Blogging is an exciting thing. Even more exciting is being a newbie blogger. Every matured living being passes few stages before becoming so. For instance, there is a single cell stage, an embryo, new born, child, teen and so on. Similarly every blogger is a newbie before becoming a matured blogger. And there are certain stages every newbie blogger passes through. Here I discuss 5 stages every newbie blogger comes across.
1. Excited blogger
This is the very first step of every newbie blogger. He/She cannot miss the initial excitement when starting to blog. It won’t be inappropriate to call it over-excitement. In this over-excited state, a newbie blogger can go as crazy as he/she can.
For instance some or all of the following things can happen: Purchasing bunches and bunches of cheap domain names, starting blogs at every profitable niche prevalent in the world, posting three or four times a day, downloading all plugins and installing them (and getting screwed), downloading all free ebooks (or literally anything available in pdf format) that talks about blogging and so on. The list is not exhaustive. Even more crazy things can happen.
At this stage, the blogger is either excited about his/her own blog or even sometimes excited about an A-lister blog.
2. The stat checker
The first thing every blogger does after launching a blog, even before publishing a single post, is to check stats. That is purely human nature to be curious about who is visiting the blog. But this curiosity takes over everything else at the earlier stages of blogging.
Checking stats becomes the blogger’s irresistible thing. Even without concentrating on writing blog posts, even without worrying about the design and the misaligned pages of the blog, even without taking into account that it has been just one week after the blog has been launched, the blogger couldn’t resist himself/herself checking the stats every hour.
When there is one new visitor since the last check that is a great motivation. But if there are no visitors to the blog, which is what is to be expected at this stage, the blogger becomes disappointed and frustrated. This is a big factor that greatly affects the development of the blog, especially at its initial stage when extra care and effort are needed to build the blog without worrying about the stats.
3. The monetization phobic
The blogger at this stage does Google searches (hundreds of them) to learn about all types of monetization techniques for a blog. PPC, CPC, CPM, PPM, ABC or XYZ… whatever! The blogger ruthlessly reads about all sorts of advertising.
He/She struggles hard to get an Adsense account approved. If this step doesn’t turn out to be successful, then the blogger Googles for “Adsense alternates”. As always there are a bunch of them available. So the blogger starts accounts in all of those advertising websites, puts all those banners on the blog and BOOM! One gets a beautiful site that has misaligned banners which blink, change colours, flash kisses at you and sell you stuff.
That is not all. There are places where one can do direct selling of ad banners. There are also in-text ads, strip ads, interstial ads, you name it. The blogger sincerely tries them all out and gets frustrated to see that the earning for the past three months is $0.50.
4. Endless learner
This is when the excitement in down a little bit. The blogger’s focus is now not on writing for their own blog(s) but to know what others are writing about. That is good, but it is actually over done or done endlessly.
The blogger starts reading a killer article about “how to blog successfully” from a A-lister blog; the article ends and there are a bunch of related posts. Oh there is that interesting post about “how to earn $1000 dollars from your blog in less than a month” and that article gets a click. This goes on and on- reading comments, related posts, about the products the A-lister is offering and so on.
And, now the blogger looks at his/her clock when it is almost mid-night. He/she feels so tired and hence goes to bed. Great!
5. Stat-free minded blogger
This is the stage when the newbie blogger becomes a matured blogger. I call him/her matured blogger not because his/her blog is now getting 10000 page views per day but the blogger is very well aware of what blogging is really about.
The blogger exactly knows what it takes to develop a good blog, what it is about to write quality content, what are the factors that are to be taken care of at this stage of blogging, and what are the things that are not to be taken care of.
The blogger now knows that blogging is not about building it, forgetting it and earning while snoring. It is about developing a good quality blog which has useful and valuable content, developing trust and good relationship with the readers, maintaining the motivation at a consistent level and sticking to it without worrying about anything else.
How about you when you were or are a newbie?
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