If I said I often get questions on how I got my Traffic Generation Cafe from zero to top 0.1% of all the websites in the world in 6 months, it would be a major understatement.
I get them ALL the time.
I know this specific topic or question rather is something that keeps a lot of my readers coming back to my blog again and again.
“How did she do it?” “What’s her secret?” “Was she well-connected before she started her blog?”
These are all the same questions I was asking as I lurked around popular blogs to see how they did it and what their secret was – before I started Traffic Generation Cafe.
As you know, I openly talk about all the things that worked and didn’t work for me when I first started blogging.
Feel free to go back and take a look at these posts to see what I did:
In this post though, I decided to talk about something that my readers might not necessarily think of asking, but yet is equally as important:
“What mistakes have you made in the beginning and what would you have done differently?”
I am going to expand the question beyond my blog and include the things I see other bloggers do that prevents them from reaching the full potential of their blogs and their earning power.
1. Pick the wrong niche
Not too many people know that I build Traffic Generation Cafe on the basis of a different blog, which I started in 2009.
I had the first blog for an entire year before I scrapped it altogether and transformed it into what you see now.
It never went anywhere.
I found myself spending countless hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and what I could be doing differently until I finally got it: my blog had no direction.
I never gave my niche much thought, I had no idea what to blog about, I had no idea who my target reader was.
Result?
No readers. No traffic. Waste of time.
Picking the right niche is the single best thing you can do for your blog. Really.
How to pick the right niche?
Usually it’s a combination of what you like to do and are passionate about and if there is a demand for the information and the products you can promote within your niche.
The first one is easy to figure out.
What is your area of expertise? What are your hobbies? What is your passion?
Obviously, it’s much easier to blog about something you already have knowledge in – it will save you a lot of time doing research on your chosen topic.
It’s also quite important to like your niche – that’s what will keep you blogging through ups and downs long-term. And if you don’t see yourself writing about the same subject a year or two from now, don’t even try.
Now that you figured that out, we need to marry it to the demand.
No niche demand = no readership = no income
How do we check for such demand?
One of the best ways to do it is to do a forum search.
Let’s say your niche is “healthy eating habits“.
All you do is perform a search for forums in your niche by searching for your keyword phrase “healthy eating habits” plus the word “forum“.
Look for active forums with lots of chat on the subject. Once you find them, stick around and see what people are talking about, what their problems and concerns are, how you can possibly solve those problems through your blog.
You might find out that your niche idea not a hot one and then you go back to the drawing board.
However, if it still looks good, you move to the next step.
This is another HUGE mistake I see many bloggers make. They assume that if they are interested in the topic, then there will certainly plenty of other people who will be as well.
Not necessarily.
Not all traffic equals money.
2. Don’t do keyword research
Here’s a problem with this: most bloggers know they need to do it, but ignore this step altogether, because
a) they don’t know how to do it
and/ or
b) they don’t want to bother.
Some bloggers don’t even want to bother with keywords because they are not planning on getting any search engine traffic to begin with. SEO is too complicated they say, so why bother?
Why bother???
Unless you want to spend every free minute of your day driving traffic to your blog, you need to come up with a more passive way of doing it and that’s exactly what ranking your blog for your desired keywords will do for you: bring you loads of free passive traffic from the search engines.
And then there are those bloggers who do want to do it, but don’t do it the right way, assuming that as long as they find a keyword that many people search for, they are all set.
When I build my previous blog, I didn’t do a proper keyword research, so my blog never really ranked for anything that brought me much traffic and more importantly any blogging income.
Here are some keyword rules you need to keep in mind when doing a proper keyword research:
1. 90% of keywords will never bring you much traffic.
2. Out of the remaining 10%, 90% will never bring you any money.
3. Out of the remaining 10%, 90% are way too competitive to consider for your niche.
So you see, you have to give this step some considerable thought BEFORE you move forward with your blog; if not, you’ll just end up wasting your precious resources, like time, trying to generate traffic through networking alone.
3. Pick the wrong domain name
Yes, your domain name is REALLY important for both the search engines and for your potential readers.
This was not one of the mistakes I made with my first blog, but I see bloggers make it time and time again.
Let’s say you are looking for traffic generation tips.
You Google “traffic generation tips” and the first two results come from anahoffman.com and trafficgenerationcafe.com.
Which one would you be more likely to click on? An unknown name or a site that you know focuses on traffic generation?
Exactly.
My next point is that search engine do highly favor domain names with keywords in them.
You know what website ranks #1 for “traffic generation“?
TrafficGeneration.com. Never mind they don’t provide any real information on the topic – their domain name is dead-on keywords.
So, unless you are Seth Godin or Chris Brogan, I highly recommend choosing niche and keyword appropriate domain.
4. Choose the wrong blogging platform
This one is definitely surprising.
Back in the day when I barely knew what a blog was let alone how to create a popular one, it still didn’t take me long to do some quick research and find out that self-hosted WordPress was the way to go.
However, time and time I see many of my readers and friends trying “to make it” in the blogosphere while using Blogger.com and such.
Here are some issues to consider when choosing the right platform for your blog:
1. MONEY: free blogging platforms don’t allow you to use them to make money, that simple. That means no paid ads, no AdSense, no affiliate sales.
And if they catch you do it or if they just THINK that’s what you are trying to do, they’ll shut down your blog in a jiffy.
Imagine waking up one morning and all your hard work is simply gone?
Not a good feeling I bet.
2. SUPPORT: most of the cool themes, great plugins, and awesome forums are focused on WordPress only.
That means that your competitors are leaving you behind in the dust when it comes down to the latest and the greatest to help them run their blogs as a well-oiled machine.
5. Poor design
Mind you, I didn’t say “inexpensive”, but cheap-looking, amateur, unprofessional.
When I first started blogging, I thought that using a free site to design my header would do the trick.
NOT!
Poorly designed header and the overall feel of your site makes your potential reader run faster than a tumbleweed across Arizona desert.
Previously, I was of the “you don’t have to put much money into your blog” thought. Now I switched to “No, you don’t have to put MUCH money, but it would serve you well to put in SOME.”
How much is SOME?
That’s an issue for another post, but I’ll tell you the bottom line: knowing what I know now about blogging, website designing, and making money online efficiently, this is what I would personally do had I needed to start over:
1. Buy a premium theme, like Thesis theme.
2. Hire someone to customize it for you, if you can’t do it yourself. Doesn’t have to be expensive, but professional.
This way will save you $1500 minimum for a custom blog design and get yourself a custom looking, perfectly search engine optimized blog.
6. What is your hook?
No, it’s not enough to have a great-looking blog in a good niche with all the bells and whistles to go with it.
You need to figure out how to stand out from the sea of other blogs and bloggers.
Finding your perfect angle, your unique hook was the most difficult thing I had to do as a blogger.
There are plenty other blogs that talk about traffic generation, SEO, blogging, and such.
Waaaaaay too many, if you ask me.
I had to figure out how to be different despite of all the abundance and redundancy.
Believe it or not, my success came when I stopped trying to “find my voice” and just decided to use the one I already had.
So here are some possible angles you can focus on in your blog:
1. If you already have good personality, look no further; simply be yourself.
2. Take difficult subjects and make them sound simple.
3. Communicate to your readers via videos.
4. Create a multi-author blog and offer differing opinions on the same subject.
5. Make your blog reader-driven, meaning center your blog around Q&A (question and answer) sessions with your readers. In the beginning, you might have to borrow the questions from other blogs or make up your own. 
6. One of the first posts I wrote for my blog was 202 Bite-Sized Tips To Insanely Increase Your Blog Traffic. THAT post can be a goldmine for any creative mind looking to hook their readers and keep them coming for more.
Marketing Takeaway
And there you have it.
Learn from other people’s mistakes – my grandma was right about that. Did I do it? Of course, not.
But now you have a chance to.
Take it.
Love it or hate it? Comment to show me that you’re alive!
Now, I honestly don’t think it had anything to with my overall pitch, but you never know.
