My Struggles of starting a blog

Welcome, it has now been 21 months since I started up my Blog and I am super excited to be celebrating 2 years soon. It has honestly flown by and I couldn't imagine when I started this journey, that it would last this long at all. 

In the beginning I had a head full of ideas but I only really got started on a whim. One day I was scrolling through free websites and the next I had my very own site with a business email lined up and a bio all written out for my home page, I then just had to fill it with all those ideas that had been building up, it appeared easier than I first thought.  

To help any new bloggers reading this, I have set out things that cropped up and that I struggled with in the beginning.

Multi-tasking 

Anything from the writing itself and collating photos to match the writing, to promoting your post and replying back to any comments at the same time, it's all go go. No sooner is one post up and running, then you have to start all over again with another. 

My struggle here was posting and keeping an eye on any comments that I would need to return at the same time. It is like anything else though, once you've got used to setting a routine down, everything else will fall into place, don't panic, this one is an easy hurdle to get over.

Organisation

I didn't think that I was much of an organiser in my personal life let alone organising posts to be released and writing hundreds of words on a different topic at the same time, but this does come quite naturally once you're a few posts in. My best advice here would be to invest in a blog planner. It was the inspiration for one of my posts as mentioned below. And another, is to set goals that are easily achieved by you. One final piece of my advice is that notepads will be your new best friend.  Make notes on everything.

Alone

This issue stems from just being a beginner, we all have to start somewhere and as much as you read up on your particular subject or know all about it, it's completely understandable to still feel alone in achieving a goal. You will start to notice as time goes on that the more you are participating, whether it be in writing communities or blogger groups, the more release of weight on yourself can be lifted. 

It takes time to build up a following and recive a lot of input, meanwhile you're struggling to bounce ideas off with someone, I have been there. Patience is the key here. 

SEO

Means: Search Engine Optimisation. Linking words in your writing to rank high on a google search. I will be the first to hold my hand up here, I just busied myself with getting as many posts released as possible in the beginning. I didn't worry about the fact that no one besides myself and my followers on Twitter would actually be able to read them. So I researched all about SEO and then linked my website into google too. And I can honestly say it feels so good when you search for something, that your site comes up on google. So make sure you do your research too, it really does work.

DA

This one is a tricky one to get around but it's also a very important one. DA stands for Domain Authority. It is a way of checking your website's quality, popularity and backlinks. The higher your content the higher your score. I know some bloggers that have a current score of 35, mine is 7 but when I had released popular posts I finally managed to reach 8. I have never gone beyond this and I know that I just need to keep improving my content and add lots more backlinks to quality websites to bring that score up.

Below is the DA checker I use:  

https://websiteseochecker.com/domain-authority-checker/

Self doubt 

I completely had this, and I'm not going to lie, I still feel this too. Self doubt is lack of confidence in yourself or your abilities. I read and then triple read all of my work and then I still have my editor (aka my partner) to read and check my posts, every single time. I doubt that my writing lacks content, I doubt that no one will ever be interested and yet I feel pleasantly surprised when I receive great comments from readers. 

Feeling this doubt can only be overcome by asking for help. Whether it is a friend, or family member or someone in the writing community, asking questions is the way forward. I did it, I asked for help from a few great bloggers on Twitter and they made me feel like I was worrying over nothing, we are in this together. 

Social media presence / promoting 

All I can advise on this one is promote, promote, promote! Use as many social media apps as possible and get your website noticed. You will have to be extremely organised but ultimately you will receive the rewards too. The more people are reading and commenting on your posts, the better it will make you feel. I did not know this for at least the first two months. I thought if I released my post once a week on Twitter I would somehow still get hits, how naive I was.