This post is a Self-Reflection Day 2 of my Blogging Journey.

Update: It’s more than a year since I wrote this post and this was actually written on the 2nd day that I decided to start my blog. This blogging journal was obviously one of my very first works due to the mere number of words that was in the post and I didn’t have much of an understanding on how to use WordPress at the time. A lot has changed since now and then I am having so much fun with my blog. I hope that you’ll enjoy it too.

In retrospect, when you first start blogging you’re going to be learning a lot of new material to add to your blog and at PinArtwork I hope you’ll turn to me for advice if you need a hand with your blog so I can help you or at least steer you in the right direction.

During the first 30 days of blogging I was concentrating on learning how to blog, how to use WordPress, and learning about things that I have never heard about such as plug-ins and SEO.

If I had to do it all over again, one of the most important things I would stress to new bloggers is to as soon as possible, start learning about search engine optimization (SEO) so that you can improve the traffic coming to your blog. The reason that I’m bringing this to your attention is that it takes 3 – 6 months for your SEO to kick-in so while you’re learning about blogging, at the same time you also need to pay a lot of attention to SEO (more so than creating content for your blog or designing your blog).

One of the best ways for you to learn about SEO is with the Rank Math SEO plug-in. It forces you to learn about keywords provided that you follow the recommendations that Rank Math suggests to you to improve your SEO.

To learn more about SEO, please visit the “detailed” post I wrote called 10 Steps for the Ultimate Roadmap for Learning SEO. It provides loads of information about SEO and basically it’s a walk-through guide to learning how to use SEO from beginning to end.

Here’s some of the main links from that post to help get you started to boost your SEO:

Table of Contents for the Ultimate Roadmap to Learning SEO

• The Ultimate Roadmap to Learning SEO
• Learn SEO Basics
• Take your SEO to the next level and increase your search traffic by as much as 12 times with three steps
• Beginner’s Guide to SEO Videos from Matthew Woodward
• Keyword Research Posts and *Videos
• Learn to Execute an SEO Process
• SEO Strategy
• Strategy breakdown for how to increase your search traffic by 14 fold
• Content Strategy
• Building a healthy Site Structure. Why is it important?
• Implement with Free SEO Tools
• Link Building Posts
• Rank Math Posts
• Yoast SEO Posts
• Learn to Implement SEO in your CMS.
• Deepen your SEO Knowledge
• Content Pruning – Why you must avoid dupe content
• Specialize within SEO
• Automate SEO Tasks
• Learn about SEO in other (non-google) search engines
• Keep up with SEO news
• Complement your SEO Knowledge

I’ve provided this information to you about SEO because I want you to get a better handle on it as soon as possible. I was using Yoast SEO Premium for nearly a year and I thought that I had a good handle on keywords; however, there is a distinct advantage in using Rank Math because you know exactly how your SEO fares with a grading system of 1 to 100 instead of Yoast’s method of grading on three levels: red, orange, or green.

Pretty daunting day. I got a lot accomplished and my blog is starting to resemble the sample template that we’re supposed to build. A long time ago I used to use Front Page, Microsoft Word, and/or Dream Weaver and I am surprised as to how much has changed in designing web pages.

I’m reluctant to use those programs because the coding I’m accustomed to using won’t suffice so I’ll have to bear this out and plug away a little at at a time as I get used to all of this new terminology and where the different buttons are located within WordPress.

Please check out these other blog posts that discuss how to build your first blog to improve your blogging journey

How to start a Blog – Neil Patel

How to start a Blog – Adam Enfroy