My blog mistakes - Part 1

I started this blog about 3 months ago and felt that it was time that I sat back and had a general review of where it was going and more importantly where I was going.
So in that three months I have amassed 40 posts all of varying degrees of quality. The good news is that I have got some traffic and some subscribers to my RSS feed which makes me feel a little better. I felt however that things were not quite where I wanted them so now is as good a time as any to make some changes. But first I needed to analyse all the things that I felt I have done wrong with the blog and also my business.

The Mistakes

When I started the blog I was somewhat in a state of flux with the Technology business that I run. I was putting the business through a major change and re-focus. It was fair to say that I was having a love hate relationship with the business. It was consuming vast sums of my time and I was working ever longer and harder than I had ever in the previous 3 years of running the business. So the first mistake I made was to try and launch a blog whilst working on remodelling my business. The last thing you need is a major distraction, especially when that distraction puts food on the table.

The second mistake was simply not planning who my audience is/are. Now with a twist of irony, I had been through an excercise with Samba in which I sat down and planned exactly who my ideal client is. Yet I had failed to even consider this as a neccesary task to consider for a blog. On reflection this is probably the single most important thing to do when you start a blog. If you dont know who you are writing for, your screwed. Problogger has a good post on this subject here

Third mistake was simply a personal trait that I need to overcome and that is confidence. I suffer from a lack of writing confidence, this was partly why I started to write this blog to improve my writing and my confidence. This is an area that I am working hard on to address and I hope that with time it will improve

The fourth mistake is linked to the one above, put simply it is to grow a thick skin! This is something that I should have been able to deal with but didnt. I have taken some stick for blogging and for that matter being an affiliate marketer as recounted in this post. What I did not appreciate when I started blogging and affiiate marketing was the way people reacted to me when they found out. Yes it hurts when people you know and trust suddenly take aim and release a barrage of abuse at you, more so when all I am doing is nothing more than writing and promoting products on behalf of advertisers, hardly the biggest crime in the world. I did however make the mistake of taking some of these comments to heart and on reflection I really should have just ignored it and continued to focus on what I want to achieve.

So there we are, those are the four biggest mistakes that I consider to have made in my relatively short blogging/affiliate marketing career. The question remains, what I am I going to do now to rectify them? I will cover the changes in the next post…..

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