There are so many myths circulating blogging that it is so difficult for any new bloggers even to understand the concept and full potential of a blog. Let me help new bloggers to get over those myths and debunk those blogging myths.
Let me start debunking the blogging myths.
Table of Content
The biggest myth that any new blogger encounter is he has to post daily when willing to start a blog.
Back in 2004, I also had a similar myth. It was one of the reasons I chose forums over a blog. I thought I wouldn’t be able to post every day that blog needs me to be doing.
The myth is injected to us when we observe a few of the top bloggers in a niche where we see that they publish new content almost daily, and then we think that every blog needs to post every day.
The critical aspect of blogging is not about getting a post out every day. However, getting a post out when you think you have something new and exciting for your readers. Publish at your own pace and will make it a moderately successful blog.
However, still, if you want to make an impact with your blog, allocate time to write something useful for readers consistently like once a week or even once a month is preferred.
Many new bloggers tend to avoid blogging because they think that it will take hell lot of time to maintain the blog, and they will not be able to provide the needed time to get it going.
At first, I thought my readers are referring to the time needed to write the content. However, later I realized they are referring to the blog maintenance time. They were referring to tasks like managing the comments, replying to comments, building links to content, and other such tasks that are part of being a blogger.
The fact is you can always do away with those tasks. If you think comments will take a lot of your time, you can have a blog without comments.
Seth Godin does not allow comments on his blog.
If you think you will have a hard time building links to your blog, just avoid them. Let the natural links build for your blog. Any tasks that you think will take the majority of your time, just avoid it to start.
Focus on building content for your blog—other things one can take up at some other point of time when you have more time.
I am sure blogging not as an online business is a myth that can surprise a few people. However, I get so many questions where people ask me how can a site that doesn’t sell anything be an online business.
I have to explain to them an answer with an example that they understand.
I help them understand that sites without selling anything to their readers can also be an online business just like TV Channels, where the channel itself is not selling anything to their viewers, and still, they are a business.
Similarly, blogs may not sell anything to the readers directly but sell advertising or recommend other’s products and earn money to become an online business.
Apart from ad revenue and recommendations, blogging opens up many other opportunities like digital product sales, membership programs, and many others.
The most used reason among Indians for not starting a blog is I can’t write.
People think that they can’t blog without ever trying to write or blog.
One of the reasons why people think that they will not be able to blog is, they think their English is not very good.
My English was horrible when I started in 2004. I still think that it is not as good as I want it to be for writing blogs and eBooks. However, the only way to improve my English is to blog more and use tools like Grammarly to even better my writing.
The other reason people say they cannot blog is thinking that people will leave negative comments about their blog. It is something that one should take as positive. The reason I say it is because if your readers point your mistakes, you can improve very quickly to become a better blogger. Isn’t it?
Others think that someone would write bad things about their blog on other sites. However, I am yet to see anyone writing about some blog’s feedback on someone else’s blog saying how horrible blogger’s English is.
At times people make a fool of themselves like in this funny business proposal, and you cannot do anything but sit and laugh on it. Still, I didn’t reveal the identity of the person, as that wasn’t the point.
Blogging is not something that can make you rich quickly. However, many people think that having a blog online will start driving money to their bank accounts almost instantly. They get a blog online and copy (not even write) a few articles and wait for the money in the bank account.
It has never happened like that, and it will never happen.
Tons of websites sell turnkey blogging solutions, and all I can say is beware of those turnkey blogging solutions.
If they worked just out of the box without you doing anything, they should have been used by the creators to make money. They should not be selling it to you for any amount whatsoever.
Blogging takes time, and the blogger has to write evergreen and helpful content for readers, which will become the pillar of your blog.
As an example, this article that you are reading right now took me almost three weeks to complete.
Blog needs a lot of time, but that is not the only thing that a blog needs. It also requires money from your pocket to keep growing. I am not talking about the expense of buying a domain and hosting. However, they are a small part of the overall cost.
Blog needs money for unique design, a logo, may even need to hire writers to get some good quality content upfront along with your content—auto-responders like Moosend to convert blog visitors to readers, and many more.
This myth originates because WordPress is free. It makes new bloggers think that blog needs no investment whatsoever.
Yes, you can always test blogging without investment, but to keep growing your blog, you need to be ready to devote time to it as well as money.
The next blogging myth I will like to debunk, which is very common among new bloggers, is that all we need to do is get the blog online and voila. It should start generating traffic from Google, will have tons of readers, name, fame, and money.
However, it is not how things work.
I get emails with questions on why Google is not sending me traffic or why Google has not indexed my site (BTW Google not indexing your site question is answered here in detail).
As soon as I visit the site, I know for sure that Google should not be indexing those sites, and once Google even indexes it, there is no reason for that site to be ranked anywhere. They have no content whatsoever, and whatever little content they have, it is either a copy-paste from some other website or has a couple of articles that they have just written with fierce competition.
Let me share with you an example of an entertainment niche blog. T
The site had celebrity images as well as other funny cartoons related to content taken from other websites. On top of that, the site had hundreds of distractions in the sidebar to annoy people. Moreover, it had 4 or 5 banner ads and a couple of popups.
The question to me was, how can I get approved in Adsense. I have been rejected thrice in Adsense, and though I have almost 5000 unique visitors monthly on my site.
The blogger was able to drive some traffic to the site, but then the quality of the site was horrible. Moreover, he has not done the homework that Adsense approves site based on the quality of the original content and not when you have copied content. Your traffic level is not the criteria for acceptance in Adsense.
So if you think blogging is easy, you need to rethink. You have to work your ass out to get your blog off the ground.
We just saw that blogging is not easy, but do you think blogging is tough? No, I don’t think so. All you have to do is make a habit of blogging and producing good quality content for your blog.
If you think it is tough, then blogging is not for you. However, for those who like to read books and new things online, blogging should be something that comes naturally to them. One may want to have an opinion on something you read.
If you take the example of this very article that you are reading, I am sure other bloggers have similar articles on their blog about blogging myths debunking. It doesn’t mean I can’t have myths based on my experience and my blog readers’ interaction.
Many readers consider that they don’t know the subject well enough to blog.
If you have a keen interest in any subject, you don’t need to be an expert to be blogging. You can become an expert in the process of blogging. Because of your interest in the niche or subject, you will go deep and wide. So will not run out of topic ideas for the blog, which is the whole point of blogging—sharing your views and opinions on the topic.
Let me share with you the example of BizTips.
I am not an expert in freelancing, blogging, or even Internet marketing. I follow some of the excellent bloggers. Moreover, as I learn new things about freelancing, blogging, or marketing for my web properties, I share them here.
As one wants to blog, he reads other blogs about blogging, marketing, or how to make money blogging.
In the process, with information overload, it becomes challenging to decide on the blog niche. However, this is where most people get trapped in the myth that they can blog on anything.
People start to think that their choice of niche is not as attractive as maybe internet marketing or blogging niche. Moreover, they have now read enough to be able to write on the topic.
So instead of blogging in a niche of their interest, they are pulled towards Make Money Online and Internet Marketing niche. They assume in the Make Money Online niche; they will learn to blog as well as make a lot of money with affiliate marketing.
Soon reality kicks in, and the quality of the content never reaches a certain level to pull the readers.
Blog niche should be something where you can generate a lot of content over some time.
When starting as a blogger, people think WordPress SEO is all about buying and exchanging links. However, I like to bust the myth.
I have neither exchanged links for any of my sites nor have purchased links.
Internet marketing is more about having the right kind of strategy to getting your site in front of your readers such that they will become regular visitors to your website or blog.
Search Engine Optimization, in my opinion, is all about making your site users friendly following the search engine guidelines for webmasters.
If you have to do something only for search engines, then it isn’t what I prefer doing. However, if it is something that will help search engines as well as humans, I always get it done. I think it is working well for me for years.
Let me share with you a story of link exchanges from 2005ish kind of time frame.
Almost every Webmaster used to exchange links. I also got so many link exchange requests as well. If the link to my site was being placed from the links page, I always used to reject for a straightforward reason that the site does not have the kind of traffic that people will visit their links page and get to my website.
Does this mean I did not get links to my site? I got many links from other pages, which were content pages. Many such links even got me a considerable amount of traffic.
I even used to email webmasters that you have content where I think my article can be complementary to yours. It helped me build links to my content naturally. It was a tough way to getting links at that time, but the updates of Google penalizing link exchanges help me skyrocket in traffic as I had zero link exchanges. You can read about my link building strategies.
Traffic is the lifeline of any website, including a blog. However, it does not mean you need a massive amount of traffic to be a successful blogger.
Let me yet again take the example of BizTips to show you how only a few people visitors on your blog is good enough to make a decent amount of money.
I have shared an article on Optimizing vBulletin Forums. It is not the most read article on my blog, but still, it pays me the most. If you look at the last point in the article, it says – “If you still have issues with your server ideally, you should hire me”.
People did hire me to get their forum optimization done. Check out some of my recent jobs done in Elance.
I am making $1000+ per month, with each job averaging $500+ per month.
Now imagine the traffic to article on vBulletin here on my blog doubles, triples, or even quadruples?
Will I be able to make the double, triple, or quadruple amount of what I am making right now. Maybe not because I have a lot of other areas to look into like my forums, blogs as well as partnerships and joint ventures.
So either I have to reject those incremental tasks or maybe look for other alternatives like outsourcing. With outsourcing even if I keep 50% of profit and get twice as much work as I am getting now. I will still be making a similar amount.
So it is a myth that you make a lot more money when your site has more traffic. The incremental traffic does not make you the same incremental money.
However, I know there can be a lot of arguments, especially on a couple of things.
The first argument can be more traffic means more advertising revenue or more sales with affiliate marketing.
Advertising revenues have always been on the decline. The reason being advertisers are paying lesser and lesser eCPM to publishers. So an increase in traffic may not always mean an increase in advertising revenue.
Similarly, affiliate marketing, making more sales means you have to continually work on generating more content that makes your readers interested in purchasing the promoted products.
At times it does not happen.
As an example, if you are an affiliate of selling insurance products. If you can get more traffic, but then the incremental traffic may not always be interested in buying insurance products. It could be that they are just interested in knowing about insurance for information.
The second argument could be that your blog is related to web development, which helps in getting hired as a freelancer. What if the blog is not related to what people are looking for as a service.
The counter-argument is bloggers can always provide niche writing as a service.
Let us take an example of Physics as a niche of a blog. One can provide services as a writer in the Physics niche. There are few physics writers available online as freelancers. So a blog with good content on Physics can always attract clients for providing content writing services.
Moreover, it may have a lot more long-term clients as compared to vBulletin or server optimization because webmasters don’t require optimizations services as often as writers.
Blog may not make you money directly, but it can create opportunities for online business.
On Jan 26th, 2013, I revamped Go4Expert URLs completely. Change in URLs was needed because I had forums installed inside the forums subfolder. I wanted to move things to Go4Expert.com/articles and have discussions in Go4Expert.com/forums.
It meant that I would have an impact on traffic from Google. However, it will help my users understand the site structure better.
I did the change, and as expected, Google traffic declined. However, in a couple of months, Google indexed all the new URLs, but the site traffic did not reach a point where it was before the change in URLs.
So I contacted Google about the same, and here is what I get from them in response.
So you should be doing things that will help your users and search engines will follow.
In the above example, I did things that help my user as per search engine guidelines.
Google suggests that if you change URLs, redirect old content to new content using a permanent redirect. For users, either temporary or permanent redirect will do, but for search engines, you should be using permanent redirect only. So I did a permanent redirect from old URLs to new URLs. It covers both search engines and users. So for my old article links were
http://www.go4expert.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29601
Which redirects to the new link
http://www.go4expert.com/articles/stop-vbulletin-spam-registration-t29601/
I remember a famous quote by Albert Einstein.
Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
I loved C++ when I started Go4Expert.
As I created content, I started to read a lot of books and online content on how to make my content more reachable on Google.
I had no idea what it was called then and slowly but surely understood SEO.
I made notes of things that I should be doing to help reach more people in Google, and I am damn sure this is the story of the majority of online blogs and forums. You can always learn SEO as you move along.
Bloggers can become better in SEO over time, but the reverse is often not true. The SEO expert always tries to work out a way around Google instead of generating value for the readers, and it works against them.
My customers will not prefer a blog on my site is yet another blogging myth that needs to be debunked. I don’t see a reason why your customers will not prefer extra content on your website.
Blog can be a repository of articles to help potential buyers or use some of the common questions that someone may have before they buy your products.
Let us take an example of a website about selling dog food. Ideal customers are people looking to buy dog food. The main keywords will be to buy dog foods or buy dog food online.
These keywords should be targeted in the product pages. One can argue people searching for those keywords are looking to buy. What if one can organize a blog which answers all the questions that dog owners may have.
The blog can act as a source of traffic for all dog owners who are interested in what you sell. The blog can act as a medium to lead generation for email marketing. A list of pet owners is a gold mine for a site selling pet foods. Isn’t it?
No having more sites in the same niche does not help by any means. It is one of the most common myths among new bloggers that I like to debunk.
Having more than one site in the same niche is never ideal.
Even in a different niche, if you have too many sites, you will find it very difficult to write good content and keep them updated.
So it is always better to have fewer sites that are regularly updated then having hundreds of dead sites.
An exception can be if you have a team of content writers to help you manage and keep each of those sites updating. However, when you have a team, you aren’t a new blogger by any means.
Bloggers aren’t sure if readers will want to buy anything from bloggers. The best way to debunk the myth is if you provide quality content on your blog to help readers and build trust, there is no reason for not buying what blogger may offer.
Take an example of my Technical Analysis Blog. Indians buying an eBook from a non-financial background blogger is something that I could never imagine even in my dreams. The reality is readers have not only purchased my eBook, but many readers have also referred their friends to me for buying the eBook.
I always focused on building trust and helping my blog readers with any question they may have for a very long-time. As I am a trusted and unbiased source of information for helping them to trade in the market, people not only started getting in touch with me to learn how to trade in the market but also wanted more from me, which became the inspiration for the book as well as the eBook.
Blogging is not about money; it is about building the trust of your readers.
or
The length of blog posts or word count is the last thing that matters. The only thing that matters is the quality of your content.
The length of the post should be as much as you think will be good enough to add value to readers as well as keep them interested.
Seth Godin’s Blog has a lot of shorter posts, whereas Steve Pavlina has some monster articles that can even be converted into an eBook. Both have their style of writing, and both are very, very successful.
Last but by no means the least blogging myth that I want to debunk is there exist a blogging turnkey solution.
There are so many sites online that advertise about such products, and hundreds of people are being trapped daily.
Turnkey blogging solution is something where all you need to do is get the key to a niche blog and switch it on to be the next millionaire. It never works.
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