Tips from a new blogger

I'm brand new to blogging and so far, it's been such a wonderful experience. (yes, all rainbows and unicorns)

I wrote my first post on April 4th 2014, deleted it and then spent the next five months basically grueling over every little detail. It was basically just lots and lots of productive procrastination.

It finally got to a point where I wanted to stop thinking about what font my commas need to be in and just get out there. And here we are! 

So, in honor of this being my 8th post, I wanted to share some tips from my experience as a new blogger.

Growing and learning

There's quite a learning curve to blogging and I'm still figuring all of this - what to blog about, how frequently, how to photograph products and so much more.

During this early stage, what has helped me is:

- Keeping notes on my phone of things I want to blog about - this has proved to be extremely helpful.

- Sharing my drafts with some friends and family to get a fresh perspective on it - sometimes, you miss some obvious mistakes or don't make sense at all (teehee)

- Reading many many blogs, understanding how they work and looking for inspiration here, there and everywhere. 

While this is all some serious stuff, remember to enjoy this process and don't be scared to put yourself out there. Don't worry about having it all together right off the bat and be open to learning at every stage. 

All in good time 

It's crucial to keep your mind in the game and concentrate on putting out genuine content, especially when starting off. In time, views, readers, sponsors etc will come to you. Until then, do it because you want to and not because you might get free things/fame/fortune out of it.

The same goes for getting discouraged when you don't see enough traffic for whatever reason - all in good time. I'm in the process of learning about blog networks and link parties which are a great way to get to know some new bloggers and also get traffic on your blog.

It also helps to be active on social media and interact with other bloggers out there. I also keep up with this one group on Facebook called Dubai Bloggers to discover local blogs and share my posts as well.

Last but not the least, talk about your blog - don't be shy to share it with friends, family and people you meet (I'm still getting there!)

Optimize, schmoptimize

SEO is my personal Everest. I managed to dodge this as long as I could because it confused me but now have found some great resources to start me out:

7 Basic SEO Tips
SEO Checklist
SEO for Wordpress (found this while I was still deciding on what platform)

To .com or not to .com

So, I started out with a .blogspot.com because I wasn't sure how this was all going to go down (and this is normal). And now, I switched to a .com! It's official - I've DTR-ed.

I'm glad I did it - one because I didn't want to lose this domain name and two, this is it! Teeny tiny footprint on the internet, how exciting! I registered my domain name with GoDaddy and it's all thanks to this wonderful blog post that everything is actually working.

Blogger vs. Wordpress

I played around with both platforms and I found Blogger much easier to use. Though I do feel like I'm most likely to shift to Wordpress in the long term, I'm happy with Blogger for right now. So that would be my advice for someone starting off: Blogger is much less overwhelming.  It's also simple enough for even a newbie like me to mess around the HTML.


Hope this helps you shake it off and do it already! Link me below if you're a new (or seasoned) blogger - would love to check it out. And of course, if you have any tips/tricks for me, please do share.

Mona xo