Introducation
When I was writing this post, it gave me that aha moment..
As I was looking at the reasons why I didn’t make it in the last 2 years of blogging, I saw others start getting good traffic in 4 months or just receive their first $100 affiliate payment.
I used to blame my circumstances and Google (while its little-bit-true updates suck) for not growing.
It was a bittersweet moment because when I looked at those, I said to myslef that how did I even make $ 25 since everything was going wrong with me.
So if you are planning to start a blog or have a new blog, you will find value in this post, from wrong niche selection to technical SEO mistakes I have covered 8 different types of mistakes in this post that I have made as a beginner, so you can avoid them and save your time in enjoying the journey.
Mistake 1: Frequent Niche Pivot
I have pivoted the niche atleast 4 times, it could be even more in hopes of finding the perfect niche.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, but what happened was I got confused so much because every new niche means I had to start from scratch, do all the keyword research, figure out the target audience, competitors, and especially write blog posts again.
Not only this, but I also confused Google’s algorithm to the point that it started to ignore my new posts, which did great damage to my website and all the hard work I did
The biggest lesson I learned is that it’s better to stick to one niche and publish at least 50 posts before deciding anything, as execution beats a perfect niche that changes every month.
Mistake 2: Selecting YMYL Niche
One of the biggest mistakes I made was choosing a YMYL niche without knowing how important it is.
YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. These are topics that can affect a person’s health, finances, safety, or well-being. Because bad information can cause real harm, Google holds these topics to a much higher standard.
At the time, I didn’t know any of this.
I followed what everyone said to “follow your passion” and was interested in mental health and psychology, so I started writing about topics like anxiety, depression, CBT, therapy, and human behavior. I spent hours researching every article.
Six or seven months later, I realized almost nothing was happening.
My articles weren’t ranking. Some weren’t even getting indexed.
Eventually, I understood why.
Google wasn’t comparing me to other beginner bloggers. It was comparing me to Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Healthline, licensed therapists, psychologists, and organizations with real expertise.
I wasn’t a therapist, psychologist, or mental health professional. I was simply someone who was passionate about the topic.
Looking back, I actually agree with Google’s decision.
If someone is searching for help with depression, anxiety, or therapy, the information they read can affect real-life decisions. Good intentions don’t automatically make someone qualified to give advice.
So, I learnt that passion and expertise are not the same thing.
If you’re a new blogger, think carefully before entering a YMYL niche. Unless you have real expertise, credentials, or strong authority, you’ll be competing against some of the most trusted websites on the internet from day one.
Mistake 3: I Chose a Niche With Very Little Potential
After the mental health niche, I went back to researching niche ideas, and I heard the same advice to go micro-niche. A smaller niche usually means less competition, which should make it easier to rank.
So after some research, I landed on an idea around journaling for college students in the first year of college.
At first, I thought it was perfect. There wasn’t much competition, the audience was clear, and it felt specific enough to stand out. But again, after months, I saw a major problem.
I wasn’t actually passionate about journaling. I wasn’t someone who journaled every day, and I quickly began running out of topics to write about. There are only so many ways you can talk about prompts, journals, note-taking, and self-reflection before the content starts becoming repetitive.
The second problem was monetization. My goal was never just to get traffic. I wanted to build an audience and eventually make money from the blog.
The more I looked at the niche, the more I realized it would be difficult. College students generally don’t have a lot of disposable income, and there weren’t many products or services that naturally fit the audience.
Even if I managed to get traffic, turning that traffic into income would be hard.
Looking back, I learned that low competition alone doesn’t make a niche good. A niche also needs enough topics to write about for years, not months. It needs an audience with real problems, and if your goal is to build a business, it needs people who are willing and able to spend money.
Otherwise, you can end up building an audience that is difficult to monetize, no matter how much work you put in.
Mistake 4: I Spent More Time Researching Than Publishing
This is probably the mistake that cost me the most time.
I became a victim of analysis paralysis. Even today, I still catch myself doing it sometimes, but during my first year of blogging, it happened almost every day. Whenever it was time to sit down and write, I would find something else to research about.
I researched niches. I researched keywords. I compared competitors. I watched SEO videos, read blog posts, bought courses, studied successful websites, and spent hours looking for the “best” opportunities. Every day felt productive because I was learning something new.
The problem was that I wasn’t actually publishing much. Instead of writing articles, I kept collecting information.
I personally think that research should have been maybe 20% of the work, and publishing should have been the other 80%. In my case, it was the opposite. I spent most of my time learning about blogging and very little time actually blogging.
The result was predictable.
I never stayed in one niche long enough to build real momentum. I never published enough articles to get meaningful feedback from Google. I never gave myself enough chances to improve because improvement only happens when you do the work.
Sometimes I wonder where I would be today if I had simply written 35 or 50 articles instead of spending hundreds of hours researching. Even if those articles were bad, I would have learned more from publishing them than from consuming another SEO video.
Mistake 5: I Used AI As a Replacement for Thinking
When AI tools started becoming popular, it felt like every video was saying the same thing.
Use AI to write blog posts, generate content, and scale faster.
Like many beginners, I got excited and started using AI heavily in my writing process. The problem wasn’t that I used AI. The problem was that I started relying on it too much.
Most of my articles became a collection of information that AI had already found somewhere else on the internet. The content wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t adding anything new either. It lacked personal experience, original insights, and real stories.
At the time, I didn’t understand why this was a problem.
Then I realized something important: people don’t follow blogs for information only, they also follow the person and voice behind it.
The soul of the blog is the art that only comes from human experience and touch.
I was letting AI do most of the thinking instead of using it as a tool to support my own ideas.
As a result, the content felt generic and forgettable. If someone removed my name from the article, there would be no way to tell that I wrote it.
Mistake 6: I Chased Keywords I Had No Chance of Ranking For
Another mistake I made was chasing keywords with very high competition.
Whenever I did keyword research, I would see a keyword with 10,000 or 20,000 monthly searches and immediately get excited.
In my mind, more search volume meant more traffic, and more traffic meant more success. So I started targeting those keywords.
The problem was that I didn’t understand SEO well enough at the time. I knew a little about keyword difficulty, but I didn’t know anything about backlinks and domain authority. I was competing against websites with thousands of backlinks, years of authority, and entire teams creating content.
As a brand-new blogger, I had almost no chance of outranking or even competing with them.
It didn’t matter how much effort I put into those articles. The competition was simply too strong.
What I should have done instead was focus on smaller, less competitive keywords. Even if they only had 10, 30, or 70 searches a month, they would have given me a chance to get traffic, build authority, and gain confidence.
Most successful blogs don’t start by ranking for the biggest keywords in their niche. They start small, earn trust, and gradually work their way up.
Mistake 7: I Broke My Website Right When Things Started Working
This was probably the most painful mistake I made.
After all the niche changes, failed experiments, and months of struggling, I finally started seeing some progress.
One of my articles ranked on the first page of Google for a trending keyword, and for the first time, it felt like the site was moving in the right direction.
Around that time, I decided to move my website from Squarespace to WordPress.
The problem was that I had no idea what I was doing.
I thought it would be a simple migration. Export the content, import it into WordPress, connect the domain, and everything will continue working as before. Unfortunately, website migrations are rarely that simple.
During the move, my permalink structure was changed, and I had no idea how important that was. The URLs on Squarespace were different from the URLs on WordPress, and I didn’t properly set up redirects.
As a result, many of my pages broke, internal links stopped working, and Google suddenly couldn’t find content that had previously been indexed.
Things got even worse.
Some pages were deindexed, including my best performing blog post, and it never fully recovered. What should have been a fresh start on WordPress turned into a technical disaster that erased all of my progress.
The hardest part is knowing it was completely avoidable. A few hours of research or help from someone experienced could have saved me months of frustration. Instead, I learned the lesson the hard way.
What I Learned was Don’t underestimate technical SEO changes.
If you’re moving a website, changing domains, changing URL structures, or switching platforms, make sure you understand exactly what you’re doing before you touch anything. One small technical mistake can undo months of SEO progress overnight.
What These Two Years Actually Taught Me
If these two years taught me anything, it’s that there is no perfect niche, perfect strategy, or perfect roadmap.
I spent too much time listening to experts, chasing new opportunities, and changing directions whenever I thought I had found something better.
What I should have done was think more carefully before making big decisions and pay more attention to my own results.
Because one wrong niche, one rushed change, or one bad decision can cost months of work.
In the end, the biggest lesson was simple: stop chasing perfect and start trusting real feedback.