I Broke the “START A NEW BLOG 101” Rules and Used My Instagram Account

Yes, yes, I know that one of the rules of starting a blog is to write, write, write the first month or so and get a robust number of posts before diving into the social media realm, but I couldn’t help making an Instagram account. Which you can find here.

Tl;dr I started using my Insta account for this blog, which got me a couple followers and traffic to my website, but there’s not much for people to look at, so I’ll go back to writing for now.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to start a blog and what TO do and what NOT to do. I’ve come across some really great tips. Most of these have come from YouTube videos that I don’t care to look up right now. You can find them if you search for tips on starting a blog. 

Other info has come from other blogs on how they started. I think a lot of those posts are click-bait-y and you, I, WE as regular bloggers will never make the money they promise you can make as a blogger. My goal has never been to make a lot of money. I just want to make enough to pay rent and my student loans while staying a public librarian, and having spending money for travel, yarn, and camera lenses.

So maybe my blog can help others like me, who want to start blogging to share a passion and hopefully pay for that passion, while going about their life with a regular full-time job you don’t want to give up because you got a master’s degree for it, dang it, and WILL be putting that money to use.

Like I said – come for the travel tips, stay for the rants.

Anyway. Back to blogs about starting a blog.

Of course, there’s a lot of conflicting information in all of these posts. I got a lot of those clickbait-y sites but once I started Googling “normal people starting blogs” I found some good ones. 

I liked what Caroline Vencil had to say in this post and then perused the rest of her site. From her advice, I:

  • Set up Rambling Librarian accounts on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter 
  • Discovered ShareaSale and CJ for affiliate marketing (I had already signed up for ClickBank and have been looking into AvantLink, who partners with a lot of travel-related companies)
    • Note: I just tried signing up with ShareaSale and they require an application. Need to remember to hold off on those until I’m a little more established…
  • Learned about link parties (??) and am going to look into them.
  • Pinterest is your friend.

I also found this “sweet & simple life” blog post on what to focus on in your first month. She stressed:

  • First you should figure out your target audience, combining your passion/interests and your experience. Welcome, all my other finance-limited lovers of travel and beginner photography!
  • SEO resources MOZ, BackLinko, and Neil Patel
  • Avoid posting on Instagram
  • Pinterest is your friend.

Another “ultimate guide to your first month of blogging” post I found was through Busy Being Mummy. And while I’m not a mom OR a mummy, she still had great tips, like:

  • A great “WordPress plugins you should consider” list (most of which I did then go and install even though I have no idea what to do with them).
  • Use AnswerThePublic.com for research
  • Hootsuite to set up social media posts and time their release

I looked at a bunch more sites in addition to the above, but this last post might have been my favorite because the author broke down what you needed to focus on each week of the first month. It’s easy for me to become overwhelmed with a lot of information, and the way she laid everything out worked well with my neurodivergent brain. I’m definitely going to browse through the rest of her site.

The main overarching theme from all these sites (other than Pinterest) that I didn’t put in the bulleted lists was to WRITE WRITE WRITE. A new blog post every day! 1-4 posts a week! Just get stuff out there no matter how bad and you can fix it later! Quality over quantity – you only grow as a blog if you have great content!

I feel ya, dude.

See what I mean about inconsistencies?? From my research, this is what I have gathered about the first month of blogging and what I’ve done or plan to do:

  • If not decided yet, figure out your niche and your audience. Mine is starting a bit broader than the posts suggested, but I figure I can use my analytics tools to see what works and what doesn’t to keep narrowing down, if needed.
  • Set up your website and domain. I did a bunch of research and decided to use Hostinger because it was the cheapest startup I could find. For about $36 a year you can get your blog up and running with hosting, a free domain, lifetime SSL, and DDoS protection. Those last two are to keep your website secure. If you click that Hostinger link, you can get a 20% discount on an already low price!
  • Start setting up your blog as you blindly make your way through WordPress. Become so confused and frustrated that you completely erase everything and start all over from the beginning with a boring looking website, but hey, at least the logo is correct.
  • Create a Google Drive folder for your blog. Create a “blog post ideas” doc to jot those down at any time and a “blog posts” doc to start writing posts/creating outlines.
  • Snag all the social media account handles for your blog.
  • Write at least a post a week. Find a good editorial calendar to help you organize and plan them. Spend hours perusing the free ones from Microsoft and Trello, but never decide on one. Think you can just create your own in Google Sheets in your Blog folder, and hope that works. Still haven’t created a Sheets doc for your calendar by the end of the month.
  • Sign up for some affiliate links.
  • Marketing plan?

As you can see, I’m very much on top of this whole blogging business.

[insert fake optimism here]

Many of the videos I watched and blogs I read said to not even worry about social media after setting up your accounts. Just focus on getting those posts out there so that people will have something to look at when you start sending them. Which is what my plan was going to be.

However, after buying my camera and then digging into photography and learning about composition and exposure and lighting (more on that research later), I started going through some of my old travel photos and decided to go ahead and post some to see how they’d do. I used Snapseed to edit them a while ago and they still look pretty good.

This one isn’t even up yet – SNEAK PEEK!

So, I decided to just go ahead and start posting one a day or so. I’ve gotten some likes and a couple followers in just a couple days, so maybe that will continue and maybe it won’t. I have gotten some new clicks on this website and until I figure out how to use Google Analytics, I suppose most of those have been through Instagram.

Which now makes me sad there’s not more content for people to look at. OKAY OKAY OKAY. I guess I’ll get back to writing. (if you click that link and there are still only 2 blog posts there, I am very very sorry. I have failed you.)

P.S. I decided to add a tl;dr at the top of this post because holy moly did I ramble on and on. I really did choose the perfect name for my blog. Maybe I’ll add a tl;dr to every post!

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