7 Tips For Beginner Bloggers To Stop Struggling With Your Blog

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Are you struggling to set up your blog? Need traffic, but can’t figure out how to make it happen? Want to make money from your blog, but don’t know where to start?

I was in the same boat. I knew I wanted to start working from home and decided a blog was the way to go but I had no clue where to start! I was struggling to figure out how to do the simplest things, consulting YouTube and Google for answers and only getting little snippets of information that didn’t completely answer my questions. I was beyond frustrated to say the least. That’s why I want to share with you my tips for beginner bloggers to stop struggling with your blog and start having success right now!

Here are my 7 tips for beginner bloggers to stop struggling with your blog:

This post does contain affiliate links, but I would never recommend something I don’t truly believe in. You can see my disclosure here .

Set up your blog hosting through Bluehost. It’s only $3.95/month if you use this link. I’ve been extremely happy with their service and it’s so easy to set up. You also get a free domain name! The other thing I love about it is that you can install WordPress in 1 click! If you want a step-by-step on how to do this, my post on how to start a blog will show you exactly how. One of the most important tips for beginner bloggers is you definitely want to set up your blog through a self-hosted WordPress site because with free sites like Blogger, it is very hard to make money because of their rules and companies don’t look at those sites as being professional. Plus, you don’t own your site. So Blogger can shut it down anytime they want. How disappointing would it be to put in so much work only to have your blog shut down?!
Set up a blog using the Genesis Framework. Genesis offers plug ins that make it SO EASY to add things to your site. I mean this makes life so much simpler! I can’t even express how much struggle this took away when I was a beginner blogger. I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to get things to look how I wanted and where to put the code for everything. The plugins that you need are Genesis Simple Hooks and Genesis Simple Share. Makes your life easy! Simple Hooks allows you to put in code for the important stuff without being a computer genius (which I am far from being). In tip #4 I’ll tell you about a course that shows you exactly how to use these and implement them into your blog.
Choose a child theme. If you don’t know what this even is, don’t worry, neither did I. It basically determines how your site is going to look. It determines the main colors and layout for your blog. It took me a while to choose one but I finally decided on Pretty Chic from Pretty Darn Cute Design. This goes with the Genesis Framework and makes your site look pretty. I liked the colors and how everything was set up. Their designs are so cute and clean. I think they look beautiful for a blog!
This is my most important tip for beginner bloggers to make your blogging life easy peasy…I was lucky enough to stumble upon a course that was super affordable and taught me every single thing I needed to know to get my blog up and running and I am so thankful! After I finished the course and went through the steps to get my blog started, I just sat there in awe of how much value was in this course and how simple it was to implement because everything was STEP BY STEP. This course saved me when setting up my blog. It’s only $97 and tells you every single thing you need to know to get started blogging. I mean, they should be charging way more for it, but I’m not going to tell them that. I’ve taken multiple courses for different aspects of blogging in the last year. Every one of them cost a lot more than this one and offered a lot less value. It teaches you everything from finding your niche, the technical part of setting up your blog step by step, how to install everything, how and where to put code in, setting up your email opt ins and email campaigns, creating content, SEO, photography tips, social media, promoting your blog, and making money from your blog. I don’t know what more you could ask for! It’s in video format so you can see exactly how to do everything they teach. This is a guide of how to do everything for your blog for beginners. I can’t say enough about how much this changed my blogging game.
Once you have everything set up, I would recommend writing at least 25-50 blog posts before you launch your blog. The reason I say this is that it is going to take you so much longer to grow your blog if you start from zero and just add a post or two here and there. The more content you have out there to promote, the faster your blog will grow. I did this the hard way. My first year was a struggle to get traffic because I started with one post and added them one at a time and only wrote one blog post a week. My advice is write as much as you can in the beginning and promote it everywhere, especially on Pinterest group boards, to really start getting traffic.
Start getting accepted to affiliate marketing programs and Google Ad Sense as soon as you set up a blog if your goal is to make money. Almost every product or store has an affiliate marketing program in place. Think about what products you really love and sign up to be an affiliate. I don’t recommend trying to push any old products, be sure it’s something you really love and believe in otherwise you’ll just seem like a pushy salesman (and no one likes a pushy salesman). Amazon’s Affiliate Program is a great place to start if you don’t have any particular products in mind. People trust buying from Amazon and they have just about everything imaginable. Also as your blog grows, new opportunities will arise. Remember that once you put the content out and promote it, people are going to find it for years to come and come across those affiliate links giving you the potential to make income on them for years without doing anything further with those posts. I have to admit, I didn’t even know what affiliate marketing was when I started my blog or the potential it has to make you passive income once you have it in place. Once I figured out what it was, I was putting links in my posts but no one was clicking them or buying which was super frustrating. If you have no idea where to start with affiliate marketing and making money from your blog, this course will help you so much! I made my first sale within 3 days of implementing what I learned after struggling for months to make a sale! Some of the affiliate programs will kick you out if you don’t make any sales in a certain amount of time. So it’s really important to figure out what you’re doing in the beginning and start making sales so you can make money and you don’t get kicked out of the programs. This happened to me with Amazon before I took this course. Thankfully I was able to apply again and using the strategies I learned in the course I make sales on a regular basis through Amazon.
Use Pinterest to drive traffic! Pinterest is amazing for getting traffic to your blog if you use it correctly. I’m not saying to only focus on Pinterest for traffic, but Google can take up to 6 months to index your blog posts. So you can sit there and wait patiently while no one finds your blog or you can put a Pinterest strategy in place while you wait for Google to realize that you exist. On Pinterest, you need to write descriptions for your posts that have relevant keywords that people will be searching on there and your images need text that makes people want to click through to see what your blog post is about. Both are SUPER important! To find great keywords for Pinterest, put in a general search term and then look at the boxes at the top of the search results. Those are awesome keywords to add to your descriptions! I took Carly’s course and took my Pinterest account from around 200 followers to over 1500 in just a few months!

I hope you’ve found my tips for beginner bloggers to stop struggling helpful. I think people decide to start a blog and think it’s going to be simple. I know I thought that. It didn’t take me long to figure out how wrong I was! It is a lot of work and can be very unrewarding in the beginning, but if you have the determination to push through the struggles and learn, it can be so amazing! I hope these tips give you a head start and eliminate the struggles that I and a lot of other beginner bloggers have faced.

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I wish you much success with your blogging adventure!

XOXO,

Cassie