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The Journey Begins
Having absolutely no knowledge of how to start a blog, I began my ‘blog journey’ on another platform, WIX, instead of WordPress. That was at the end of 2013. It was pretty easy to get up and started and, then again, not being particularly tech-savvy, it was difficult at times. I chose a site name, “My Humble Home and Garden” and paid for the domain.
In retrospect, I should have used a shorter name. Home and Garden, it seemed to cover everything I wanted to do, though. Try to make yours shorter and something you won’t mind typing millions of times! Also, try to make it a word or words that are not limiting to only one subject matter. If you evolve and go in a different direction, it’s nice to have a name that doesn’t limit you.
I ran the name I had chosen by friends and family and they were really not much help. Placating, they would agree it sounded good and they were probably not paying much attention. The support from family and friends was minimal at best. You may have a much more supportive family but I’ve learned not to expect much for this particular journey. Unless they are bloggers too, friends and family just don’t get blogging.
Short And Sweet May Not Apply To A Successful Post
Somehow I stumbled through and created my first post. People are busy! Wouldn’t you think that a short post with an amazing picture of the finished product would draw all kinds of kudos and people would be pinning it on Pinterest like there was no tomorrow?
Yes, I was delusional. Later, I learned that posts with 1500 words or more were some of the most read. Yoast, a plugin for use on WordPress, suggests you use at least 300 words for a post. I’m thinking that first post was more like 50 words.
At that time, I had a few thousand Pinterest followers and began pinning my pictures to boards. Yeah, at first, that didn’t pay off big time either. Although, even then, most of my traffic did come from Pinterest. I was continually trying to improve my skills by reading what other bloggers did and googling anything I didn’t understand.
I changed the header on my blog several times. At first, it was a picture of our house, then pictures from some of my posts, and then a picture of my beautiful granddaughter. Who wouldn’t like that? My logo was a cursive typeface, ‘Great Vibes’. I know that is really lame.
What was I thinking? Keep in mind that I actually had 2 years of commercial art school! I wasn’t thinking of my blog as graphic art. Although my life has taken me down many different roads, I still have that foundation. One day, I happened across a site that offered to critique your website. I bit the bullet, submitted mine and waited for the results. This particular site actually had real people critique your site and they sent a video of the process. Oh, my!
Fear set in and it was all I could do to press on the link in the email the company had sent. But, I did. She was brutal! Because of the lame header on my site, she said it was unprofessional and that she would never revisit the site. She was sure that no one but my family would! She wasn’t interested in any recipes or anything I had going. Crushed… tears…
That phrase, ‘no one but my family would’, played over and over in my mind. I realized I couldn’t even get my family to look at my blog. Passing it off as a joke, my kids even laughed when I mentioned it and said, “Mom has a blog.”
Create A Nice Simple Logo!
In the midst of those tears, it dawned on me that I hadn’t really created a logo! Duh! Using her brutal critique on several points, my website improved. I created a logo, the little red flower, and changed the type to be more reflective of homey.
The new logo was created on PicMonkey a crazy awesome photo editing tool. (I am now a PicMonkey affiliate and may receive compensation if you purchase from this link at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting this website!)
After working industriously on my site for a while, I resubmitted my URL for another critique. This time, I received a glowing report and the lady said she loved the logo. She also said there was a lot of good information on the site and would definitely come back! Elation!
Create and Go Course
Yet, on my WIX site, I barely had one hundred visitors a day. How can you monetize your blog if you can’t get traffic? Then, I stumbled across Alex and Lauren’s “Create and Go” website and their course, Launch Your Blog. Yes, I know I had been working on my blog for about 3 years! In my mind, the numbers said it hadn’t launched yet! So, I bought the course.
Alex takes you through the process of how to start a blog, step by step in this course. Where was this when I began?
My plan was to go through their course in one month! Okay, that didn’t happen. In the introduction, Alex said that if you weren’t using WordPress, you wouldn’t be taken seriously. What?
Transferring A Website To WordPress
I hadn’t planned on that. WordPress was kind of scary! That’s why I chose WIX! It was free! It was easy! Here, Alex and Lauren walk you through WordPress making it far less scary.
Learning a new platform was not something I necessarily wanted to do! Yet, I was amazed at how they showed so much more was possible with WordPress. Yes, and I remembered seeing a great banner to use across the top of a page only to find out it was a WordPress plugin and it wasn’t available on WIX. What else was I missing? Transferring 300 blog posts to a new platform was overwhelming!
Easy Way To Transfer A Website?
There are easy ways to transfer a website to another platform. One is to pay someone to do it and for other ways, you can google, “How to transfer (WIX, Weebly, or your platform) to WordPress”, and follow the steps. These can be done in a few short steps by importing.
At the time, ignorant, I did not do it this way! Halfway through copying and pasting 300 posts for days, I figured out that there was an easier way to do this. Blindly, I continued copying and pasting the remaining ones. I had already invested so much time into what I had done. In hindsight, I should have, at least, imported the second half by using one of these methods but I DID NOT! Yes, lots of time wasted. Don’t do what I did if you have a lot of posts!
The process of transferring all the posts was almost completed when I went live with my transferred website in May of last year. Following Alex and Lauren’s advice on Launch Your Blog, my stats have increased exponentially.
Immediate Increase In Views
Remember on my WIX site, I was struggling to get 100 views a month? You can see my page views increased to 3.5 thousand the first month! While that may be crumbs to some bloggers, it is a lot to me! There was a steady increase each month! The best yet was January of this year 26.6 thousand! Hopefully, I surpass that this month. We are one week into April on this chart.
One thing I noticed right away is that the speed of my site improved dramatically. That may account for more people staying around to read my posts. Imagine if I had launched my blog using Alex and Lauren’s course four years ago!
Change Your WordPress User Name!
As soon as you start or switch to a WordPress site, you need to change your admin username! I did not know this! I had to learn the hard way. Apparently, anytime someone starts a website on WordPress, the admin username follows the same sequence and hackers know this. Someone hacked mine and started adding foul words on a couple of my pages. You can google how to change your username or click here for instructions ►How To Change Your WordPress Username.
Blog Monetization
In retrospect, I should have had a plan for monetizing my blog from the beginning. When I started my blog, it was more of a hobby. As I went along, the realization that there was actually ‘some money to be made’ became more apparent. It would be wise to make a plan for how you will monetize your blog from the beginning.
Since I actually have traffic now, in recent months, I have really started trying to monetize my blog. You may have noticed Google Adsense and a few other affiliates, which I recommend, on My Humble Home and Garden. PicMonkey and “Create and Go’s” course, Launch Your Blog are two affiliate programs that I just applied for and got this week! This will be another chapter of my growth! The ads on my WIX site netted a big fat goose egg. In the last couple of months, payments of around a hundred from Adsense have begun to be deposited into my account. It’s nothing really impressive yet but I have just begun to focus on monetization.
PicMonkey
If you haven’t used PicMonkey. a photo editing tool, for photos and making pins for Pinterest, you should check it out now. A free trial is available and, then, you can pay a monthly or yearly fee to subscribe. I use PicMonkey almost every single day! I plan to do another post on the ways to use this great editing tool. They also have templates to use for making a variety of cards and pins for Pinterest.
We used the editing tool to create the front of Emily and Jon-Michael’s ‘Save the Date’. Remember the signs on the skeleton wreath and the pumpkin wreath? Yeah, those were made using PicMonkey, too.
Hard Work And Tenacity
After a few years of hard work, (No one said it would be easy!), there is good news, too. In the last year, more and more of my family and friends have begun to visit my site, and what’s more, some of their friends are, too. My kids go there for the recipes, too. My oldest son has even helped with a post on how to make an industrial pipe lamp. We have more lamps in the process. Even the family has begun to take my blogging a little more seriously!
Reports are that most bloggers quit in the first year. If you quit, you will never know what might have been. You must have tenacity. Through all the lows, the trials, and the tribulations, I don’t regret this journey. In writing this, I’ve realized how many mistakes I’ve made!
Determine What Success Is
You need to decide what success is to you. In the beginning, success for me was sharing artistic ideas and actually having other people value them. That is my passion. My pins on Pinterest have led me to believe that objective has been achieved. Now, monetization is the next target.
You will find all kinds of advice about how to write and what to write. Take those with a grain of salt. I’m convinced that if there is something you love and want to write about it, there is an audience out there. Figure out where you can best find them. My target is Pinterest. Is your’s Pinterest, Facebook, or maybe YouTube? The best piece of advice I could give to you is to write your posts as if you were sharing them with a friend. They’ll be received in the same way.
Hopefully, there is something in this post that will help you with beginning your blog and save you from making some of the mistakes I’ve made. Good luck!
