When we first started the blog we made a lot of newbie blogging mistakes. and we mean A LOT.

We aren't sure what made us think this but we seemed to be under the impression that all we had to do was start a blog and it would be smooth sailing. We were very wrong.

Looking back we were making blogging mistakes from day one. If we would have known then what we know now...our site would be in a much better place.

On the positive side, we figured out where we went wrong and we've been making progress in the right direction every since.

It doesn't help us to dwell on the past but our silly mistakes might be something you're doing too. So if you're new to the blogging world or just frustrated with your blog's progress, make sure to avoid these common blogging mistakes beginners make.

Disclosure: Links throughout the Mindful Nomadics site may make us a small commission at no additional cost to you. See our Affiliate Disclosure for more information.

Not Having a Niche

We were told this by EVERYONE yet we still thought "Nah we're good". Spoiler alert, we weren't good.

If your thinking of running a blog for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE find your niche. Even if your niche is "my life" that's fine.

Having a more narrow niche can be beneficial but if a broad one fits your brand better that's okay. What will be bad is if you are all over the place.

It's hard to get people to your site so once they are there, anything you can do to keep them is clutch. By having a niche it's a lot easier for people to keep navigating or keep coming back because they know what they're getting.

So if you are reading this and don't have a niche yet, stop what your doing and pick one. Even it takes all day, it's worth it.

Picking the Right Name

From the get-go, you want to make sure you pick the right name for your blog. From day one you will be building your brand so you want all of the efforts to count

We started with one name then changed after about two years...and then a few years later changed it AGAIN. This meant changing domain names and moving over ALL OF OUR posts.

So all of the pins we had go viral with our previous name and all of the Facebook shares were now wasted. Maybe we are being a tad dramatic but you get the idea.

Two things are important when it comes to picking your name.

1. Make sure you like it (duh)
2. Make sure it "translates" well

When we say translates well we mean things like...does it sound nice, is it easy to tell others, can you put it into google quickly. You also want to make sure it gets your point across.

Our original name for our site was Minimalist Living Maximum Results. So cute right?

Well turns out that just because we had a cute little name didn't mean it was a good name. It didn't "translate well".

First off, putting that entire thing on anything was EXHAUSTING. Every time we made a pin or typed in our name we had to type out that entire (very long) phrase.

Our old name had ELEVEN syllables and was a mouthful when telling friends about our new site. Again the idea was there but we missed the mark.

Another problem was that half of our site is about traveling so even though it's technically not excluded by the old name, it's not very obvious to the reader.

So we tried MLMR Travel for a while but then this left out the life portion of our site. We were trying to keep the original idea but make it better.

Finally, we ended up on our perfect fit....Mindful Nomadics and we love it. So please save yourself the hassle and pick the right name as soon as possible.

Spending Time on Silly Tasks

This is possibly the most important thing you will take away from this post. STOP WASTING YOUR TIME.

Every blogger knows how easy it is to get lost in some blogging rabbit hole. Suddenly hours later, you realize how much time you just spent on something as tiny as "font-size".

We're not saying you can never spend time tinkering with your site and adding a little glitter here and there but make sure you are completing the big things first.

Kelsey recently learned about the term ROI (return on investment) and now we use it for everything. It is a perfect way to decide "should I be spending this much time on this task?"

We were spending so much time adjusting old posts, changing the site's layout, and reading about how to improve our blog. All of these things are helpful to our overall blog, but not bringing in a lot of visitors.

Now we spend more time on things that increase our daily site views such as writing new posts and scheduling pins. Both of which seem to have a pretty good ROI for our site.

We get to the other stuff only AFTER completing the other daily (and more important) tasks for the day.

Not Having a Plan

Organization is key to running a successful blog. You need to have an idea of how you want to spend your days working on the blog.

We think two crucial blogging elements to have planned out is

1. How many new posts a week
2. What kind of posts

When we first started our blog we decided two new posts a week was a perfect idea. Then we did nothing to actually plan this out.

Guess what happened...we did maybe 1-2 new posts a month. It's embarrassing but true.

When blogging is not your full-time job it can be hard to keep up with so with no plan in place it was easy to let the site come second. But if the site comes second you're not going to grow.

Now we have a google calendar with two new blog posts scheduled for every week. Life still happens but we are much more consistent now.

It's easy to schedule out our calendar because we have a list of blog post ideas and all we have to do is fill in the new post box with one of these ideas. This also helps us stay consistent with all of our blogging categories.

One quick word of advice on making a plan...make sure to not go overboard. Don't be so scheduled that you are trying to do a new post every day with only two hours set aside.

Branding Everything

Since you already picked the perfect niche and perfect name (steps from earlier in this post), you need to make sure you are growing your brand. It's important to keep your brand consistent and EVERYWHERE.

All of your social media accounts should have the same @ and the @ should be your name. It seems silly but we did not do this at first.

Initially when we had our old name, our Pinterest was "the Schaubs" our Instagram was "MLMR Travel" and our Twitter was "MinLivMaxResult". It was very confusing for our followers.

To be fair, constantly switching our name was probably hard for followers. But now everything is under Mindful Noamdics.

How can you grow your brand with your followers if everything is different? Luckily we figured it out and now all is in sync but we wish it would have been this way from the start.

Proofreading

Sometimes we look back at old posts and we think "Oh my gosh who wrote this? This is awful". We weren't the best writers but even worse...we had so many writing errors.

Kelsey sucks at everything grammar and even with Phil proofreading, we missed a lot of errors. No one wants to read a blog and think "what were they trying to say here?"

Now we use the free version of Grammarly and it changed our site completely. Even while writing this post, Grammarly politely informed us how often we accidentally put "we're" for "were" and vice versa.

The sad part is going through old posts with Grammarly and realizing we had over 20 errors in one post. Oops.

If you don't already use it, we suggest getting on the Grammarly bandwagon ASAP. Then from here on out, you have a little extra proofreading for all your posts.

Paying for Hosting

If you are still using a free hosting platform to run your site...it's time to change. Even if you never plan on running ads for income, you are giving up a lot of freedom.

There is a lot of fine print you probably didn't read when starting your blog on a free platform and it comes with a lot of stipulations.

At this point, bluehost seems to have a discount price every week and you can run your site for less than 5 dollars a month. That money is worth the control you will get over YOUR site.

Using a Free Theme

We used a free theme for YEARS on our site and just recently made the change to purchase the premium version. It's embarrassing it took us this long.

* We finally listened to advice from Trish Mckinnley *

You wanna know what finally made us switch. The free version changed the featured image size. So one morning we woke up to find our featured image taking up the whole screen and more.

It was about three hours of a disaster. This wasn't the first time something like this happened either.

About a year ago, one day we realized all of the titles we no longer showing. That's the catch with the free theme, they can change things at random.

So it was finally time to buy the premium theme and then we saw just how much we were missing. Themes cost money for a reason and it's because they give you SO MUCH MORE.

Now, we have access to more fonts, easier ways to add to our site, and no more worrying about waking up to random site changes.

Neglecting an Email List

Oh, email lists...does anybody love running an email list? We sure don't. But even if you hate email lists, you kinda need one.

We started using MailChimp the day we started our site and did something wrong within two days to get kicked off. We contacted them over and over but never heard back.

So like the children we are, we decided at that moment, screw an email list, who needs it. Well turns out every blog kinda needs it.

A lot of our family members are not the most tech-savvy and we found out they had a lot of trouble getting to our site. They aren't on social media and weren't getting our post updates.

Guess what they were using...you guessed it...email. Turns out having an email list was how to keep our family as active readers.

For the record, we do hold grudges so there was NO WAY we were trying MailChimp again. But it turns out we weren't the only ones and another blogger gave MailerLite a raving review.

Now, we are using MailerLite (which is awesome BTW) and we are growing our email list. After one month we already saw more family members keeping up with our site and a few strangers.

Researching Blogs

Don't go too crazy with trying to look like other blogs but you might want to at least give them a quick look. See what things you like and don't like.

We wish we would have spent more time looking into layout ideas, optimal image sizes, and best plugins before starting our site. Some of these big blogs are big for a reason.

Again, don't copy them exactly but pay attention to what works and what you like. Or else you're gonna pull "a Schaub" and change everything years in.

We learned how we wanted our blog to work but a little too late. Now, years later we finally have an idea of what works for us.

Things we like for our blog

• Featured image of ONLY AN IMAGE, no words at a size 1200x628
• Starting our page layout with an intro paragraph, small box photo, then larger pin photo
• Ending each post with another Pin and a super-secret hidden pin
• Linking to other posts with a pretty grey box
• Separating paragraphs with a wide image
• Plugins to make custom links (pretty links) and set up drop-down menus (Content Views)

So now we are slowly going back through posts and adjusting to formats we like, but again, this would have easier from day one.

Multi-Tasking

Phil read an article a while back explaining that multi-tasking is not real. What is really happening is a quick change of focus from one task to another.

You might think trying to muti-task can save you time but in reality, it's taking away from the big picture. You can get a lot more done by focusing on one task.

If possible, try to finish a task before moving on to another one. You might be surprised by how much more you get done.

There will be times where you get stuck on a task, and its fine to move on, but then you need to completely move on. If you go from writing a new post to scheduling social media you need to close the post tab and focus on your scheduling.

Writing About Nothing

It's fun to write (at least we think so) and sometimes you can go on this little rant with no real purpose. You look down and there's a post with no beginning, middle or end.

What are you expecting your readers to get from a random post about nothing? Even a story is at least entertaining.

We have looked back on some posts and cannot figure out for the life of us what we were trying to say. Were we trying to give advice, tell them about our day? Who knows.

If you feel a lot of your blog posts aren't getting the love they deserve you might want to look back and with a non-biased view think, what am I getting from this?

The answer may vary depending on the post. Sometimes posts are to educate, other are to entertain.

Just make sure your post is doing one of those things and not just ramblings of a crazy person.

Still Probably Making Blogging Mistake

This post was a lot and it's probably because we made ALOT OF blogging mistakes as beginners. When we first started we had no idea what we were doing and we're still learning to this day.

We're hoping someone else will read this and learn from our mistakes. Don't be like us, be better.

Good luck with blogging and don't forget to find your niche.