After nearly ten years of blogging, I decided to make a series of posts containing all my wisdom. The series is called Secrets of a Blogger: Less Stress, More Success. Here’s my take on Things Bloggers Should Worry More (And LESS!) About!

Bloggers have a lot to worry about. What and how often should we post? What’s the best way to get followers? Is anyone reading our posts?

Now that I’ve been blogging for almost ten years, I’ve come to realize a few things. One: I’m a lazy blogger. I want results with the least effort. So I’m working on a series of posts called The Lazy Blogger’s Toolkit.

A second, equally important thing I’ve learned about blogging is this: it’s important to think about and define YOUR blogging goals. Your goals may be different from mine. Your goals may also change as your life changes. And if you know your goals, you can more easily decide if that new thing everyone is talking about is worth your time. I’ll talk about my goal setting in another post.

This post is about where I’ve decided to put my attention. That will obviously be different for everyone, but over the years I have learned that some of my blogging worries weren’t as important as I thought. Conversely, I decided that there were other things I should have thought about A LOT more.

I’d love to hear YOUR opinions in comments!

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Here Are Four Things I Think Bloggers Can Worry Less About:

1. Worry Less About What Platform You Use

When I started blogging in 2011 many (most?) of us used Blogger. If we were fancy and wanted to spend money, we got a custom URL and blog design. Then, around 2012, Google started shutting some things down (like GFC) and we all panicked. Was Blogger going to be phased out? It seemed possible, driving many bloggers to switch to WordPress. In 2015, Google also started shutting down blogs with content they deemed “adult” (which sometimes included explicit romance content and also drove people to leave the platform.)

I’ve blogged on both Blogger and WordPress. I think that for a free platform, Blogger is amazing. I loved using it and sometimes I miss it.

Yes, I have more freedom on WordPress, but it’s also a lot more work. And a lot more money. I now pay for hosting, a URL, and a WordPress theme. So again: what are your blogging goals? If they are to spend as little as possible, I think Blogger is a really good option.

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2. Worry Less About How Often You Post

When I started blogging in 2011, most book bloggers posted almost daily. I felt guilty taking even one day off a week. Not only was that CRAZY, I think it was counterproductive.

Unless you have co-bloggers or your blog is a major source of income, daily blog posts are probably too exhausting for most of us. Is anyone out there reading our each and every post? I doubt it. Fewer posts can give you time to create higher quality posts. Also, you may find that fewer posts equals more engagement on each one.

As I started putting up one to three posts a week instead of six or seven, I enjoyed blogging more. Over the past couple years, I have focused more on creating new types of content. Yes, I’ll discuss all my lazy content creation tips in another post.

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3. Worry Less About Blog “Followers”

People blog for different reasons. Some want to join (or create) a community, others want to monetize their content or promote a business or service. Some bloggers want to do more than one of those things.

When I started blogging in 2011, we were all obsessed with getting people to “follow” our blogs. We watched our Google Friend Connect numbers and discussed how to get them higher. Raise your hand if you remember these little faces:

Blog “followers” come in many forms. Some people might get to your blog through a Twitter link. Some might read it regularly in an RSS feeder, like Feedly or Bloglovin. Others might subscribe to your newsletter and click on a link from time to time. Saying you want more “followers” can mean a lot of different things.

What kinds of followers do you want? What kind are aligned with your blogging goals?

If being part of a community is your goal, maybe getting (and leaving) a lot of comments, finding friends, and being active on social media is important to you.

If you are trying to monetize your blog, maybe you need to worry more about things like page views and sessions and unique visitors. I will talk more about that in another post.

Maybe you’ve decided you enjoy social media more than blogging (I will discuss in a later post why I think that, depending on your goals, that is not without risk). But if that’s the case, maybe you don’t need to worry about blog “followers” at all. You can just use the blog as your home base on the internet and try to build your follower base elsewhere.

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4. Just Stop Worrying About Doing It All

I think as bloggers we ALWAYS compare ourselves to others and think that we need to be doing ALL the things.

For me, it has been more enjoyable and productive to figure out what my goals are, then decide what how I can best (and most lazily) achieve them.

I recently spent some time looking at my blog analytics, something I will talk more about in a later post. My analytics revealed this:

The majority of my blog readers don’t get to my blog through social media. But ONE social media platform was by far the best driver of traffic to my blog.

Now, that may not be the case for you. But discovering this information was very liberating to me. (I also accept that this could be a “chicken and egg” situation. Chatting with my blogging friends on social media is something I enjoy. My acquisition numbers could reflect my use of social media as a communication device.)

However, I also think that the dreaded new social media “algorithms” have made it MUCH harder to get your tweets and photos noticed without paying to promote them.

I’d rather use social media to chat with my friends and find other (lazier) ways to drive traffic to my blog.

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Four Things Bloggers Might Want to Worry More About

Now that we have discussed Things I Think Bloggers Should Worry Less About, Let’s Talk About The Things I’ve Realized I Should Have Worried More About. No surprise, they are less fun and glamorous, but (I think) ultimately more important.

1. Check How Fast Your Blog Pages Load

Why should you care about this? Because your readers do. If your blog post takes forever to load, potential readers might give up and close the window. You don’t have total control of how fast your site loads, as some of that depends on your hosting and how much money you’re willing to spend on it. Luckily, no matter what your platform and hosting situation, there are free and easy ways to make your site load faster!

First, find out fast your site loads. Go to a free speed checker like GTMetrix and type in your URL. See mine below. Yay- my site got a 95! If your loading speed is good, high five!

Some simple (and free) things you can do to make your site load faster:

These tips work both on Blogger and on WordPress!

First off, are you using a lot of large images?

Pretty pictures are great. But lots of huge images can also slow down your blog’s loading time.

Images have two sizes: image pixel dimensions (width and height in pixels), or the image file size (KB or MB). You can resize large images pretty easily. (You can do it on a Mac in a few seconds. Just click on the image and in Preview, select Tools and Adjust Size).

If you’re on WordPress, you can you can find plug-ins that will compress your images to help them load even faster. You can also install plug-ins that cache, which makes your blog load faster.

If you’re on Blogger, don’t despair about your lack of access to plug-ins. Here are some things you can do: 1) go in your settings and limit the number of posts on your homepage; 2) use the “read more” feature for your posts, and 3) get rid of any unnecessary widgets and gadgets. Don’t be sad. Remember, Google Friend Connect is defunct 🙂

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2. Make Sure You Are Backing Up Your Site!

We put hours and hours and hours into our sites and then we forget to back them up. Nooooo… don’t make that mistake! Protect all your hard work!

If you’re on Blogger, it’s SO easy to back up. Just go into Settings (on orange on the left) and then scroll down to Manage Blog. Click Back Up Content. You’ll get an .xml file (titled with the date, which is so handy). Save that in case you ever need it.

If you’re on WordPress, install a backup plug-in and the magic will happen automatically. I use Updraft, but there are other options too.

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3. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly

So much has changed in the nine years I’ve been blogging. Aa of 2020, 66% of my blog readers access my site on mobile devices. Only 29% read my blog on the roomier screen of a desktop or laptop, and 5% on a tablet.

I love my laptop and I do most of my blogging and blog reading on it. Realizing that the majority of my blog post readers access my blog on mobile devices was a wake-up call. I needed to make sure my site was mobile friendly (according to Google). Google will penalize you in search results if you aren’t, and readers may give up if your site is hard to read or navigate on their phones.

First, go to this Google Mobile Friendly Test Site Page and put in your blog’s URL. Whew, I passed!

Okay, even if Google gives you the thumbs up, there’s also the aesthetics of the mobile version of your site. I checked mine and .. NOT GREAT. There were some seriously wonky things going on. I’m so sorry, my 66% mobile readers – I’ve been working to improve that.

If you don’t usually access your own site on mobile (I didn’t that often) grab your phone and take a look. Navigate around and see how easy it is. Do you have pop-up that block your content? Are your photos a good size? Do you have clickable links that work?

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4. Find Out What Your Readers Want To Read

How do you know what readers want? I mean, most of the time people don’t say they didn’t like your posts. But there is a way to find out how many people are reading them.

Have you ever looked at your analytics?

For years and years, I really hadn’t. At all. If you don’t care about analytics, that’s totally fine. Looking at my analytics really helped me see what my readers were responding to. It was incredibly interesting. It didn’t change how I blogged that drastically, but I did use the information to help me get more views on my most popular posts and also get ideas for new posts. I’ll go deeper into analytics in a future post.

Thanks for reading this Secrets of a Blogger Post on Things Bloggers Should Worry More (And Less) About. I hope you’ll share your thoughts and ask questions in comments. If you are interested in these kind of topics, please keep an eye out for my future posts! Or subscribe! (Yes, one of my blogging goals is to work on my email subscribers.)

You can find the entire list of Secrets of a Blogger posts here!