45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

28. Headlines matter. Don’t miss out on clicks

Headlines are important when establishing a blog for two reasons. They:

  • Make your website clickable in organic search results for your audience.
  • To encourage readers to read the rest of your piece, grab their attention.

The adage “eight out of ten people read your headline but not your copy” is true.
However, that statistic dates back to a time when newspapers were the norm rather than blogs and eye-tracking research, which was 50 years ago.

However, a quick glance at your bounce rate and average time on page will show that the majority of visitors aren’t reading past your headlines.

An excellent resource for writing effective headlines is Copyblogger. Additionally, you can obtain additional data-driven insights like:

  • People enjoy reading headlines with numbers (hey, check out this post!).
  • The number of tweets for certain words varies.
  • Usually, using more verbs than nouns is an effective strategy.

29. Add a FAQ section before your contact form to save time

When beginning a blog, even if you don’t expect anyone to use it, you can put up a contact form since you feel like you need it.

Then, once your website begins to receive some traffic, someone actually fills out your form and contacts you. Hallelujah! Your content is important to people for them to use your contact form.

Then, as your site continues to expand, you find yourself unexpectedly deluged with messages, many of which repeat the same question.

All of a sudden, responding to emails takes up more time than blogging.

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And that won’t lead to continuous success.

But what’s this?

By placing a FAQ (or anything similar) above your “Contact” page, you may at least get rid of a lot of the most pointless emails that you receive. See how Henrik at The Positivity Blog puts two succinct FAQs above his contact form, for instance:

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

If your contact form plugin permits it, you can utilize conditional fields to accomplish a similar result by requesting information from users before allowing them to send an email.

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

30. Make a habit of testing important pages on your site (like forms)

I still want to slam my head against a wall in frustration over this error I made.

I changed the contact form plugins on my website, and soon after I saw a decrease in messages (these were critical messages because this was my portfolio site). Naturally, my first thought was to see if my contact form plugin was having an issue.

However, while sending test message after test message, I was unable to identify any issues with my form plugin. I suppose people simply stopped like me as much.

I guess not quite. I should have tested my forms sooner, as it turns out. There was an issue, but it had to do with caching. I never encountered the problem in my testing since I used my admin account, which was not allowed to see cached pages, to test my form plugin.

Avoid the same error I did. Make sure to test any crucial pages on your website the way that your end users will see them. Specifically, use incognito mode.

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It’s awful to waste your time on broken pages.

However, some testing can stop that from happening.

31. Ignore the haters…most of the time

Whether you’re beginning a blog for the first time or not, the following is something that all bloggers have in common:

Angry remarks

Even if your goal is to learn how to build a site that only features adorable pups, I practically guarantee you’ll still receive negative feedback from readers who:

  • I believe you overlooked the cutest puppy ever.
  • One of the puppies you posted is not cute, in my opinion.

However, as YouTube shows, receiving negative feedback is an inevitable part of putting oneself online.

If you let them, you will get them and they will sting.

You must get strong skin. These comments are typically made by irate people hiding behind anonymity. On rare occasions, a commenter will have a valid complaint that you should address. but a great deal of the time? Angry remarks are heard in one ear but not the other.

32. Stop staring at your analytics data

Analyzing data is almost as addictive as checking your Facebook news feed. It becomes even more addictive if you start to notice a constant increase in your statistics.

However, consider this:

These data are completely irrelevant in daily life unless you’re managing a significant advertising campaign that needs real-time monitoring.
Yes, it is beneficial to look at analytics data over time.
However, is it really necessary for you to know whether you got 100 or 200 visits today?
Does it matter if you made $10 or $12 today through Google AdSense? Does any of the information currently help you in any way?

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I’ve learned through years of experience that it doesn’t.

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

I advise you to establish firm boundaries in order to save time. When establishing a blog, you actually have a lot more vital tasks to complete. Make a statement along the lines of, “I will only check my stats on Monday morning.” While not excessively frequent as to become time-consuming, that frequency is still plenty to monitor how your website and content are functioning.

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