9 Deadly Blogging Mistakes To Avoid At All Cost To Make Money With A Blog (And How To Fix Them Fast)
Discover the 9 easy-to-make blogging mistakes when blogging to make money online and how to fix them fast. Because only 5-8% of blogs generate a full-time income. *Wait, what?!*
Blogging mistake #1: Not using the best platform for blog traffic
Blogging mistake #2: The most common blogging mistake that will waste you lots of time
Blogging mistake #3: A deadly blogging mistake that you risk to discover late in your blogging journey
Blogging mistake #4: When you lack confidence, this is an easy blogging mistake
Blogging mistake #5: The one thing you can’t put off (but you most likely have!)
Blogging mistake #6: The 80-20 rule
Blogging mistake #7: Free will cost you
Blogging mistake #8: The introvert blogging mistake
Blogging mistake #9: The most powerful free resource
Have you guessed the 9 mistakes? This blog will be very useful is you have started your blog in the past year or so… and even if you have been blogging for longer because avoiding these mistakes can help you accelerate your growth.
It is easy to believe that because you have been doing something for a while you think everything is fine. I must admit that one of these mistakes is something that I discovered months after starting, despite being convinced that I was doing the right thing!
So my advice is not to rush this blog as if it was a checklist that you want to tick off… “Cool, I am not doing that, next…”
Take your time to reflect and go deep with some of these mistakes, to challenge yourself and find new opportunities to improve your approach to blogging to make money online.
Full disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that, at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission from.
You have a dream... doing what you like, with freedom, being your own boss. Or maybe you want to have more time with your family. Or maybe you are burnout by the pressure of the corporate world. Or you just want to get some extra income for those personal projects... paying off debt, a dream holiday, retiring early, investing to make your money grow...
You have decided that a blog and the online business seem the perfect recipe to reach your dreams. So you start a blog.
Not just that. You decide to start blogging to make money online. Super exciting!!!
The learning curve at this stage can be quite steep depending on how you approach it.
You may have already read a few blogs about how to start your blog. Those usually cover things like how to get your own website address, your website hosting services and so on. This blog isn’t one of them.
I want to share something different with you in this blog. It includes learning lessons, mistakes you can easily avoid to be successful blogging to make money online.
Take each of them and really dig deep to see whether you are falling into some of these mistakes without even noticing. It is easily done. Months can go by and you start to wonder why certain results don’t come as expected... At that point, you would see yourself going back to basics and realise that you have wasted valuable time.
Only if you have taken the time to avoid these mistakes before…
Do you know that approximately only 5-8% of blogs generate a full-time income? Let me help you be one of them!
Here are the top 9 mistakes to avoid when blogging to make money online.
And talking about promoting your content, I let you guess from where 80% of my traffic comes from…
I know! Obvious after the heading of this section! 😀
Yes! Pinterest!
Pinterest has become a very powerful tool for bloggers, specially those blogging to make money online.
Pinterest will help you get discovered because it is designed to bring traffic to your site.
Do you think that you can do the same with other platforms? Not to the same extent!
Let me explain. Let’s take one after the other.
Instagram is truly engineered to keep you in the platform.
You can only add links to your stories that disappear after 24h!
You can only add a few links in your bio but not your individual posts!
When you open a link in Instagram, it does not open the associated app (it keeps you in Instagram).
So Instagram is not the best of social media engines to drive traffic to your website and blog. It can help you provide visibility of your content in Instagram and build your brand.
Facebook has a very large user base but, once you post, the lifespan of your post, meaning how long it is actively shown to others in the platform, is just a few hours. *Really?*
Google can be great, certainly, when you master SEO and manage to get your content in page 1 of searches. However, SEO takes time and focus to get right. Getting the right keywords isn’t that straight forward and sometimes keeping Google happy gets into very techi requirements like the loading speed of your site… which is not for everyone to tackle easily.
Pinterest, on the other hand, has an easy learning curve and, when you pin, the average lifespan of your pin is months, not hours. Cooooool!!
So, if you want to discover how to grow online your blog on autopilot, my friend, I have something very especial for you! Access instantly here my FREE Pinterest training:
Among blogging mistakes, this one is the most common mistake. The perfectionist in you know exactly what I am referring to.
Not launching because you want all the pieces of the puzzle perfect before you open your online doors. A slick website, a comprehensive product portfolio, an email list automated, your lead magnet, your sales funnels, 5-10 blogs written... the list goes on.
Actually, approaching it this way is quite a waste of time for a number of reasons:
You gain experience through creating and selling and that comes over time. So forget the concept of getting it perfect at the beginning.
Your online business will evolve over time. So there isn’t such thing as launching and getting it 100% spot on.
The voice of your own community will help you better shape your online business.
You are likely to evolve your niche as your progress.
So as they always say, it is better to get started earlier rather than later.
Content is the fundamental basis for your online business, so concentrate on that first.
Create a phased plan and start with your blog content. Then ensure you start your email list as soon as possible. The earlier the better.
Trying to monetise from the very beginning will cost you time, as you need to learn and implement quite a lot of things at once. Give yourself some breathing space.
Start blogging, create your list, start with a simple monetisation strategy and add monetisation strategies as you gain experience and build knowledge and confidence.
Trying to get the monetisation from the beginning makes you waste time. To monetise you need traffic and to build trust. Your blog content and your connection to your email list will give you that! So get those going first.
Among blogging mistakes, this is a deadly one… and I made it! (Yeap, I’ve said it!)
Nothing better than sharing with you my own experience. Here it comes:
Niche down your target audience
“What is niching down?”… you may be asking. Niching down is the exercise of thinking who you are targeting in order to make your content and offering more specific, addressing a smaller segment of audience.
Smaller audience???!!!
Before you think this is crazy, here is the reason why you want to do it.
Once you are more specific about who you target, you can research better their specific struggles, goals and dreams and create content that will talk to them.
Research your niche
It is very easy to get convinced that you know who you are serving. However, ask yourself:
do you know their struggles,
what questions are they looking answers for,
what blog titles are the most read,
what podcasts relate to them,
what YouTube channels do they watch,
what are their goals and…
what is their ultimate purpose?
Once you look at your target niche this way, it is very possible that you don’t really know as much as you thought you knew. That moment of realisation is gold. I experienced it and it was as if a light had been lit in my brain. So, so important.
Spending time answering the questions above is not wasting time… is gaining results!
So consider your niche research one of the most vital time investments for your blog to make money. Once you do this:
your products will be more fit for purpose,
they will talk by themselves to your audience,
your sales copy will become natural.
Everything is easier, more natural.
If you only do one thing about the 9 mistakes in this blog, this one is the one!
In making money, everything starts with the customer and its needs, whether is online or not.
Do you know one of the most common mistakes of writers when they do their first book? They are influenced by their favourite authors and their style is not truly theirs.
The online world is very similar. We all have our idols, the people we aspire to be, those who have achieved plenty, the ones you would like to become.
The danger is that as you develop your blog and your online business, you unknowingly embrace a style, a voice, content that is too close to others who influence you. That does not make you different.
It is totally natural to be influenced. It is perfectly ok to admire other entrepreneurs.
Just don’t assume that being like them is the recipe to success.
Here comes the #1 rule to stand out: Being yourself is.
I am conscious that many say the same: “Be yourself”. The fact is that not being yourself is something you do without noticing.
Why does it matter?
There is a wrong, common belief that online entrepreneurs have this profile of hyperactive, super confident, young people. Always successful, smiley, full of energy. And that is an image that we form day after day from social media, videos in YouTube…
If you are super energetic, fab! But the fact is that you don’t need to force yourself to be someone you are not. When you do so, you will not feel authentic. And people can tell.
What you really want is people to build trust with you and your brand. So nothing better than showing up as your true you.
Share your story. Accept to show your vulnerable side, your mistakes as well as your successes.
Still unconvinced?
The same is true with your blog.
The point is not to attract everyone. It’s to attract those that will connect with you.
My son says to me: “Mum, I will never create the Instagram stories the way you do. It isn’t my style. But I love them, because is so much you!”
And that’s my point. Be you. Accept it is not for everyone. That’s perfectly ok.
Are you deciding your blog content without a plan? When deciding what to write about each week, you just think about it there and then or just a few days in advance… whatever feels good to write about that week.
Being intentional with your content marketing will get you quicker results blogging to make money online.
Why?
Imagine aligning your content to your promotions during the year. Let’s imagine you have 4 main products and a couple of affiliate offers that you promote twice a year each. This will mean that each month you can and should create content aligned to the product you are pushing that month.
By approaching your content this way, your content will more naturally lead to your sales funnel and increase sales.
The alternative is to have a randomly misaligned sales plan and content plan. You decide to create content as you want each week and sale or create campaigns when you want to increase your revenue. That is a very reactive way of managing your online business and will not generate the best results.
You can discover how to plan easily a full year worth of content, fully align with your launches and affiliate products promotions in my blog How To Write Unique Blog Posts For A Whole Year - Exact Blueprint For Quality Blog Content Ideas.
Did you know that users produce around 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month ( WordPress)? This is why is sooooo important to get your content marketed. There is a lot of content produced every day, every week, every month. So help yourself to be noticed.
And if you still remain to be convinced, look at these statistics:
Only 21% of bloggers focus more on marketing than on the content itself (Growth Badger).
70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 say they are very active marketers (Growth Badger).
Based on this, what do you think is the right balance between creating content and promoting it?
80% content creation - 20% promotion?
50% each?
20% content creation - 80% promotion?
It obviously always depends. However, always lean to spend significantly more time promoting your content than you think. The 20-80 rule is the best to ensure that you provide visibility to all the efforts of creating the content.
So if you are serious about making money with your blog, promote, promote, promote your content.
Now, promoting your content doesn’t necessarily mean paid ads!
Promoting your content can be done in many different ways for free:
Pinterest pins & stories
Social media: Facebook groups, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter
Blogging platforms like Quora
your email list
a podcast
private community of interests groups (in Circle, Kajabi…)
in collabs
The list goes on.
The beauty of making money with your blog is that the out front investment is small, and you can increase your invest as you grow. However, to make money, you’ll need to invest.
If you try to do it all for free or at very low cost, you will not use your time strategically:
If you try to learn it all by yourself, you will lose valuable time and make avoidable mistakes.
If you try to only use free tools and platforms, you will soon hit capacity and functionality issues that will limit your growth.
I know all this sounds a bit daunting. In fact, the best you can do to get your blog to make money is to allocate a budget for your strategic expenditures to run your online business optimally. It does not need to be thousands and thousands. Just ensure that you are not trying to build a business from thin air. Blogging to make money online requires investment, not a lot, but some.
Here are the most critical areas for investment:
Your website
Going for a cheap website hosting service can be very counter productive.
With free web hosting, the chances are that your website will have slow loading times affecting your SEO (and therefore your ability to rank high in Google searches).
I personally use Squarespace and I love it!
Tailwind for Pinterest traffic
As you know, Pinterest is critical to drive traffic to your blog and online business.
To maximise your traffic from Pinterest, nothing better than Tailwind for Pinterest Communities.
Tailwind Communities enable you to share your pins within a community with the same type of activities than you, for others to repin your pins in their accounts. Very, very cooooool!
Read this to Discover My Secrets To Maximise Your Website Traffic With Tailwind For Pinterest And Be Super Productive.
Your graphic design tool
If there is one essential tool to create your promotional content for your blog and online business, it is your graphic design tool.
I would not go any further than Canva Pro for the perfect combination between a simple and powerful tool. I use it daily! And despite being proficient in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Spark, Illustrator, Lightroom and the Adobe CC suite in general, Canva Pro is my go-to graphic tool every day.
You can even easily create video posts for your online marketing. Check this out: How To Make Pinterest Video Pins For Free With Images - 6 Easy Ways (No Video Skills Or Subscriptions Needed).
Your online business tools for email list, landing pages, digital product e-commerce platform, your automated sales funnels, video hosting…
It is easily done: going for all free options as much as you can.
Be mindful that you will hit limitations quickly or have to make compromises.
It is also a path that can lead you to building your systems tools with a multiplicity of tools that you then have to integrate yourself… If you are really not that much into tech, the tech nightmares start here!
For example, when I started my email list, I decided to go for the free option of Convertkit, as so many people seem to recommend it. It is undeniably a great tool.
That meant that for months I hadn’t an automated sequence for people signing to my email list (just a simple welcome email). That truly did not help.
Today I have removed the headaches of integrations and endless time of having to learn different tools and platforms.
I am delighted that Kartra allows me to do easily all of the following from one single tool for a very sensible monthly:
Email marketing including automations, tagging and segmentation, A/B testing…
Landing pages
Fully automated sales funnels
Video hosting
Memberships (not yet using this but great for my future online courses).
Helpdesk
You can choose separate tools and end up paying more or go for Kartra and benefit from the ease of use and save money compared to all the costs of many separate different tools together. It’s an easy choice.
Yourself
You might be reluctant to invest in online courses. There is so much available to learn for free. That’s very true.
I am one of those eager consumers of free content to learn lots. However…
Having invested in courses ranging from $99 to $999, I can tell you that good courses are an invaluable way to speed up your learning and success. I hesitated for a long time to invest in courses. Once I discovered the joy of learning fast from brilliant educators, I don’t hesitate any more.
However, don’t make the mistake to get too many courses at once. Don’t get courses you don’t need right at the moment too. Otherwise you run the risk of not taking the time to go through them and implement them.
Private memberships are great to join communities who can support you with questions, feedback and ideas. They are also great to build your network. Always be active and provide value to others.
There is something that is always true in business, whether it is online or not, whether you are starting or have years of experience and success: your network is your strength.
To make money with your blog, you are going to have to build your network.
So ask yourself:
How many people you can turn to for feedback, for help, for collabs?
How many people will give you shout outs in social media channels?
Are you weekly cultivating your network? Expanding it?
How many people do you support with your own insights?
How regularly do you engage with others, people you know and people you don’t, to share inputs and help?
Building your network with other online entrepreneurs, course creators and bloggers will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Your ability to accelerate your growth is highly depend on your ability to network.
Consider it a priority, not an afterthought or a nice to have.
Overtime you will build one of your most valuable business assets, your personal network. Well done!!
To be successful, you can spend a lot of effort in learning and executing certain techniques. Social media strategies, email list growth, sales funnels, Pinterest, SEO, coaching best practice, affiliate marketing, passive income, webinars…, you name it, the list goes on.
One of your superpowers is your mindset
All of these are super important, no question about it… however, your biggest superpower to make money with your blog is your mindset.
How you approach your day.
How you face fears and adversity.
Whether you procrastinate and what you do mentally to stop it from happening.
How you face your business choices and decisions.
How you manage failure.
How you maintain a healthy work life balance.
How you avoid being overwhelmed or what you do when you are.
How you believe in you.
What you do to build your confidence.
How you surround yourself with positivity.
How you reflect on your lessons learned.
How you challenge yourself.
How you cope with success.
How you limit your ambitions or go after opportunities.
How aligned you feel between your online business and yourself.
All of these are part of the most critical asset of them all: your mindset.
What is an abundance mindset
An abundance mindset:
sees opportunities and pursues them
sees through a positive lens each day
faces challenges, not problems
never accepts failure as defeat but as a learning experience
harnesses the energy of stressful situations to achieve better things
So what’s the opposite of abundance? Scarcity.
This is all very normal. We all have good and bad days.
How to easily maintain an abundance mindset
There are a few easy techniques that will help you maintain a strong mindset.
You may believe that either you have an abundance mindset or an scarcity mindset, that’s part of who you are. We all have certain tendencies, that’s a fact. However…
You can cultivate and amplify an abundance mindset. Don’t accept or give up because you believe that your personality will not enable you to look around you with abundance.
The brain is like a muscle that you can train. It’s elasticity will help you train your brain to a positive mindset. That’s where activities like meditation and affirmations are important to embrace as a daily routine.
You will notice the difference in your thoughts quickly.
I know we all want to get to our goals fast. Many out there promise you can achieve thousands in just weeks. And while it can be possible, the fact is that blogging to make money online takes consistency and some time.
In fact, because you are bombarded with so much marketing making you believe that get rich quick results are possible and easy that bloggers, course creators and online entrepreneurs can get frustrated and anxious very quickly when they don’t achieve quick results.
When you listen to well established online entrepreneurs, there is a well known timeline in the online world of blogging to get your online business to have good enough level of traffic to generate a sustainable income. Around 2 years.
What???!!! 2 years. I know, I am controversial by sharing this. Obviously some might take shorter, some might take longer.
2 years doesn’t mean that you will not see income before that or that your traffic will not grow in the meantime.
It means that on average, a sustained effort of weekly content, active promotion, collabs, guest posting and launch of digital and/or affiliate products should build a good income after this period.
This isn’t to discourage you. It is to demonstrate the point that blogging to make money is not a sprint. It is a marathon.
So some ground rules are key to avoid becoming overwhelmed quickly:
Don’t compare yourself to others.
Things will go probably slower than all the ‘marketing-to-get-rich-fast’ that you read.
You will make mistakes, everyone does.
Maintain your energy levels because you will have period that can be exhausting.
Focus on progress day after day. Incremental and continuous progress builds up to great progress after a while.
Be grateful to your small wins.
Don’t be afraid to experiment.
Keep it up. Surround yourself with people who support you.
Your blog and online business is a marathon, not a sprint.
You are a super star! Sometimes you will doubt yourself.
The fact that you are doing what you are blogging to make money online is a fantastic achievement. It shows:
Your drive.
Your creativity.
Your spirit to serve others.
Your energy to build from zero.
Not many have what you do, so feel superb about your online journey. Your journey might become bumpy at times but it is soooooooo amazing!
When you start blogging, your learning curve is significant but… when you start blogging to make money online, your learning curve goes through the roof.
Many things to understand and implement.
A weekly schedule to publish content.
The pressure and anxiety to generate revenue.
Whether you’ve started to blog recently or have been blogging for a while, these 9 big mistakes when blogging to make money online are easy to fall into.
Avoid them and you can accelerate your blogging success!
That’s it. 9 big mistakes to avoid when blogging to make money online. Make a note of at least one mistake you want to address this week and make it a priority to take action. It will feel soooo good.
As you have seen, these mistakes when blogging to make money online are simple to avoid.
Many times with mistakes, the key is your awareness.
When you ride on the road and you know a pothole is coming, you can avoid it. Here it is exactly the same.
Now you have an easy and short repertoire of mistakes and how to avoid them to make money from your blog and online business.
I would love to know whether you have struggled with any of these (or any others).
A HUGE thank you for being with me until the end.
I’ve loved sharing this with you and I thank you for taking the time to read and find value in my blog! It is really a pleasure to see to here!
Don’t forget to get your Free Visuals Collection if you have not got it yet to help you with free Canva templates as well as styled photos and video for business use*.
Hi! I’m Isabel
For years and years I have created and produced content, in particular visual content. You can find me very often with my cameras and tripod out and about!
My passion: to help you with your online presence and drive business growth through my blog and visuals collections (marketing templates, styled photos & video).
Ah, I have also worked for 24+ in the corporate world, leading quite a mix: transformation, marketing, coaching, sales, productivity, programme management, investments and product management.
I love sharing all these skills with you in my blog.
I am also founder of Agavea Properties, our family holiday rental business. My husband and I lead it with the passion with one goal in mind: serving our customers to create a memorable holiday experience for them.
So there you have it, that’s me! Ah... I almost forgot, my happy place is by the sea.
Thanks for being here with me!