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I always find it interesting to hear about the lessons people learn in their first year of blogging. And since my own one-year anniversary has passed, I decided to share my biggest lessons with you.
But first: Can you believe it? It’s already been ONE YEAR! I am so damn proud of myself for what I’ve accomplished this past year! I actually published content each and every week! If I put my mind on something, you can be sure it will be performed with scaring consistency ^^’
And of course, I am incredibly grateful for every single one of you! Whether you are a first time visitor to this Blog or you’ve been a loyal Felicity Seeker for a while now, you are the heart of this community. Without you, I would not spend my evenings working on this business.
So thank you immensely, for keeping my passion and hope alive!
1. Lesson: Task batching is MAGICAL!
I still don’t do this all the time, but I’ve come to learn that doing a bunch of the same tasks at once saves you soooooo much time.
For example, I might spend a few days writing my content for the next few weeks. That way I don’t need to worry about it every week anew. And since I am already in “writing-mode” it flows so much easier and quicker.
The same goes for creating Pinterest pins or scheduling my pins with Tailwind.
It’s just really nice to focus on one thing for a while and get it all out of the way before moving on to the next thing.
Then again, sometimes, I do feel more like doing a bit of everything. In those moments, I like to go with the flow and just do what feels most aligned to me.
2. Lesson: Focus On One Traffic Source
It is easy to feel like you need to have a business profile on every social media platform out there. After all, you want to reach the biggest audience possible, right?
However, especially in the beginning, I believe you should only focus on ONE platform to market your content on.
When I started marketing my content, I created a Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter profile.
But to be honest, I never really liked marketing on social media. I much more enjoyed it with Pinterest (which is a search engine by the way).
So after half-hearted marketing on all three platforms, I first dropped Twitter and, at the end of 2019, decided to drop Instagram, too.
The thing with social media marketing is, you need to be really present to have success with it. At least that’s how it feels to me. And I simply don’t have the energy or time or passion for giving 120% everywhere.
I plan to level up my marketing on other platforms once I have the money to finance virtual assistants and tools to help me with that.
But right now, I am utterly glad I can put all my energy into Pinterest.
3. Lesson: Pinterest Beats Instagram, Facebook & Co. By Miles!!!
As previously mentioned, I’ve always felt like I had to do marketing through social media. Yet I always dreaded the thought of doing so.
But then I discovered Pinterest marketing, and I honestly fell in love!
With Instagram, Twitter & Co., your posts are pretty much only relevant for a day or so. The majority of people won’t spend the time scrolling through your older posts. Therefore you have to produce a ton of content whose lifetime is very limited.
In search engines, however, your content can rank for years to follow! Sometimes your content suddenly starts to take off after months of posting it and provides a steady source of traffic.
For example, my most significant amount of traffic comes from my blog post 10 Ways To Tune Into Your Feminine Energy. I’ve created multiple pins for it, but the initial one is over six months old at this point, yet it produces traffic for me, each and every day!
Can you imagine that happening with a six-month-old Instagram post? Probably not.
Also, Pinterest doesn’t require you to interact much with others. It might be my introverted side speaking, but for some reason, I’ve never liked interacting much on social media. Not on my private accounts nor my business accounts.
I love talking to people in person, but the whole commenting, liking, and chatting feels very stressful and bothersome to me. And it takes time!
With Pinterest, I don’t have to do any of that. I just do my thing, and whoever is interested in my content clicks on or saves my pin.
Pinterest is literally like a perfectly uncomplicated friend ^^
Read also: The 5 Biggest Pinterest Mistakes I Made In The Beginning
Read also: My Pinfinite Growth by Melyssa Griffin Review
4. Lesson: Marketing can be fun!
For the majority of my first year of blogging, I hated marketing. The thought alone made me uncomfortable, and I dreamed of the day I could hire a virtual assistant for that task.
But as I started to learn more and more about marketing and only focused on Pinterest, I actually found myself enjoying it more and more.
It was mainly that initial phase of being overwhelmed and anxious because I had no idea how to market correctly that kept me from enjoying it.
Now, I know that marketing can actually be fun if I do it my way and push through that initial phase of overwhelm by investing in a course like Pinfinite Growth and amazing tools like Tailwind.
5. Lesson: The best progress follows after frustration
Without fault, there will be frustrations throughout your journey of building a successful business.
You will never reach a level that is entirely without frustrations. Still, they will most likely become rarer than in the beginning phase of building a business.
So naturally, I had my fair share of disappointments throughout my first year of blogging. And yes, it was frustrating to try such much time and time again and not see the results I had hoped for.
What I noticed, however, was that after those phases of frustration – especially the bigger ones – followed highly motivating stages of growth.
That’s why for a while now, I’ve actually become excited every time I am in such a frustrating phase. Because I know that very soon some significant progress will be made!
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6. Lesson: There are no spontaneous growth spurts, and that’s ok.
We always hear all those success stories of people changing one little thing about their strategy or taking one course, and suddenly their traffic spikes like crazy!
So far, I’ve not had those crazy spikes. Sure if you look at percentages you could say I had great moments of growth. But even if going from 10 views a day to 40 a day is a 400% growth, it’s not necessarily the spike I had in mind. (But it’s of course still very much appreciated!)
Anyways, what I’ve found in the last few weeks is that somewhat of a calm and security has settled over me.
I am not desperate anymore to get those crazy growth spikes or finally make tons of money online. Sure, I am still working towards that, but I am much more patient and don’t really care that much if it happens today or next week.
Mainly because I am 100% certain that it will happen eventually. I have this unwavering faith that success will come sooner or later. And since I am genuinely enjoying myself and the steady progress I am making, I don’t feel in a desperate rush for it.
I love that feeling of calm and ease. And I have the feeling that once you reach that, you finally open the doors to let the Universe deliver your manifestations.
It feels like that practice of letting go and not clinging to that dream, the law of attraction teaches.
Should you still feel impatient and desperate to have that success, remind yourself of how far you’ve already come. Maybe look at your Google analytics and see the steady growth your traffic has made throughout the past months.
You will enjoy running and growing your business so much more if you just let go of that impatience and enjoy the steady progress.
Because in the end, steady growth will benefit you more than one crazy spike.
Also, you never know how long those over-night successes have already been growing for that “sudden” success to happen.
One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I’ve ever spent.
– Sandra Cisneros
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I’d been publishing for 20 years.
– Mary Karr
It took about 10 years’ time for Shopify to be an overnight success.
– Tobias Lutke
7. Lesson: One Blog post per week is enough
Looking at some of my business role models – Alux.com and ProjectLifeMastery.com – I kind of thought I’d need to publish content at least three times a week to be truly successful.
But quite frankly, I’d much rather publish one fantastic quality content each week and focus the rest of my time on creating amazing products or improving my existing posts.
I learned this mentality from Neil Patel. Neil has a crazy successful SEO marketing Blog, and you guessed it, he publishes one post per week. Yet he has three employees working on improving and updating is already existing content.
I immediately fell in love with that strategy! I think it’s rather sad to think of the crazy amount of content that gets published, but barely anyone takes notice of it.
I think the idea of carefully curated and regularly nurtured content is a lovely one.
8. Lesson: Content is king …. but inside a constitutional monarchy
This is an addition to the previous point.
For a long time, people preached that “content is king.” Meaning who has a lot of quality content succeeds inevitably.
But in today’s age, where there are billions of pieces of content out there on the internet, it’s much much harder to get people to discover your quality content.
That’s why marketing is so important.
Again, Neil Patel is a fantastic example for someone who spends a minority of his time creating content but a majority on marketing it.
So, yes, I’ve learned that my content is not everything. In fact, I should probably only spend 20% of my time with it and the other 80% with marketing it.
9. Lesson: Same content – many faces
One excellent way to get a significant impact from a few but quality content is by multiplying it.
So you’ve written a blog post. Let’s read the text out loud and record it. Then hire a virtual assistant to create a YouTube video and a podcast out of it. And suddenly, you have that same content on three highly used platforms without much more effort on your side compared to the one initial Blog post.
Two people, who are doing this are Stefan James from Project Life Mastery and Jim Kwik.
I absolutely adore this strategy! It’s the perfect example of “working smarter, not harder.”
What’s especially great about it is that most people won’t even notice or be bothered by this duplicate content because they only consume your content on one platform.
I, for one, am not reading the blog posts, watching the youtube videos, and listening to the podcast of the same entrepreneur altogether. I mostly do one or the other.
And in the few cases of me being a rather loyal follower of that entrepreneur, I love to have the variety to choose in which formate I want to get the information.
It’s honestly a win for everybody!
10. Lesson: My business can be anything I want it to be!
You might have noticed a recurring theme in the previous points. A lot of them mention me thinking I needed to do something a certain way but then realizing I could actually do it in a different and much more enjoyable way.
So I guess one of the more profound lessons I’ve learned in my first year of blogging is that I should just do what feels right to me and not what I think is correct to do.
I am genuinely believing more and more that building and running a business can be easy and fun if you just find the right balance between being in flow and pushing your comfort zone.
On that inspiring note, I want to end this “lessons of my first year of blogging” list. I am already getting excited about doing another one in a year from now! It is just so amazing to look back and realize how far you’ve come. I love that!
Let this be a reminder for you to look back on your journey and be proud of how far you’ve come.
And if you’ve thought about starting a Blog yourself, do it already! Before you know it, a year will have passed, and you will have gotten so much closer to your dream life.
Until next time!
Sophie
