Blogging Mistakes for Beginners to AVOID | Common Blogging Mistakes | By Sophia Lee

hi guys today we have another exciting video the mistakes that i made when starting my blog slash the mistakes that you do not want to make starting your blog or that you have with a blog basically it's just talking about mistakes that can be done with blogging and things that i've had to learn the hard way so let's get in to all of these blogging tips okay first things first the last video or last two videos have had the most annoying noise in it and we think that it's the like zoom thing on the camera auto focusing so i turned it off so i'm hoping slash praying that this is focused if it's slightly out of focus i'm sorry the information will be the same also i have you set up in a different area of the office but we thought that this would be a really good video idea and email idea ps if you are not on our email newsletter make sure to subscribe to it it's filled with so much great information that's obviously free because it is an email so we'll have the box down or like a link down below where you can subscribe to it okay back on topic sophie all right so i have made a ton of mistakes since starting this vlog four years ago if you don't know kind of what i'm talking about i started a blog called by sophia lee four years ago now which is wild i feel like i say that every video like this too crazy it's been four years but it actually is crazy and since then i started when i was in sophomore year of college i was in my dorm room starting my blog i have turned it in to a seven-figure business so we make over a million dollars from my blog now i say we because it is not just i anymore when we started or when i started it was just me but now we have a team of six people and every single p every single person on the team is crucial obviously business has changed a lot in the last four years from going from when it was just me to making absolutely nothing to now being at this point but i think in the process of all of it there are things to take away from and things that i look back and think pat on back you did a great job in other things i'm like what were you thinking like how did you not think of this how just i don't know so many things but let's get in to the different mistakes that i've made or that i've seen a lot of bloggers make in their blogging journey first things first don't spend a lot of money on extras so when you start your blog there's certain things that i think that you need to spend money on i'm not even gonna go into those because we have so many videos talking and just about like how to start your blog and the different things that you need for that so we'll have those videos linked below but what i have learned and what still isn't an issue for me is that every single company's job is to sell you something and when they sell you something they try to add in extras that you literally cannot say no to of course they're going to do that that's good business practice as they should do that because they make a lot of money off of it because it's hard not to say that you want to buy it but i will give you an example when you get blogging hosting they're going to try to throw you in a ton of extras like security and other things like that i want to lightly go over this because if something happens i don't want it to be my fault so do your own research as with everything make sure that you're looking into everything and not just fully listening to me or anyone for that matter but i just find that it's an up sale that you don't need to spend there are so many people that start blogs and then they go nowhere like i know every single one of us knows someone that started a blog and it's gone nowhere and it's not worth the money like you should invest in your blog or invest more money just put the minimum amount down that you need in the beginning to get you started and then once you're actually making money then you can put more and more towards your blog number two this is a question that i get asked all the time and it is at what point should you publish your blog so should you write a ton of blog posts and then publish it or should you start publishing the blog post right away this is something um that i strongly encourage and believe is that you should be publishing your blog post as soon as you're done with them the chances of someone other than your mom or your brother or your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or whatever it is the chances of someone else besides them looking at your blog in the beginning is so slim and rare unless you're coming to it with a following already publish it right away no one's gonna be looking at your blog and the longer that google has to read through your information the faster that you're going to get ranked which ranking is so important so you're gonna want you'll learn if you're new to you'll learn all this verbage but basically ranking is really important key to having a successful blog you want to rank on everything there's a strategy behind it blah blah blah go on about this in all of our videos so just go check out the other videos if you're curious about it but sum that up just publish your blog post right away number three is something that i never talk about i refuse to talk about it i never will talk about it but it is important and this is probably the biggest mistake that i personally made when starting my blog and that was i did not think about anything legal at all i did not nothing like that crossed my mind one of my biggest downfalls in my business and just like with this house business that we're doing and basically everything is that i don't know what i don't know and so there have been multiple times in this vlogging journey where i do something wrong but i didn't know i was doing something wrong so i didn't know to avoid it so this is my little push to you on what i've learned is that you need to have disclosures so you need to have like an affiliate disclosure at the top of every single blog post you need to have other disclosures so like now we have lawyers just because of like where we're at with our business but in the beginning i could not afford a lawyer like i was a broke college student and so when i learned that i had to think about the legal side of things there is a lawyer who is specific who's now works specifically for bloggers and she basically has really inexpensive templates so her um name is um shoot what's her name i know her name like really well why can i not remember this actually let's call sarah because what is the loy the blogging lawyer that i've used amir allah what is it i never remember her name amira law blog amir law blog i think i'm a self guru a self guru okay all right thanks moral of all of that is is that she has templates out there where you can go and then put in your own information so she's a lawyer by trade so she they're like totally legit and it's just a way cheaper way to do it than hiring a lawyer but it's something that you definitely need to think about when you are in those first phases of your blog another thing with that again i do not want to be responsible for any legal things so i don't talk about this like ever but you cannot use other people's photos you cannot copy other people like i have seriously had people copy the exact way that my website has looked like same theme um their name will be by this is like technically they can do it but it's just like ridiculous we do send seasoned assists we've sent them multiple times don't copy people don't use other people's photos you can get in serious trouble for this and not only that it's just so annoying to the other blogger and i remember everyone who has copied my blog like because it is a long discussion we get our lawyers involved we've had multiple meetings with lawyers where we basically dig deep down and take screenshots of everything so not to scare you but that is something that i didn't really even consider like when i first started my blog i use other people's photos you can't do that and so i learned that okay and then i had to go in back and switch all of the photos out which is just a pain and it just looks bad when you use other people's photos without giving credit or just using them in general so now what we do is we get permission for every single photo that we use or we take our own photos or we use a stock photo website the best way to do it is to use your own photo so we've like really started using our own photos way way more now but basically don't copy people you can get yourself in big legal trouble i've seen bloggers get themselves in big legal trouble i've come after people who've done it and it's just not worth it so think about think about that next think about what you're going to make money from like think about your angle so are you starting a blog to simply make money are you starting a blog to talk about your life or like as a diary are you starting a blog like website for your business there's multiple different things that you can be starting blogs for and i believe that there's multiple different angles that you should be taking based on what you're trying to do if you're trying to start a diary type of blog don't invest any money into your website all you need for that is a blogspot blog a free squarespace one i just don't i mean you can do whatever you want but um i just don't personally think that there's like specific things that you need to be doing for those type of diary sort of blogs if you are looking to start a blog that makes money there are certain things that you have to do to set yourself up in the future to make money and just get yourself very legit and not in like uh your information's legit but like legit in a way that you can bring on affiliates and sell things and different stuff like that and then the last one i'm sure there's other ones but the last like main one is if you're starting a website for your business so like an example of that is my father well he's like my boyfriend and i are not married but i always call like his siblings brother-in-law and sister-in-law some people think that's weirder than his parents like mother-in-law and father-in-law because we've been together since we were like 14 years old so at this point this point i'm just waiting for the ring but um he has a website that is clearly a different angle did i say he owns a countertop business i don't know if i did but he he has a website that is way different than like if you're gonna start a blog like my website so if i was doing something like a website like that i personally would i mean you have to think about seo for that but not as much as you do for like a blog that writes posts that you want to rank for but basically there's different angles that you can take when you're starting your blog based on what type of blog that you want to have there's different amounts of money that you need to spend and i think that it is worth your time don't spend a ton of time on this but worth your time researching what type of blog that you want to have so that you can follow what's best for that angle for what i talk about on like this channel and on the blogging side of my website my website is like not about blogging my website's about like home decor and we call it like a lifestyle home blog type of thing but what i talk about is that a blog that makes money so that's where like all of our content is geared to but if you have are trying to do a certain one i find someone else that can give you tips or i mean yeah that's what i'm gonna say for that one because i feel like i'm really not getting my point across strongly or clearly okay this is huge when you start your blog or even like in the beginning phase of your blog you want to be really strategic with what social media sites you start on and there's a few reasons for that but the only reason i'm really gonna hit on here is that it is so overwhelming like i personally get so overwhelmed trying to manage all the different content streams and i cannot even think about how i would have managed it as a full-time college student also having another job and trying to get this business running which that's that was my situation when i started this blog like i wouldn't have had time for it and i would have ended up failing with my website because of how overwhelmed i was so the only thing the only social media sites that i recommend you starting on is and i've slightly changed this answer this in this past year but it is obviously your website okay so that's like no brainer but then pinterest pinterest has been my all-time go-to so when i started my blog i only had pinterest for the first three years so we only launched social media in the last year and a half um and basically pinterest is the only social media website that people go to specifically to get people to your website so like instagram you scroll and look at pictures the conversion rate from instagram to our website by sophia lee is so so low compared to pinterest where pinterest is like one of our top traffic sources and then this is what i've slightly changed my answer to in the last year is tick-tock but that is similar to you have to have the angle where tick-tock makes sense for you because tick-tock is something that you're obviously like going to need to put your face on and talk to it so i think like tick tock tick tock the reason i'm saying tic toc is because tik tok has such you can be found on tick tock on like any other platform like instagram takes so freaking long to grow on it is like actually annoying where tic tac i started tick tock in august i put so much more effort into my instagram it's not even funny and my instagram is at like 40 000 followers and my tick tock's at 300 000 followers so you can just grow so much faster on tick tock and you can't do that any other platform i still have not figured out yet how to get people from tick tock to the website so if you want to start a tic tac or you think that that's worth it for your business that would be a type of website where you're really trying to brand yourself and not necessarily like rank on seo and then lastly this is another thing that we messed up on slap aka me messed up on is taxes once you start making money on your website this is the boring side of owning a business you when you start a blog to make money you are starting a business it is fully a business um and as you start to make money you're going to need to start paying taxes so you need to pay taxes and like also do your own research on this because i don't know if this is just wisconsin and also it could change any second so if you make over six hundred dollars you need to pay taxes on something i'm not an accountant either so who knows if that's actually right but i'm 99 positive you make over 600 you need to pay for taxes so that's awesome you want to make that much money on your blog but just have in the back of your mind that you need to put money aside don't go spend at all because you're gonna have to pay taxes with it eventually so that's my two cents on that one all right that sums up that video with blogging mistakes and things that i've messed up on i kind of want to do a follow-up on it because i feel like this would be a great something to do like next year where i've kind of been thinking about it so like anytime i make a mistake i can write it down in my phone and then we can have like a little more precise video because that was kind of like an overall situation which i like like the nitty gritty so i want to know like the exact things but if you could please give some more video ideas or questions that you have about blogging that we can turn in to these blogging videos please let me know what questions you have or that you'd like to see for a video and then make sure to subscribe to the channel i will see you at next week's video

Channel: Perfecting Blogging | By Sophia Lee Blogging

Views: 73,237

Keywords: blogging tips, blogging for beginners, how to start a blog, blogging, blogging mistakes to avoid, blogging mistakes for beginners, blogging mistakes, how to start a blog and make money, how to start a blog step by step for beginners, blogging tips for beginners, blogging tips and tricks, blogging tips 2022, blogging 2022

Id: ziGPILVoVsw

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022