I am that I discovered blogging.

My dream would be to become a full-time blogger. Is this possible? I want to think that it is, as long as I stop doubting myself and start putting myself out there! As I said above, blogging is hard work, but it has also been so rewarding.

And finally, a massive thank you to you for reading my ramblings each week. I really am so grateful!

Before you go, would you please do me a favour? If you liked this post, would you mind just giving that little heart down the bottom of this page a click? Or maybe give it a like and share on social media? Or even leave me a little comment below. It really does make such a difference, and you have no idea how much I would appreciate it! Thank you.

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All photos from Ivory Mix