This blogging business is tricky. There no real rule book on what to do – or not to do and how are we suppose to learn it all? When I started out back in the olden days, where the word ‘blog’ wasn’t even invented there wasn’t any advice what so ever available online, we had no pinterest blogging board, no ebooks to buy and no one to email for advice. We just had to learn through trial and error, sometime hitting the jackpot – other time it a complete disaster. We didn’t have super-duper fancy WordPress and Blogger at the beginning wasn’t owned by Google and was run separately with no SEO capabilities. It was just the case of writing and tell your real life friend about it (while they rolls their eyes and tell it so boring). So as you can imagine over the space of 15+ years I learned a lot about this blogging malarkey and learned at time the easy way to do something very simple – and other time (and more often than not) I learned a hard valuable lesson, here is 4 blogging lessons I learned the hard way.
Backup everything:
And I mean everything, even the cat – backup your cat! Seriously every month or so get into a good practice backing up everything, this include your posts, pictures, videos and your gifs. I learned this the hard way, by losing everything. My old website was hacked (more on that very shortly) and I lost bloody everything – my posts, videos and pictures. It was nightmare and so upsetting. Even if you think nothing will happen to your data – that when it most likely will happen; or at least that what I have discovered. It was a hard lesson and one I never want repeated.
How to do a backup:
- If using WordPress you can installed a plugin to help you back up your data – just search backup plugin. The best thing I found is you can schedule a backup and it get automatically downloaded onto the computer.
- Or in your admin/dashboard area (this also apply to Blogger) go to Tools>Export>given an option to export>save/download a file.
There are other better tutorials out there but it 100% worthwhile doing.
Secure The Website:
Batten down the hatches and secure everything. As I mentions, my old website was hacked – like completely hacked and could not get access what so ever! I didn’t just loose my data but I lost my entire website. It was a virtual online horrible nightmare. I was using WordPress at the time but it has a lot of a vulnerability and loophole, it wasn’t secure as it is now put it that way. My web host at the time was from the US (that another good piece of lesson I learned – choose your country origins as a web host) and cause of time different it was very hard to corresponds, they basically wasn’t any help to me. So I ended up losing the domain name (thebeautifulstyle.com if you’re interested) by me closing my account down with them. After that fiasco I took a year off break from blogging and after that brought this domain name. The first thing I did was secure everything on here – where I now use a powerful plugin that secure my website data and will lookout for any hackers. So overall I cannot stress this enough, secure your website.
Know a little about the SEO Rule:
What I mean by that, know a little about SEO, it doesn’t have to be a lot. Just enough to know so you’re not going to hit by a penalty fare by Google. Like I am. It’s nothing major and one I was able to correct straight away and revoke the penalty fare so no real biggie. But it did give me pits in my stomach and felt like all my hard SEO work went to waste. I basically didn’t add a <no follow> tag at the end of a link which was my fault as I forgotten that my plugins that put all my links to <no follow> was deactivated. So it was a case of activating the plugin again and business get back to normal (well almost, gotta wait for Google to lift the penalty fare). So what I’m saying is, read up a little on SEO so you can avoid a penalty fare from Google. Read up on why its important for bloggers to know the <no follow> tag and read up on how Google bots can detect when such a tag isn’t on. Also SEO will also help you get traffic and help you bring in new readers.
Not everyone is your friend online:
I have this motto or stance in life – where what you see is what you get. Or in the case of the online blogging world what your write is what you get. I think I’m still very me through blogging as I am in my real life.I mean I’m very friendly to everyone I meet and always happy to have a good old chat. I’m like that both online and offline. What I’m saying is – I try to be a friend to people regardless of colour, race or ethic. But that isn’t always the case online, I had one girl who befriended me through MSN (remember them) and MySpace (now this is getting seriously old school!). At the time I thought it was cool that a girl from Canada wanted to be my friend. We sent each other emails and even Christmas card. I did have a blog at the time (it was at livejournal) and we commented on each other blogs. I started working in retail full-time and got really busy with that job, because of that I started to distance myself online. My real life took a lot of my focus away from the online world. I started to not talk to her so much, I explained I started a new job and I was very tired and etc. At first she was fine with it and told me it not to worry. When I did have some time off from work and could give a week my attention to my online life, I found out she went bat-ship crazy. At the time we was both member of an online blogging forum and I logged in to find she wrote a complete page-worth rant about ME!! From there on out I completely blocked her email address, blocked on her MSN and unfriend her on MySpace. I saw her as a long distance friend and one that I thought we was cool. Nopee naaaa. So that a hard lesson – I had no idea what was her problem with me. Or what was going on with her real life. It very strange. Moral of the story is that everyone you meet online isn’t always your friend.
Have you got any to add and if so feel free to comments. I hope this have helped you in any way.
