3 Myths About Blogging You Need To Know Before Starting Your New Blog

Last Updated on July 14, 2023 by Nadim Alamuddin

Whether you’ve just decided that you want to create a new blog or you’ve been blogging for a few months, there are a few learnings about blogging that you’ll discover along the way. Some of these could be challenges that will set you back while others would be good lessons to reinforce and promote your blog. This blog post demystifies 3 assumptions about blogging that you need to know before or as you’re starting a blog.

Myth No.1: Blogging is Easy

Not even close!

I’ve been blogging since 2016 (I relaunched my blog in 2019). In my experience, which is still limited, I have hit many walls and am learning a lot as I go. A common perception is to underestimate the amount of work that goes into writing a blog post. This is one of the three myths about blogging you need to know before starting a blog.

Blog Post Components

There are many elements that make up a blog post. They can be grouped into 3 main categories: Must Have, Recommended and Optional.

Must Have Elements Of A Blog Post

Headline

This is the single most important feature in your blog post. If your headline is not catchy, how do you expect anyone to open your blog post? There are resources online that help you write the best headlines for your post.

Content

While this is the main event of your blog post, it may not take as much time as a lot of the other elements. Still, your content must be phenomenal, not only to attract your readers, but to keep them coming back. Of course, great content should be structured in a way to introduce your readers to your topic, wow them with your content details and then recap with a call to action at the end.

Formatting

Formatting your blog post increases legibility. If you’re using “Yoast SEO” plugin, it will help you increase legibility by suggesting different strategies to use, such as more paragraphs, less passive voice writing, and formatting your headings and sub-headings. The latter will also benefit Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Recommended Elements Of A Blog Post

Images

In my opinion, finding suitable images for your blog post, shrinking them for faster load times, preparing them for SEO, and finally inserting them into your post, take the longest time when creating a blog post.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you’re a blogger interested to maximize your web browser search ranking, you should be working on your SEO strategies. Fortunately, there are some tools and plugins that help bloggers with this. However, despite these, it will take you time to go over your content, to ensure you have used the right keywords.

• If you’re using “Yoast SEO” like I am, its wizard guides you to optimize your SEO.
• Another great feature of Yoast is to suggest to you which of your internal posts to link to, so that you increase your search ranking. For example, in most posts, you will see “Related Posts” or “I think you may like reading these” sections – these direct the readers to more posts on the blog, increasing their time spent on it.
• You will also need to link to external resources, either to reinforce your post with research on the subject, or to refer to an affiliate link, product or service. If you’re using affiliate links, it’s always more “professional” to mask the links, which also takes time.

Affiliate Disclosure

This blog post contains links that take you to external sites. Some of these sites are products and services that I recommend, based on my experience with them. If you decide to purchase from them, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you in advance for your understanding. For more info, check out the Affiliate Disclosure page.

Optional Elements Of A Blog Post:

Opt-In Form

To grow your email list, bloggers often have at least one opt-in form on their posts. This can be a lead magnet (a free offer – e-book, report, printable) or a subscription form. If you plan on having a different offer per post, this will definitely take up a lot of time.

Social Shares

While this is optional, I found that a lot of the traffic coming to my blog is from Pinterest. Because of this, I use a plugin called “Social Warfare“, which allows me to create a Pinterest pin and store it on my blog post.

• While this Pinterest-ready image does not display on some of my posts, it will display once you click the Share Pinterest button, allowing you to save a Pinterest pin that directs visitors back to my blog.
• Creating this pin takes time. Fortunately, I use Canva, which allows me to store my brand colors and fonts, so that it takes a lot less time to create these images than starting from scratch.

So, What’s Your Opinion About Blogging Now?

Taking into account the above points, writing a blog post is time consuming. For me, on average, it takes me 4-6 hours per blog post. Only 2-3 hours of these are spent writing the post, while the rest is spent on all the critical tasks to make it amazing.

It is no wonder that, after all this effort and dedication, we often get discouraged when our posts do not get the intended appreciation. The next myth explains this in more detail.

Myth No.2: “If You Build It, They Will Come”

Not in a million years! It may have worked for Kevin Costner, in “Field of Dreams”, but folks, let’s get back to reality!

Even when you write an exceptional blog post, no one is going to come to it unless you promote, promote, promote! Sure, if your blog post has excellent SEO, eventually, people will start visiting it, by finding it on Google or Bing Search. But, this could take weeks!

You will need to keep promoting your blog posts everywhere, and I mean everywhere!

When you first hit the Publish or Schedule button on your blog post, your work on creating the blog post is done. But the journey on getting your post viewed and read has just begun.

Promotion Techniques:

Social Media Promotion

This is probably the most popular and easiest way to promote your blog posts. Some social media platforms have restrictions on how many times you can promote a post or the wording you use, so it’s good to vary your techniques and try different ways.

• If you’re using the “Social Warfare” plugin, you can use it to customize Twitter, Facebook & Pinterest headlines & descriptions that are SEO ready to maximize your exposure on these platforms.
• You can also use different social media schedulers, which allow you to schedule your content among other content to be posted on social media. The Tailwind application is such a tool that I use for Pinterest and Instagram scheduling.
• You can also use promotional posts within each platform. This usually gets more reader engagement and backlinks to your blog.

Forums

There are many forums within your niche that discuss challenges or tips & tricks within the niche. Subscribing to these sites and engaging in the discussions will result in good backlinks to your blog.

In particular, when you publish a blog post, you should search on your keyword or topic within the forum. If someone is asking a particular question on the subject, you can write an answer, and then refer them to your blog post for more details.

Here are some forums I am active in:

• Quora: This is a great site for sharing information and tips & tricks. It allows you to create your own blog posts under their own hosting. You can also answer a myriad of questions and leave your blog or blog post links. This will bring you traffic from their readers.
• Warrior Forum: Another excellent forum which can benefit certain niches, such as internet marketing, SEO and traffic strategies, among others.
• Bloglovin’: This is a site that allows you to create and share your own blog posts, increasing your footprint and potential readership. One way to introduce “curiosity” is to write a section or excerpt of your blog post on Bloglovin’ and tell your readers there to come back to your blog post to finish it!

The above were just two techniques to promote your blog posts. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of work to do outside of writing your blog post. This is one of the lessons I learned once I started blogging. When I started, I aimed at publishing twice a week. Now, I’m down to once a week, and it’s been almost 3 weeks since my last post. It’s challenging to keep up, with everything else you need to do between each post.

My advice? Start slow, learn the ropes, then increase if you can. However, before increasing the frequency, you need to take into consideration that, as your blog grows, you will need to spend more time on administration: reviewing older posts and updating them, if necessary, linking older posts to newer ones, implementing new opt-in forms, growing your list, etc.

Myth No.3: Anyone Can Blog

Nope. At least, not in my opinion!

Another myth about blogging before starting a blog. To blog, you need certain skills:

Writing Skills

To write exceptional content, you need to have great writing skills. Even if you’re blogging in English and it’s not your mother tongue, you need to be able to express your thoughts in legible sentences in order to capture your readers.

Technical Skills

While these are not mandatory, you will definitely cut down the blogging learning curve. When you start a blog, you will need a domain, a hosting service, and then you get into a slew of other technicalities. Some of these challenges include:

• Making your site secure: Most hosting services include a free SSL certificate to render your site secure. However, even with the certificate implemented, you may get a case of “mixed content” and this comes by way of an error or warning, for you to fix. I had this and when I Googled it, most of the answers were so technical (lines of code) that I didn’t know where to begin. Fortunately, I found the answer by using a simple plugin that did the job.
• Upgrading your theme: Most WordPress free themes have their updates and upgrades on your WordPress dashboard. However, my theme is paid and I would need to update it / upgrade it differently. The first couple of times I did that, I nearly lost my blog! Luckily, I was able to restore it from my previous backups. But, it took some technical know-how to overcome the challenge.

Focus

This is an element that I keep coming back to. Without focus, you cannot accomplish anything you plan on doing. This is what has been preventing me from blogging the last couple of weeks. Every time I sit down to write, I think of so many different things other than what I want to write about. I have the TV on, my emails are pinging me, WhatsApp messages, etc. Today, I just sat and started writing. Switched off all distractions. I’ve been at it for two and a half hours now. Complete focus.

Perseverance

What makes me continue to blog? As I said before, it’s been almost 3 weeks I haven’t written a post. So, why not quit? This has to do with my “WHY” which drives me to persevere. Before you start a blog or business, you need to establish the reasons for doing so. What is it that would make you do this no matter what. I’ve written a post on this that you need to read if you haven’t already done so.

Now That You’re Informed…

With the three learnings above, I hope you’re now in a better position to decide whether blogging is your calling. Whether you want to blog to satisfy a writing passion, or you want to start a blog and monetize it, be sure you’re doing it for the right reasons and that you’ve got the skills, patience, focus and perseverance to realize your goals. 

As a new blogger, be sure to read any of the posts starting with “From Zero To” – you can find them listed on the right of this post, in the side bar. Also of interest, the following blog post guides you in detail on how to create your very first blog post:

How To Create Your First Epic Blog Post Using Gutenberg (Block Editor)

Other related posts are:

• Top 10 Amazing WordPress Plugins For Your New Blog
• Stop Leaving Money On The Table: Here’s How
• Revealed: Top 5 Reasons To Create A Top-Notch Blog
• Best 7 Strategies To Increase Organic Search Traffic

What do you think of this post? Please leave me your comments just below this post. If you’ve been blogging for a while, I’d appreciate it if you would leave your lessons learned and/or anything that may benefit other readers like you. Make sure you check my About section for more about this blog.

Pinterest Users, pin this!