The first few months of my blogging journey weren’t ideal. I didn’t have much experience even visiting blogs before I began. I spent a ton of time playing around, trying to figure out how to post stuff and choosing a theme and colors. Thankfully, I found a great book, WordPress For Dummies and it helped so much with understanding some of the basics. I still flip through it even now and again for little reminders and tips.

Why am I telling you this? I decided to join a challenge, yep that’s right. Master the Art of Saving is joining the Beginner Blogger Challenge and to join, I need to write a post sharing my experience in blogging. Am I a blogging expert? H*ll no! I’m still learning stuff every day and there’s probably a lifetime worth of learning because things change all the time, especially online.

I’m also supposed to answer 4 questions that will hopefully help beginner bloggers avoid the same mistakes I’ve made. Here we go:

1. How long have you been blogging?

I started blogging at Master the Art of Saving, my first blog ever, on August 7th, 2010. So that’s about 1 year and 7 months, wow. I like to think I’ve gotten progressively better with time, at first I wasn’t even focused. Instead of focusing on personal finance and saving money, I was trying to blog about every possible way to save money, including deals and coupons and all that stuff. Finally, I found my niche—I loved writing and learning about personal finance more than anything else.

2. Why did you start blogging?

Every time I would look for information about saving money and improving my finances, I’d find the same old stuff. I couldn’t afford to save 10% of our income, nor could I save $50.00 a month. I just wasn’t in that place yet, I had to start smaller and make gradual changes if I wanted to achieve anything. So, I wanted to share my journey of improving my finances and saving money with others who might be faced with the same challenge. Not everybody can start with a bang, but everybody can start small and work their way up; It all adds up! Also, I think I might have been looking for another hobby, as well as a bit of accountability.

3. How long did it take you to earn $100

Okay everybody, I’ll tell you…but you can’t laugh. I know other bloggers are bring in craploads of money within the first few months, but it wasn’t that way (it still isn’t) with Master the Art of Saving. No, that doesn’t mean my blog sucks! I just suck at monetizing it; don’t hate the blog. I didn’t make my first $100.00 until December 2011. I didn’t even know you could make money from blogging when I started.

4. What is (at least) one thing you wish someone had told you before you started blogging?

• It’s not as simple as just writing up a post and publishing it. No sir! There is so much more involved with blogging, assuming you want people to find and read your blog. There are categories, tags, SEO, networking, responding to comments (though some don’t at all), PageRank, domain authority, back links, following laws and so much more. It’s nowhere near as simple as I’d expected it to be, and it requires time. The more time you have to put into it, the better chance you have to be successful.
• When I found my focus, I went back and deleted my old posts that weren’t directly related to personal finance. Yep, that was a massive dumb@ss move on my part. Never delete your old posts! All the links I’d received from other blogs, included a few big ones were gone. I also inadvertently created broken links for the blogs that linked to me, meaning they had to do clean-up because of me. So sorry guys.
• This one I just learned recently. I have the hosting for Master the Art of Saving through BlueHost (which rocks as does their customer service) and purchased my domain name from GoDaddy.com (also awesome, but I just use it for domains). I had decided that I wanted to start a second blog, so I went to BlueHost and paid for new hosting. I felt so stupid when I found out through BlueHost that I can have more than 1 blog on the same hosting account. Yep, I wasted money because I had no clue that was possible. I still haven’t launched the site I’ve been planning, but I have gotten another up, PF Carny. All it really costs to start an additional blog is the domain name. Don’t make the same mistake I did, even after blogging for a year and a half, but I have a feeling everybody else in the blogging world already knows this.