What I Learned from My Blog: 5 Mistakes I Made

In 2016, I took a hard look at my blog, my business, and my industry, and I knew I had to make some new choices when it came to marketing and promoting my business. (I share my story in depth here.)

Along with deciding a blog was still the way to go, I also decided my blog (which I now lovingly refer to as my “starter” blog) had so many issues, it seemed the best thing to do was start over with a fresh, new blog.

Mind you, it wasn’t the easiest choice to me. My starter blog was getting a decent amount of organic traffic. Not great, but it was something to build on.

Plus, I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to build my SEO back up. While my research showed it was entirely possible to build up a new blog’s organic traffic, I also knew it was more difficult now than when it had been when I had first started blogging.

In the end, I just felt like I had made too many mistakes with my blog to justify keeping it. It felt like it would require too much work to fix what I had done versus starting over fresh.

So, what were those mistakes? I lay them out for you below.

1. I didn’t keep it up-to-date.

My blog no longer fit my brand. It was built around my old brand, which was “The $Ka-Ching!$ Marketing Strategist!” I had named my blog “Rev Up Your Results!” None of this fit into the new Love-Based Business brand, which is where my business is now.

In addition, the blog theme itself was old and dated. It desperately needed a facelift.

Now, it’s true I could have simply rebranded everything. Put it in a new template and added new graphics. But, that’s actually easier said than done. I had A LOT of content on that blog, and making sure all the content survived the transformation is not only tricky, but a ton of work.

If that was the only mistake I made with my blog, I may have attempted it. Alas, there was more to come.

2. There was no clear focus.

When I started my blog years ago (I’m not even sure when I first started it), I did it because at the time the “new” marketing strategy that was getting all the attention was BLOGGING.

Throw a blog up! Get thousands of visitors! It’s the new, hot thing!

Okay, I could do that. Plus, I was already writing a weekly ezine (well, nearly weekly, maybe three times a month), so I had content I could post.

Made perfect sense.

Needless to say, while I do believe having a blog is better than not having one, this isn’t the best blogging strategy. Having a clear focus, goal, and plan for your blog is essential, if you want it to be successful.

And, that lack of initial focus ended up being reflected in the content I posted over the years.

Now, before I get into all my wanderings in the blogging wilderness, let me put things in perspective.

I started my business as a freelance copywriter in 1998. Since then, I’ve morphed into a copywriting company and further morphed into the Love-Based Copy and Marketing Company. I’ve published a non-fiction book series (the love-based business books) in addition to fiction books (I have two novels published and a three-book series due out later this year), plus I have a lot of other plans in the works.

This type of shift in business focus over a twenty-year time period is pretty normal.

After you’ve been in business for a few years, you’ll start to see that your business is a living, breathing entity. It grows and changes just like you do. (And, just like other living things, sometimes it dies, too.)

So, expecting your blog to have the exact same focus when it’s over a decade old isn’t realistic. And, if your blog IS that old, I don’t think it’s a problem if some of the older content is different from your newer offerings.

That said, my content problems were bigger than normal “growing pains.” Mine stemmed from not having a clear vision for my blog other than attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. So, when I didn’t attract hundreds of thousands of visitors, I would vacillate between tinkering with my plan to ignoring my blog in frustration for weeks (or even months) at a time.

Needless to say, that’s not a plan for success. (For anything, not just blogging.)

But, looking back, I feel like a lot of what I did was a necessary part of my journey. In some respect, I used my blog to help me find myself and get clear on my message and what I stood for. I posted some beautiful tributes (the ones to my mother and my dog, Roxie, are two that come to mind). I also posted some very odd, more personal posts that really had no place on a business blog (like one about tequila during my Cabo vacation that still attracts a visitor every now and then—needless to say, those visitors aren’t my ideal clients).

Overall, though, my “starter” blog gave me the freedom to explore my creativity and test what worked and what didn’t. And for that I’m grateful.

I was able to see which posts worked better than expected, and which ones flopped. That was priceless information.

Unfortunately, however valuable that creative experimentation was, in the end, it still led to the bigger problem, which was my blog felt disjointed. It didn’t hang together right. And, just liked the branding issue, it felt like too much work to tinker around to try and fix it. (Especially since I wasn’t even sure precisely what to do to fix it.)

But, even this paled in comparison to Mistake #3.

3. I wasn’t sharing very good content.

Ouch!

Yes, I’ll fully admit it.

Okay, so to be fair, pretty much all of my “not great content” happened over approximately a two-year period where I had tried not one but two different strategies to boost my number of visitors to hundreds of thousands.

It started with me joining a 30-day blog challenge and deciding to post every day.

This was a mistake. A big one.

Not because posting every day won’t work. It can. But, there’s a catch.

You need to be posting good, solid content.

And, I wasn’t doing that.

You see, for years I had a problem with the concept of speed. I had bought into the hype to move quickly, so I did. But, unfortunately for me, part of how I defined “quickly” was pretty close to “sloppy.”

On one hand, the blog challenge was a success. I posted every day for a month. I even extended the blog challenge for a few months (although I didn’t quite make every day, I was definitely posting four to six times a week).

Some of those posts were good. But, others were crap—something I simply threw up so I could check off the “yes I posted” on my to-do list.

Eventually, the “nearly-every-day-blog-post” started to wear on me, so I switched strategies (again) because I still wanted multiple blog posts a week and I thought if I changed my system, it would be easier for me to create them.

Unfortunately, the bad habits I had picked up during the blog challenge stuck with me, which meant some sloppy content still got posted.

In addition, because I was trying to move quickly, I didn’t have my editor edit my posts, so that contributed to a further decline of quality.

So, again, trying to sort through all that mess just gave me a headache. Plus, since I had switched strategies and visions so often, the whole blog felt energetically confusing, and the thought of putting my beautiful and powerful love-based message on a discombobulated platform sent shivers down my spine.

While this was probably my main reason for rolling the dice and starting from scratch, there were a couple other mistakes that turned this decision into a no-brainer.

4. I was dealing with broken plugins.

For whatever reason (maybe the technology was reflected in the content mess), I had a few strange technical issues with my old blog. The podcast plugin never worked, so I never did get my first, “starter” podcast on iTunes (or any other platform). I added one of those Tweet plugins, which worked for a little while and then stopped. It just seemed to be a never-ending battle with apps and plugins that just wouldn’t work right.

This was more annoying than anything, and maybe if my heart was more into saving that blog, I could have landed on a satisfying technical solution. But, I was also missing a vital piece.

5. I had no call to action.

Now, this wasn’t entirely true. I did have a CTA at the end of each article to sign up for my free gift.

But, part of where I wanted to go with the love-based platform was to also wrap the articles around one of my books. Selling the love-based business books was most definitely part of the overall vision for the new love-based business blog.

And, if I used the old blog, with the old posts, I would either have to go in and edit a whole bunch of articles OR live with the fact that my older articles (i.e. the ones getting organic traffic) didn’t have a CTA around the books.

Again, it felt like a much easier and less stressful project to simply start fresh.

So, now that I’ve walked you through the mistakes I made with my blog, check out this post where I walk you through what I did to set the new one up for success.

And, if you want to learn more about how you can be more effective with your Internet Marketing (including your blogging strategy), you may want to check out my “Love-Based Online Marketing” book available at most online retailers.