My 1 Year Blogaversary! – A Summary Of My First Year Blogging

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

This week has marked one year since I started The Blog Standard Parent blog! These last 12 months have gone by in a flash. It has been a year long learning curve and I am nowhere near the end of that curve. I have had doubts, made mistakes and considered stopping entirely. On the other hand, I have also had some lovely bits of feedback. I’ve had some real moments of pride and the occasional feeling of making a difference to people. Therefore, I wanted to give an honest account of the ups and downs of my first year blogging. With the hope it may help anyone else who is going through their first year of blogging!

Starting from scratch

I made the decision to start a blog as I wanted to use my experiences working with parents, children and families to help make a difference to as many people as possible. Becoming a parent myself also enhanced my perspective and the way I think about helping families. Therefore, I wanted to use this combination as both a professional and a parent, to give honest, detailed and specific advice around a range of common challenges we can all face as parents.

However, there was one problem with this. I had no idea how to start or a run a blog.

I have no background in website design, blog writing or social media promotion. As a result, I was literally starting from scratch. To say the learning curve to start with was difficult, would be an understatement. I had to spend countless hours online researching what specific terms meant, what the costs would be, how to get a blog up and running and more importantly, how to get people to read it.

After plenty of research, I had bought onto a hosting platform and had a blank canvas of a website. I won’t lie, I had no idea what I was doing to start with. Therefore, I looked at other blog sites and took inspiration from the structure of their blogs and how they would design their website. Slowly but surely, I began to put the website together. Often having to start over or completely re-do sections, having realised I made a number of mistakes. I aimed to have a plain, simple and easy to read blog and once it was finished, I realised I still had so much more to learn.

Having a lot to learn

I would describe entering the world of blogging as like entering a rabbit hole. There are so many different areas to explore, learn about and understand. All of which are interconnected and make a massive difference to the structure of the whole website.

It quickly became overwhelming, realising the various factors that need to be considered when running a blog. Again, having no experience of website design, this was all alien to me. I thought the hardest part would be writing the content and getting engagement with the content. However, I was finding just the setting up of a blog to be very challenging.

SEO, back linking, sitemaps and page speed analysis, all terms that I had never come across before and had to spend hours trying to understand. I still remember reading articles online explaining terms like these and I often found myself, having to then google other words in those articles, as I didn’t understand they terminology used. It felt like a never ending google search learning what all these different words mean!

Thinking were are going well

After a few months of googling, I started to feel as though I was making progress. The blog was up and running, I had started to add content and to my surprise, people were actually reading! My website traffic was increasing and I was getting some positive feedback from those who did read.

Things were going well and I was feeling positive about all the work I had put in. I had a plan of what I still needed to do and how I can grow the blog. Despite having no real writing experience, I was feeling like I could organise my thoughts relatively well, or well enough for people to know what I am getting at!

I dare say at this point, I may have even started to get a bit complacent as my expectations had been surpassed almost across the board. Especially in terms of traffic and page views.

Realising they maybe aren’t going so well

Rest assured, I soon came crashing back down to Earth when I realised things weren’t going as well as I thought. Website traffic sharply dropped, page views were down and I felt completely lost as to why. Was it my content? The blog format? A bunch of technical things I had missed or didn’t think about? Or maybe, I was just out of my depth.

After all the money, time and effort, I felt quite low as I started to feel like it was all wasted. I didn’t know what to do about it, what I was doing wrong or what it all meant. I got completely bogged down in all the data. As I didn’t really have anyone I know who worked in this area or who had a background in website design, I went back to google to look for answers!

More often than not, the information I found on google was a mish mash of different ideas and opinions, none of which made much sense to me. I would find one article telling me one thing, then another with a completely different opinion. Not being able to make heads or tails of it, I decided to do the one thing I could do, which was to just carry on, stay consistent and hope that time heals all wounds!

Thinking I finally understand what I am doing

As the weeks and months went by, things started to click into place for me. I started to learn more about the features of website design, how to make your blog posts more user friendly and rank higher on google. Understanding what the data told me became easier too. But more importantly, I was less concerned with the data and more concerned about the content and being consistent with posting. I found that in doing so, the data changed for the better anyway.

My confidence increased, I became more relaxed and enjoyed running a blog more and more.

(“My Baby Memories” – Affiliate Link)

Becoming confused once again

As consistent as day turning to night, I then found myself full of confusion once again. Understanding what goes into google rankings goes completely over my head. However, there were elements that I started to understand. For example, the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the speed of your website and having a good link structure across your site.

Unfortunately in my naivety, there were some elements of this that I thought I was on top of, but actually wasn’t. For example, when assessing my blogs page speed, everything looked great. That was until I realised I had only been checking the page speed of my home page and not every other page on the website. Once these were checked, I found that I had a big problem. This led on to a full redesign of my website, the features I have on the site and the formatting of every single page/post on the blog. I felt like to just giving up. It felt like every time I started to understand something, there was something else much bigger that cropped up and I had to start over.

This is perhaps the biggest thing I have learned over the last year, especially when you are in your first year of blogging. You are going to have periods of joy and progress, as well as feelings of giving up and deflation. Or maybe that is just me learning as I go!

The cost/time/effort

I always knew that when starting a blog, it is going to require a significant investment of time, effort and money. Dependent on your blog goals, will dictate how much time and cost is required. For me, I have found it difficult to find the balance of running a blog. This alongside working full time and being a parent/husband. I still struggle with this at the moment and often feel guilty. I have guilt that I am not always doing as much as I would like to grow the blog. Whilst also feeling guilty that running a blog takes time away from being a husband and father.

I want the blog to be as successful as possible and want to be able to do more. However, there comes a point in which you must accept there are only so many hours in the day and finding a balance is important.

I just hope I am helping someone out there

Being completely honest, it is only now after blogging for a year, am I starting to see some meaningful progression in achieving some of my blogging goals. The realisation has hit that it is a long term project and sometimes it is a case of not worrying about the short term and focusing on the long term.

My personal goals for the blog is to help as many parents/families out there as possible. I am doing my best to meet this goal and hope that there are some parents out there who have found the information insightful or useful. Parenting is such a subjective topic and we are all products of our own experiences and environments. Hopefully, I just provide some food for thought at the very least.

I have renewed all my subscriptions to continue blogging for another year. I did have to think hard about whether I can commit to the blog. But I felt that with all the time and effort put in, I owe it to myself to continue working at it. There are still so many confusing aspects of blogging to me and I still have a lot to learn. However, I will continue trying to figure it all out and continue growing as much as possible.

Hopefully the time spent over the last year has helped at least one of you out there!

I would love to hear some of your experiences if you run a blog, or have done so in the past. Let me know in the comments below!

(This post contains links from affiliates of this blog. If you make a purchase via the links, you will get a discount and I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to yourself. So everybody wins! All affiliate links will be labelled as such).

Useful links:

• How Do I Get My Child Off Their Phone? – Child Phone Addiction
• 5 Common Toddler Behaviours and How to Manage Them
• The Challenges of Balancing Work and Being a Parent
• The Importance of Being Clear, Calm and Consistent
• 10 Tips to Support Your Child With Their Transition to Secondary School