12 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Blog

They say that hindsight is 20/20 – it’s hard to predict the future and easy to understand what to do after something has already happened.

This is true for new bloggers.

I often think, “If I only knew then what I know now.” There are a ton of things I wish I knew before I started blogging.

This blog isn’t a success because I’m smarter than anyone else. In fact, the opposite is true – it’s successful because I learned from smarter people who knew more than I did.

I tried, failed, tried again, and failed again until I finally learned enough to make a lot of money blogging.

I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And after gaining this knowledge, I’m making over $80k/month from this blog that I launched in 2019.

Even though this blog found quick success, I still stumbled and fell along the way. I wasted my time (and money) on a lot of things – and I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.

I surveyed 531 bloggers in 2020 and this article provides answers to the 12 most common (and challenging) blogging questions. My answers include a lesson that I wish I knew when I first started and mistakes to avoid.

Here are the top 12 things that you should know before deciding to start a blog this year.

1. Don’t plan, just do.

Common blogging question: I’m feeling overwhelmed. How do I start planning my new blog?

Let me take a trip down memory lane to some of my planning failures.

In 2016, I created a dropshipping website to try and sell outdoor adventure gear. I called it “Rebel Peak” (sweet name, right?) and the products were at the intersection of camping and adventure: truck tents, tailgating gear, cooler speakers, etc.

I spent countless hours planning every little detail: the company name and branding, the logo, the product line, the design – I even created a Facebook Page and custom banner ads for remarketing (in all common Google sizes of course).

I signed up for an ecommerce platform, synced my products to my Shopify store from a dropshipping supplier, and launched my site.

I also (embarrassingly) announced the new venture to my friends and family on Facebook.

People were very impressed by the nice-looking – yet soon to be unsuccessful – business.

Only after all of this planning did I decide to start a blog on the site to gain a following. I started writing blog posts but spent way too much time on them, thinking that they had to be perfect or I’d be judged by my (non-existent) readers.

I was planning and trying to perfect every detail so that I wouldn’t fail.

There was perfection on the surface but no real risk taken underneath it all. I didn’t know I was supposed to get backlinks, I didn’t build relationships, come to think of it, I didn’t actually get out from behind my computer and treat it like a real business.

Long story short, I failed.

I quickly realized that launching a new website isn’t the finish line. In fact, it’s not even one foot out of the starting gate.

All of my time spent planning could have been spent on taking real action. It’s funny to look back and think of how much time (and money) I spent on all of that planning