9 Blogging Mistakes That Cost Me Five Years (And What I’d Do Instead)

It took me five years to make enough money from blogging to live on. Looking back, most of that time was lost to a handful of mistakes that had nothing to do with writing ability.

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. That part is true, and everyone says it. What nobody tells you is that you can shorten the race considerably by not making the nine mistakes below, all of which I made personally.

The turning point was the day I started treating blogging as a job instead of a hobby I felt guilty about. Everything before that was practice.

I am not going to pretend the last few years have been easy either. Google keeps changing the rules and AI answers now sit above the organic results. Traffic that took years to build can disappear in a month. Mine did, which is why the ninth mistake on this list is the one I paid the most for.

Blogging still works. It just requires you to be better at it than it used to.

One more thing before we start. Blogging has advantages and disadvantages, and the disadvantages are real. What separates the bloggers who make it from the ones who quit is not talent. It is that they keep going through the slumps, and there will be slumps.

This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting my small business.

The 9 blogging mistakes I made

The first eight are in no particular order. The ninth is last because it is the most expensive.

1. Staying undecided

I started blogging in 2016 while still working my corporate job. I enjoyed writing, and I wrote whatever I felt like writing, purely for the pleasure of it.

I was not sure I wanted blogging to become a career, so I never bothered to learn it properly. I had a salary. There was no urgency.

The following year I left that job to travel around South America, living off my savings and looking for a way to fund the life I had just started. I loved it. I had no intention of going back to an office.

That left two options: build an online business, or freelance. I wanted the first one, but doubt kept winning.

Every successful blogger I followed was showing their face constantly, posting their daily life, dressed well, hair done. That was not me. I wore the same hiking outfit most days. Comfortable, but not content material. I did not think anyone would care about my life.

And English is not my first language. What if my writing was boring? What if I made too many mistakes? Classic impostor syndrome.

Underneath it all was a bigger question: did I actually want to build a business? I had never seen myself as an entrepreneur. Writing for other people seemed easier. Deliver the article, get paid, move on, no ranking anxiety.

So I kept writing my blog without ever committing. Meanwhile, my savings shrank, and my anxiety grew.

The freelance work never took off either, and since I saw no breakthrough on the blog, I decided that proved I wasn’t cut out for it. It was not proof of anything. It was the predictable result of doing something halfway.

I took a full-time remote job. I learned a lot, and I loved my colleagues, but I had a fixed schedule, and I spent most of it calculating how much I needed to save before I could quit again.

Then the pandemic hit, and I was laid off.

I cried for a couple of hours, and then I made the decision I should have made three years earlier. I was going to be a full-time blogger. Nothing magical happened afterward. Money didn’t appear just because I’d made a decision. But I stopped hedging, and that changed how I worked.

I started writing like there was no tomorrow. But I also learned the business of Blogging; I took courses connected with like-minded people. I had a breakthrough while housesitting on the outskirts of Antigua, Guatemala, overlooking the almighty Acatenango and Fuego Vulcanos.

I worked my ass off for a year, and then a simple switch made my site explode. I built another one, and it took off immediately. Things were finally working out for me, and I was making a living blogging; my ultimate dream came true in full pandemic. I kept working and trying to find ways to grow the business even further until I found Scale Your Travel Blog, a blogging coaching program by Laura Peters, which changed my life completely. The business grew to a size I had never let myself imagine. (more about it later)

What to do instead

Decide. Are you building a business or writing for pleasure? Both are fine; they just require completely different behavior and expectations.

If it is a business, set small, realistic goals, write a plan, and tell the friends who will actually support you. Say nothing to the people who will list all the reasons it will not work. They aren’t being helpful, and you don’t need them. I had only one friend who cheered me on. I regret telling all the others (family included). They made my life harder than it already was.

2. Getting the mindset wrong

This sounds soft. It is not. Mindset is most of the game in any career, and it is nearly all of the game when nobody is paying you yet.

If you keep changing direction, doubt your ability, and measure yourself against people ten years ahead of you, it will not happen. Look at successful bloggers as evidence that it is possible, not as evidence that you are behind.

Maybe you will take longer than they did. Maybe less. Maybe you end up somewhere better. You do not find out until you actually put the work in.

When I was locked down in La Paz, Baja California, just after being laid off, I did the maths. Managed carefully, my savings would last a year. I asked my landlord to meet me halfway on the rent so I could stay through lockdown, and he agreed. As soon as the airport reopened, I went housesitting for a few months, which removed rent entirely and gave me the company of a few cute animals while I worked.

Clearing the money worry was what let me focus. That was a strategic decision, not a mindset quote.

After that, no slump or setback made me reconsider, including long stretches with no progress at all. I had one goal, and I kept going.

What to do instead

Find your reason for doing this and keep it somewhere you can see it. Then reduce your fixed costs as far as you can, because financial panic makes you take bad short-term decisions.

A few mindset books helped me stay focused. Read them if that works for you. Cut your rent either way.

3. Writing before learning how blogging works

This was my biggest mistake after the indecision.

Blogging as a profession is competitive and technical. There is a lot of unglamorous work involved that has nothing to do with writing, and you cannot skip it.

The days of publishing a post and watching it reach page one two months later are gone. Now you need a strategy, keyword research, a site that loads fast, a structure that makes sense, internal links that connect it all, and content good enough that a reader picks it over an AI summary.

What to do instead

Start with Google’s SEO starter guide. It is free, and it comes from the source.

SEO is a large part of blog traffic, but it is not the whole job. You also need to work out:

• what you are blogging about and who it is for
• which theme and hosting to use
• how to structure and organise your content
• how to do keyword research
• how to handle images and site speed
• how you plan to make money before the traffic arrives

All of this is available online in pieces. Good training collects it in one place and saves you months of assembling it yourself.

There is also a real chance you go through this and decide blogging is not for you. That is a useful outcome, not a failure. If what you love is writing and nothing else, freelance writing pays sooner and carries none of this overhead.

Plenty of full-time bloggers barely write anymore. They commission the writing and spend their time on strategy and editing, because strategy is where the job actually lives.

4. Publishing without a plan

This follows directly from the mistake above.

Once you understand how blogging works and you still want to do it, you cannot just start writing. You need an editorial plan built on keyword research so each post has a reason to exist and a place in the site’s structure.

Publishing at random is how you end up with 200 posts and no topic anyone associates you with.

What to do instead

Plan in topics, not in posts. Decide the three or four subjects you want your site to be known for, then build each one out as a group: one main guide covering the subject broadly, and a set of supporting articles answering the narrower questions underneath it.

Do the keyword research for the whole group before you write any of it. That way you find out which angles have search demand and which ones you assumed had demand, and you avoid writing two posts that compete with each other for the same searches.

Decide the internal links at the planning stage. Supporting posts link up to the main guide; the main guide links down to each of them. If you leave this until later, you will not do it.

Keep the plan in a simple spreadsheet: target keyword, search intent, the group it belongs to, status, publication date. It does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist, so that when you sit down to write, you are not choosing a topic; you are just writing the next one.

Review it every few months and cut what no longer fits. A plan you never revise turns into another way of publishing at random.

5. Writing what I wanted instead of what people search for

This is the part that disappoints most new bloggers.

Established sites with authority can publish almost anything and rank. The rest of us cannot. I have been blogging for years and I still cannot.

Brandon Gaille, who hosts The Blogging Millionaire podcast, explains that he built his traffic by writing 80 percent of his posts around low-competition keywords, including topics he had no particular interest in, and 20 percent about whatever he wanted.

If you want to write purely for the pleasure of it, Medium exists, and so does the personal blog. Nothing wrong with either.

But if this is the business, you do not get to write only what you feel like writing. I did that for years, and it is exactly why it took me five to grow my blog.

What to do instead

Find low-difficulty keywords inside your topic and build articles around them. Roughly 80 percent of your output goes there. The other 20 percent is yours.

Apply common sense. If you blog about dogs and you find a beautifully easy keyword about cats, it is still the wrong article.

Keywords are one ranking factor out of many, but they decide whether anyone ever finds the post. An article nobody reads did not really get published.

6. Buying courses because someone else loved them

There are hundreds of blogging courses and, apparently, blogging coaches. Choosing between them is a skill in itself.

When you are desperate for answers, “make money easily” messaging is very hard to resist. Resist it.

The harder trap is a successful friend recommending something. If she says it works, it must work. Not necessarily.

I made that mistake twice, with a Pinterest course and a blogging course, both bought purely on recommendation. Neither was wrong. Both were wrong for me, at my level, with my way of thinking. I could have asked for a refund and did not, because I felt bad about it.

That was money I could have spent on something useful. I do my own research now before buying any course or tool.

What to do instead

Do not let one bad purchase stop you from finding the right teacher. Check what level the course is aimed at, look for a refund window, and ask what specifically it will teach you that you cannot already find. I found in Laura Peters from Scale Your Travel Blog the coach I needed; even if she was not coaching me on a one-to-one basis, I still found priceless value in her course, and I still do, 4 years later.

7. Publishing inconsistently

For my first three years, I wrote when I felt like it. That is the single easiest mistake to fix, and I did not fix it for three years.

What to do instead

Consistency covers more than new posts. It means updating old ones, building links, and keeping up with what is changing in search, which right now is changing constantly.

Pick a publishing rhythm you can hold during a bad week, not your best one.

8. Choosing a pretty theme over a fast one

I picked a WordPress theme that was complex, heavy, and slow. I didn’t know any better because I hadn’t studied this. I just wanted a good-looking blog.

Site speed affects both rankings and whether readers stay. A slow site loses people before they read a word. As soon as I switched the theme, my site took off, literally.

What to do instead

Pick a lightweight theme. GeneratePress or Kadence are the ones most bloggers land on. If you are not technical, pay a developer once to set the site up properly rather than fighting it for a year.

I am using Kadence and love it. You don’t need the paid version unless you have a woocommerce plugin on your site and you need to customize it. The free version works just fine. Ask Claude to help you customize it if you want a specific layout; it can give you the exact code you need to customize the Gutenberg blocks. It worked wonders, and now my site has a layout that I actually love and is still light and swift.

9. Building the whole business on one traffic source

Every mistake above is about getting traffic. This one is about what happens after you get it.

Boundless Roads was doing 160,000 sessions a month from Google. After the Helpful Content Update and the arrival of AI answers in the search results, it fell to 20,000. There was no penalty and no warning. The traffic simply evaporated slowly and surely in about six months.

It is back to somewhere between 48,000 and 50,000 now, and a meaningful share of that arrives from Flipboard rather than Google and some from Pinterest and Facebook.

The lesson is not that SEO is dead. I still write for search, and it still works. The lesson is that I built an entire income on a channel I didn’t control, and when it broke, I had nothing else ready.

Laura from Scale Your Travel Blog emphasizes growing your email list and built her new course around it. This is something that didn’t work for me, or maybe I didn’t want to put in the work (talking about the non-glamorous part of blogging)

What to do instead

Keep doing SEO. Add one channel you own outright, which means an email list, and one distribution channel that sends traffic without Google’s permission. Start both while the traffic is good. Nobody builds a mailing list calmly during a traffic collapse.

My blogging resources

The two blogging coaches I still follow

I have bought a lot of courses over the years. Some were useful, some were wrong for me, and a few are simply out of date now, which is what happens to anything written about SEO more than two years ago.

Two people are the exception. Laura Peters Abalo from Scale Your Travel Blog and Jessie Festa from Jessie on a Journey are the only two I still follow, still learn from, and would point anyone towards. I am a student of both programs, which is the only reason I can tell you how they differ in practice rather than comparing sales pages.

They run completely different business models, and that difference matters more than it sounds, because the model decides what kind of help you actually get and how much risk you take to find out.

Jessy on a journey (travel blog prosperity and other courses) by Jessie Festa, the membership model

You pay monthly for as long as you want access, currently 49 USD, with an annual option around 388 USD. Use the Cupon Code Boundless9 to get you the first month for 9 USD, and you can cancel anytime, though there are no refunds, so cancel before your billing date rather than after.

What you get is a library of more than 100 courses and workshops, at least one new live workshop a month, a private Facebook group, mastermind groups, and a weekly email with paid opportunities like writing gigs and collaborations. Some members cover the membership fee from that email alone.

The model means low risk and low commitment. It also means nobody is chasing you. The library is deep enough that you have to arrive knowing roughly what you need, or you will spend three months browsing. It suits you if you want a reference library, a network of other bloggers, and ongoing access to someone established without a large upfront spend.

Scale Your Travel Blog by Laura Peters, the high-ticket coaching model

This is the one I get asked about most, and the one I am a student of.

Laura and her husband Mike built Mike & Laura Travel, worked out an SEO process that took them from a few thousand readers a month to over fifty thousand inside six months, and then turned that process into a program. She also runs the Travel Blogging Summit.

The structure is the opposite of a membership. It is one purchase, in the region of 2,500 USD, or six monthly installments of around 430 USD, and it buys a course plus group coaching, a community, and hands-on work on your actual site: keyword research, site audits, and reviews of your posts.

The model means real money upfront and no cancel button. In exchange, you get someone looking at your specific pages instead of handing you a library and wishing you luck. That is worth a great deal once you have published for a year and cannot work out why nothing ranks. It is worth very little when you have twelve posts and no data for anyone to audit.

This is the course that took my site from 60,000 to 160,000 monthly views.

Laura took me by the hand and gave me the tools I actually needed: a full site audit, a specific action plan, the keywords to tackle first and in what order, and a system that covered the technical side and the mindset side together. The second part matters more than people expect it to.

What I value most is that she keeps the material current. The content gets adjusted as the blogging space shifts, which it does constantly, so you are not working from strategies that quietly stopped working two years ago.

It looks expensive until you look at what comes with it. Laura has a team of professionals she trained herself, and they are there to answer questions and look at your work. That used to run through a Facebook group and now happens in Skool.

That 160,000 is the same number I lost after the Helpful Content Update. Laura’s system built it. What Google did afterward was outside anyone’s system, and I still use the process, and I am presently going through the new course guideline and applying the teachings. She actually helped me bring the numbers back from 20K to 50K, and I am working to keep climbing back up.

Which one

If you are unsure, start with the membership. One month tells you whether the approach suits you, and the downside is the price of a takeaway. Move to the high ticket program when you already know something is broken on your site and you want someone qualified looking at it directly.

Both prices are current as of publication. Check before you buy, because both change.

Plugins and tools I use

• Hosting: Cloudways
• Keyword research: Keysearch
• Table of contents: Easy Table of Contents
• Social Scheduling: Metricool

How bloggers actually make money

Display ads. Usually the steadiest income once the traffic is there. The entry requirements changed significantly in January 2026, so ignore the numbers quoted in older posts. Mediavine’s Journey program now accepts sites from 1,000 monthly sessions, tracked through their Grow plugin. Mediavine’s main network moved from a traffic minimum to a revenue one and now asks for 5,000 USD in annual ad revenue. Raptive, formerly AdThrive, dropped its entry point from 100,000 pageviews a month to 25,000. Monumetric still sits around 10,000 pageviews.

Once you are accepted, the network handles placement, and you manage everything else from a dashboard, including the reports you use to decide what to write next. I am with Raptive.

Affiliate marketing. Almost every company runs a program, either directly or through networks like Awin, CJ, Impact, Amazon, Viator, Booking.com, Expedia, GetYourGuide and DiscoverCars. You place links where they genuinely belong in a post, which is the part most people get wrong. Scattering links does nothing. Matching the right product to the right moment in the right article is a skill, and it is worth learning properly, because affiliate income is how you earn while you are still building the traffic that qualifies you for an ad network. You do not need big numbers to start.

My most profitable platforms are TravelPayout and Stay22, and DiscoverCars.com

Travelpayouts

I’ve been using Travelpayouts to monetize my travel content and wanted to share it with you. Instead of joining a dozen travel affiliate programs separately, each with its own login, threshold and payday, it puts over 60 travel brands into one account with one dashboard and one monthly payment. What made the difference for me was the widgets: live search forms you can place inside an article so readers can check real prices for their own dates without leaving your page. Plain text links do not convert anywhere near as well. Sign up free here.

I do use DiscoverCars’ own affiliate though, because it’s more profitable and I have a great partnership with them.

Stay22

Stay22 is the one I use for accommodation, and only for accommodation. It turns a hotel recommendation into a map with live prices across booking platforms, so a reader who cannot use your exact suggestion because it is booked, too expensive for their dates or in the wrong part of town can still find something in the same area and book it. That is where most accommodation links quietly fail. I keep it in the Where to Stay section and nowhere else.

These are two of the tools I use to run my travel sites. See my full list of blogging tools and the courses that got me here.

Your own products. Ebooks, printables, presets, courses, physical products, whatever fits your topic. This is the income stream that does not depend on Google.

Sponsored partnerships. Once you have authority in a niche, brands will pay for content and exposure. Terms vary enormously and you negotiate each one.

Those are the mistakes that cost me the most time. If I had avoided even three of them, I would have got here in half the time.

If you think I have missed something, or you are stuck on one of these, tell me in the comments.

FInal thoughts

Looking back at all nine, none of them were about writing ability.

They were decisions I avoided making. Whether this was a business or a hobby. What the site was actually about. Who I was writing for. Where the traffic would come from if Google changed its mind. I kept working hard while leaving those questions open, and hard work does not compensate for an unanswered question. It just gets you to the wrong place faster.

The delays cost me more than the wrong turns did. Buying two courses that were wrong for me cost money I could afford to lose. Spending three years unsure whether I wanted this cost me three years.

People ask whether it is still worth starting now, with AI answers sitting on top of the results and traffic behaving the way it has. My honest answer is that it is harder than it was in 2016, and what makes it hard isn’t what most people think.

Generic content is finished. Anything a machine can assemble from other people’s articles has no value now, and it won’t come back. What survives is writing that comes from somewhere: places you actually went, mistakes you actually made, opinions you are willing to put your name on. That is bad news if you were planning to rewrite what already ranks. It is good news if you have something real to say, because the competition just got thinner.

I lost 80 percent of my traffic, and I am still here, still writing, still rebuilding. Five years to get it working, and I would do it again. I would just skip the first three.

If you are stuck on one of these, or you think I have missed a mistake worth adding, tell me in the comments. I read all of them.