A whole year of consistently blogging! This blog has been like my third child this past year and a lot of lessons have been learnt along the way. I wanted to share this post about all the things I’ve learned from my first year of blogging, partly as a review for myself and hopefully to help you reach your goals quicker than did!
I’ll be sharing my top blogging success tips, things I wish I had known before starting a blog and finally, blogging myths debunked. These are tips or strategies I heard a lot, that didn’t work.
So if you’re looking to start a blog in 2025 or if you’d like to grow an existing one, read on. This post is full of realistic, actionable advice I’ve learned from my first year of bogging.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of my links, I may earn a small commission, there is no additional cost to you and I am extremely grateful as it helps me to run my blog.
THE HISTORY OF MY BLOG
I initially started my blog alexjessicamills.com 4 years ago, at the end of 2020. I published a few posts randomly with no idea what I was really doing. It wasn’t until a year ago, in March 2025 I made a commitment to take it seriously. I learnt about how to blog properly, stay consistent and actually started to grow my blog.
My niche is family travel, especially in London and New York (as we’ve lived in these cities). I also write occasional posts about fashion and some family lifestyle posts that I know will interest my target audience.
I’m a full-time mum so I currently get roughly one, maximum of two hours a day to work on my blog (while my eldest is at school and my little one naps). So my blogging journey has been understandably a slower one than someone working on their blog as a full-time job. Even with a small amount of time, I have still been able to make good progress during this first year of blogging.
THINGS I’VE LEARNT FROM MY FIRST YEAR OF BLOGGING
In this section, I’ll be sharing the blogging lessons I’ve learned, blogging mistakes to avoid and top tips for beginners.
WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW
This may sound incredibly silly. However, when I started my blog, I wanted it to be something for myself, outside of being a stay-at-home mum. In reality, writing about travel from my pre-mum point of view was quite tricky as it’s a completely different lifestyle.
Once I rebranded to focus on family travel, inspiration for the post came flooding in and I had so much to write about. My posts are also more valuable to my audience as I know this topic so well and have so much detailed knowledge to share.
Knowing you’re target audience is extremely important. Further to that, how can you help them? It sounds very harsh but people don’t care about you, they care about what you can do for them.
YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE TIME
Time is so precious and something we all seem to be short of. If you want to take blogging seriously, you have to make the time for it and set a schedule that works for you.
As I mentioned, I get around an hour and a half a day to work on my blog. It’s not that long but I try to make sure I’m fully focused in that hour. That often means getting on with other household jobs early in the morning and sacrificing sitting down with a cup of tea but that’s the only way I can create the time I need.
YOUR BLOG THEME MATTERS
The best blogging platform is wordpress.org (not .com). Once you’ve downloaded WordPress and decided on Hoasting (I use Bluehoast). You need to pick a theme for your blog.
I did do some research on themes before I picked one but I was mainly focused on the design and how it looked.
Of course, you want your blog to look aesthetically pleasing but more importantly, you want it to be fast. When Google ranks websites in its search, it favours ones which load faster.
I have recently updated my theme to Astra, this is one of the most popular free WordPress themes known for being very fast. The great thing is it’s very customizable. Meaning you can easily change colours and layouts to suit your branding. This took a bit of time and my traffic took a hit but it has bounced back much stronger.
DO KEYWORD RESEARCH
When writing posts your SEO and keyword research really is so important. I knew about SEO before I started but didnt fully understand it.
Ideally, you find keywords/phrases that have a high volume of searches but low competition. However, this is easier said than done.
Places to Research Keywords:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner (a free tool)
- Google Search – when you type a key phrase into Google, scroll down and it will give you a list of questions related to this topic that people often ask.
- Pinterest – firstly by using the search box and secondly by looking at Pinterest Trends (on desktop only)
- Chat GDP – it can make great suggestions but double-check them as it isn’t always accurate.
There are also lots of sights you can subscribe to to help you find keyword ideas.
When you have a list of relevant keywords and phrases you want to include them organically throughout your post. Make sure your main focus keyphrase is in your title, first paragraph, some subheadings and your meta description.
You should also make sure to SEO your pages/categories and tags as you set them up. This was a long and tedious job for me to go back and do a year later!
LINK YOUR OTHER POSTS AND MAKE IT BOLD
Once you’ve written a few posts, you can start linking the other posts you’ve written you think your readers will like. This will help with your SEO and also with your engagement time.
Unfortunately, readers don’t read every word of your posts, they’ll skim to pick out what they need. If you don’t make your links prominent, they can easily be missed.
If it is relevant, now make a section in my blog posts with a bold heading and a list of 3 or 4 of my other posts which might interest my readers. I put this near the start and near the end of my posts.
You can also include backlinks throughout the post if they’re relevant. For example, I have a post on How to Spend 4 Days in London with Kids. In this post I include Tower Bridge, so I can write: Read More: Our full guide to Tower Bridge and link it. I usually make these a separate line and make the text box coloured so it stands out even more.
ALSO MAKE AFFILIATE LINKS STAND OUT
If you’d like to make money from your blog, affiliate links will be a big part of that. Like your internal links, you’ll want to make your affiliate links stand out. For example:
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR EMPIRE STATE BUILDING TICKETS HERE
As a travel blogger, I use two sites for affiliate links, that are:
Travel Payouts and Stay22 – Stay22 has generated more revenue but Travel Payouts has more options of brands you can link to.
I also use RewardStyle/LTK to link any fashion items or products I recommend.
PROMOTION IS KEY
I saw an article saying you should be spending 20% of your time writing your blog and 80% promoting it. I didnt save the article so I can’t link to it but I had never thought of it like that.
In reality, it is fairly hard to rank highly in Google Search as there is so much competition around. But there are many other ways to promote your blog.
Pinterest is the biggest for me. Take some time to research how it works as it is more of a search engine than a social media platform. The great thing about it is, that pins can stay relevant forever. Unlike Instagram when your content is gone in a couple of days. I make 4 or 5 pins per blog post and schedule them using Pinterest’s own scheduling tool.
Facebook is often overlooked but I have found it to bring me a lot of traffic. Join groups relevant to your niche, for example, I am in many London and NYC groups that allow you to share blog links if they directly answer someone’s question. Do check the group rules as some dont allow you to do this.
Unless you have a big Instagram or TikTok following, they might not bring you much traffic but it all counts.
BLOGGING MYTHS DEBUNKED
In this section, I’ll be talking about some of the advice I read that I listened to and wished I hadn’t. These are some of the most common mistakes for first-time bloggers to make and how to avoid them. There are also some blogging myths which I think are important to know before you start blog writing.
JUST GET STARTED
This was the most common advice I read on other blog posts. Yes, you do need to get started, there will always be a reason to delay or other things happening. If you dont get started nothing will happen.
But honestly, please dont just randomly start writing as I did, this must be the most common new blogger mistake and the reason so many blogs fail! Take some time to research and plan before you dive in.
Make yourself a schedule you can stick to. Make sure to factor in both writing and promoting your blog when creating your plan. Google values consistency and if you try to take on too much at once, you’ll burn out.
How many blog posts should you publish? Realistically, if you want to take your blog seriously you need to post once a week as a minimum. If you want to grow quicker, up to 4 posts a week. However, make sure it is quality, useful content. Don’t post for the sake of it!
I aim for one blog post and also try to publish about 10 Pinteret pins per week. Some for new posts and some for old posts. I look through Facebook groups daily (or every other day) to see if there are any posts I can comment on. Finally, I post on Instagram 3 x per week and share stories when I can.
YOU’LL MAKE A FORTUNE QUICKLY
I see a lot of blogging advice on Pinterest, pins titled things like “How to make 10k a month from a new blog” and “How I made 1k in my first month of blogging” etc. While these things may be possible, it’s not likely for the majority of bloggers.
Building a profitable blog is not an easy side hustle or a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes a lot of time and dedication and you might not see a financial reward for a while.
Can you make money from a blog? You definitely can both from affiliate and ad revenue as well as sponsored posts but these will take time.
YOU NEED TO NICHE DOWN
This is an unpopular opinion but I dont believe you need a very narrow niche to be a blogger, people love to see lifestyle content.
Since I stopped posting general travel on my Instagram page and started to focus only on London, I have seen great growth. On a social platform such as Instagram, a strong niche is beneficial. People like to know what to expect from you.
With a blog you can be broader, you do however need to know your audience. I post family travel guides about multiple destinations and also fashion and lifestyle posts. I am my own target audience so I make sure all my posts are on topics I think my audience will enjoy and fit with my ‘brand identity’.
I hope this post on things I learned from blogging over the past year has been useful to you and I wish you every success writing your new blog.
This isn’t the usual subject I write about, but if you’ve found it useful, I’d be happy to share more in this area. Let me know in the comments!
