My biggest mistakes when I started blogging

This might sound like the easiest part of starting a blog: you have a vague of what you will blog about, and you have a title (and domain name) for it in mind. A domain name that sounds catchy, is available and is easy to remember. Perfect, you think. We are ready for it.
This was the first big mistake I made. I had been brainstorming what I was going to blog about, and 'howmuchpassiveincome.com' seemed to be the perfect domain name for it. I am intrigued by passive income and at that moment, I was trying to set up some passive income streams, so Howmuchpassiveincome was perfect in my eyes.
I registered that domain name and published my first blog posts, ready for immense traffic.

After a few weeks, I realized that my posts were not only about passive income. I was writing about budgeting, blogging, and my Etsy shop. So, not only about passive income, which was my original plan.
When I started, I thought writing hundreds of posts about passive income would be easy. This is because I didn't do my research well enough. I should have written down all the topic ideas I had in mind, and then I would have seen that I only had a few about passive income.

So, the first mistake was not paying enough attention to my domain name. Choosing a more generic name like 'PeterTriesIt.com' would have been much better. That name would have covered a broad range of possible topics.

Mistake number two was not choosing WordPress as a blogging platform.
I have a background in IT; I can code, so I thought it would be easy to set up a website in PHP and MongoDB. The reason behind this is that I wanted this blog to be fast-loading and have the freedom to do whatever I want and not be bound to 3rd party widgets. All fine, you might say.

I did indeed put everything together as you can see, but I suck at design (as you probably noticed). I have no eye for a good design or color scheme. When using WordPress, you just have to choose the layout, and you're ready to go. I had to code everything myself, and it still doesn't look as cool and professional as good WordPress themes.
And when I have to implement a newsletter or a search bar, I have to code everything myself. While using WordPress, you just can download and install a widget that does everything for you.

I was always convinced not to put ads on this until I had a certain number of daily visitors. So, I completely forgot about monetization; that would have been something for later as I didn't want to overload the early visitors with ads.
I should have started building an email list from day one. Even if there were no visitors to this blog, I would already have a sequence and some experience in writing emails. But to this day, I am still figuring out how to attract people to sign up for my email list. I have nothing to offer, and they won't sign up only for my blue eyes.

Building an audience can be done even before you publish your first post, and that is also something I learned in these six months. Start promoting your blog on social media even before you publish your first post. It will also take a while to get a following on social media, so it is also good to start building your online presence on social media from the beginning.

If you plan to make money from your blog, have at least an idea of how you want to make money. It's very easy to say, 'I will add some affiliate posts and make money'; this is not the case. You already need to have some products in mind that you want to promote. I made this mistake and still need to figure out how to implement affiliate posts in this blog. I don't want to promote stuff to other people that I never used before. Maybe I am too honest.

When you read all of the above, it comes down to one single point: having a plan.
And that was something I didn't have. My idea was, 'let's just do it and see where the wind will bring me'. But after a while, this blog became very serious to me, and I put more and more time into it.
I had no plan on how to monetize it.
I had no plan for how to promote my blog.
I had no plan for a newsletter.
I had no content plan.
I had no idea who my audience was going to be.
As you can see, if you want to blog seriously, you have to consider your blog as a business. And you don't start a business without a business plan.

Me, I did not only lack a business plan, but I also had no structure for my blog. I had no idea about pillar posts and how to structure my blog posts.
I took some online courses about blogging and writing. I learned more in those two courses than watching hours and hours of YouTube videos. All of a sudden, everything became clear to me, and I finally understood how a good blog should be. It should have a structure, and if you want to make money out of it, everything should point in that direction, guiding your readers to your sales page.