This week I post this one question interview to 4 of my blogger friends what they would do if they could start their blog all over again. This was prompted after I recently read numerous posts on the topic “Are You Giving Up Blogging“. While many of them discussed the reasons such as “it’s too hard”, “you won’t make much money blogging”, ” it needs luck”, ” requires too much long term effort” I suspect many bloggers quit blogging due to very simple reasons. My intent here is to provide some answers to bloggers and hope they help a few would be quitters change their minds.

I would do this…

Firstly I would have a separate domain for my blog instead of a sub directory of my main Plugin-Profit Site. I believe even with a PR3, this has somewhat weakened the site authority than had it been on its own domain. I had to work doubly hard to achieve my current search engine ranking, compared with others and that was a big mistake I made.

Secondly, I would rather not use my name as the domain name. In terms of SEO, it makes better choice if I were to use something else related to my niche. I was just like any other newbie then, with no mentor and not knowing how important this was until it’s a little too late. I guess I was just too eager to start my new website. Well we live to learn.

This is what my friends have to say….

Salwa: I actually have few things that I regret not doing when I started out. First knowing what I know today I would have built an email list right from the start. An email list is the absolute most effective marketing tool available on the Internet today. It provides you with a direct line of communication with your target market, and also enables you to develop a trusting relationship with your subscribers.

Second; I would have balanced my activities more equally between content production and promotion/marketing. And lastly taken things less personally.

Alan Mater: One of the things I would do differently is putting more emphasis into promoting my blog in the early stages. When I first started blogging, I spent a lot of time on the visual appearance of my blog. While the look and feel of a blog is important, I didn’t do enough to get the word out and drive traffic to it. If I had to start over, I would work more on marketing and building backlinks to my blog. There’s no point in having a nice looking blog with great content if hardly anyone knows about it. Now that my blog is six months old, I’m just now starting to do more about marketing it and getting more traffic. My advice would be to spend just as much time marketing your blog while you’re working on the appearance and creating content for it.

JR: If I could start my blog over I would definitely have picked a different blog theme, one with more than one sidebar, or the option to add another and I would make sure the sidebar was wider than the one I currently have.

Another thing I would do differently is to launch with less posts, when I first started I posted some of my best work all at once, before I had any readers in order to have a deep site for the search engines. In retrospect this was a mistake, I should have waited for the readership to build and then posted gradually.

James King-Select a good web host would be my first choice. I listened to an Internet business podcast back in 2006 and they recommended this hosting company. I purchased some reseller hosting in 2007, where I found the hosting to be very cheap. Where you could easily purchase 2TB of bandwidth for under $200 for the year, at the time I thought it was a bargain. However, as I progressed into creating more WordPress blogs I noticed that my loading times from the databases was getting worse and worse. At one time, I was waiting over one minute to download a page from WordPress and this was the “Hello World” page. The very first page on the your new WordPress blog.

As time progressed, I was suffered with headaches and frustration with the slow loading time from my blog. The customer service was poor and it was getting beyond a joke. The databases were crawling, the customer service was useless and support there wasn’t any. I created atmmultimedia on this reseller hosting server and four weeks later, in the footer there were hidden hyperlinks. My blog had been hacked, I was so angry. I couldn’t even retrieve any of my blog posts as the site was infected.  Another lesson to you all bloggers: back up your blog on a regular basis to avoid heartache.

I realised that if atmmultimedia was going to be successful, then I had to transfer to a good reliable host. I live in the UK and I decided to a use a UK host instead. Where if I have any trouble I could easily phone or even visit their office. Heart Internet is the best hosting I’ve ever used, although they cost more than other hosting companies, I would recommend them for their excellent support and after sales support.

Now over to you…tell us what you would have done differently…

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