What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Blog

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself everything in this video. Hindsight is 20/20; watch now and avoid the mistakes that I made.

00:00 Intro
00:34 Pick the Right-Size Niche
02:15 Don’t Limit What Platform You Use
02:56 Links Are Everything
03:23 Do What You Can To Stand Out
03:52 Update Your Old Content
04:24 Don’t Blog on the Same Topic Over and Over Again
05:11 Be Consistent

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I look back at my early blog posts, and I was wondering what the heck was I doing? But the reality is that's what most bloggers grow through. When they look at their older content, they realize that they could have just done so many more things to improve. Here are the top things that I would change if I was starting today.

Number 1, pick the right size niche. Now, a lot of people say the riches are in the niches. That's not true. If you look at the biggest companies out there, they go after big market caps. It's called TAM, Total Addressable Market. You want to go after a really big market because it's easier to capture 1% of a really gigantic market than it is to capture 60, 70, or 80% of a really tiny market.

So marketing is a big TAM, conversion rate optimization not that big. SEO, it's not a bad size TAM, but paid advertising much bigger TAM. So if you focus on niche that can expand into a much bigger TAM, you are good. But if you go after a niche that can't be expanded into a bigger TAM, you're kind of screwed. Small niches don't get that much search traffic. Big niches get much more traffic. Big TAMs get a massive amount of traffic.

Don't limit what platform you use. Use an omnichannel approach to promote your content. It's not about just promoting your content for Google. I use stories on Instagram and tell people to swipe up to read my blog posts. I share my blog content on Twitter.

Links are everything. When you post on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram or YouTube always link back to your blog posts. Why? It gets you more traffic. There's nothing wrong with that. Now, if you're posting video content there's no need for a link back. But with your blog content if you want people to come back to your site, post a link. It's simple. It's easy. Even though these platforms want you to keep people on there every once in a while, putting a blog post link in there helps drive more traffic.

Do what you can to stand out. 32% of marketers believe that visuals are the most important type of content that their business creates. So you need to create amazing visuals and integrate them within your blog post. I started doing infographics later in my blogging career and that provided so much value, started getting way more social shares and backlinks and I started getting way more SEO juice as well.

I used to keep creating new content week after week, after week, and a lot of times my traffic wouldn't go up. What I wish I knew was that you need to actually spend more time updating your content. Don't just keep producing new content because there's already a ton of regurgitated old content on the web. Keep your content fresh and updated like Wikipedia does. That's how you continue to rank higher. Just think about it. For whatever search room you search for there's a high chance that Wikipedia ranks for it. Why? Because their content is continued fresh and up to date.

Don't blog on the same topic over and over again. Instead, they want you to have one detailed posts on online marketing instead of 5 posts that talk about the same thing. Again, it goes back to Wikipedia. They have more detailed, longer pages on the topic instead of 6 or 7 pages on the same thing because that confuses Google on which ones they should rank.

When I started out blogging I didn't understand that you need to be consistent. When you keep producing content each and every single week you get more traffic the moment you stop being consistent. And when I looked at the data from years and years ago when I took some months off it would take me even if I took one month off with my last blog, crick sprout it took me more than 3 months to recuperate my traffic from having to blog consistently. That's why it's so important for you to be consistent as well, or else you'll lose your traffic and it's hard to get it back. It'll actually take you more time to get that traffic back.

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