When I first started blogging, I thought I needed to know exactly what I was doing before I could publish anything.

I spent weeks choosing a theme, changing fonts, adjusting colors, rewriting my About page, and looking at other people's websites to see what they were doing differently.

Every time I finished something, I found another thing that needed fixing.

My homepage wasn't quite right. My articles needed better introductions. My images didn't look professional enough. My categories weren't organized the way I wanted them to be.

So I kept working on the website instead of actually building the blog.

The funny part is that I told myself I was being productive.

I wasn't procrastinating. I was preparing, researching, improving the user experience, and making sure everything looked professional.

At least, that's what I told myself.

Eventually, I realized I had spent more time preparing to publish than publishing anything.

When I finally started writing consistently, I discovered something I probably should have understood from the beginning.

A lot of the things I worried about didn't matter nearly as much as I thought they did.

Nobody was visiting my website to admire the font I had spent two hours choosing. People wanted useful information, interesting stories, or an answer to whatever had brought them there.

That doesn't mean design and presentation are unimportant. They matter, especially when a website is difficult to navigate or looks untrustworthy.

But there's a difference between improving something that already works and endlessly polishing something that nobody has seen yet.

I also noticed that my writing improved much faster once I started publishing regularly.

Not every article was good. Some were too long, some had weak introductions, and others simply didn't interest the readers I was hoping to reach.

But those articles taught me things that another week of changing my website's layout never could have taught me.

I started paying more attention to the questions people were asking, the subjects that interested them, and the parts of my articles that needed improvement.

Instead of trying to create the perfect blog from day one, I began treating it as something I could improve over time.

I'm still learning, and I still catch myself wanting to redesign things whenever I'm unsure what to write next.

Old habits are difficult to break.

But now I try to ask myself one question before making another change to the website:

Will this actually help my readers, or am I just avoiding the harder work?

Sometimes the answer is that the change genuinely needs to happen. Other times, I close the settings page and start writing.

I'm curious about other bloggers, especially those who have been doing this for a while.

Did you spend too much time getting everything ready before publishing your first articles?

And if you could go back to the beginning, what would you stop worrying about so much?

I'd love to hear what you learned along the way.

Hey everyone
I currently run a recipe website getting around 9K–12K sessions per day, mostly Tier 1 traffic (US, Canada, etc.).
I’m monetizing with HB Agency, and my RPM is usually between $15–$35, but the user experience is really bad because of too many ads. Visitors keep complaining, and they don’t stay long on my site.
I can’t really reduce the ads because I have a team to pay and need to maintain my earnings.
I was thinking about switching to Journey by Mediavine, but I’ve seen people reporting RPMs as low as $5, which worries me.
Now I’m considering Mediavine or Raptive instead.
The problem is I’ve already applied to Mediavine with two websites and got rejected. One for low-quality content and the other for invalid traffic.
I use AI to help write my recipe posts faster, and most of my traffic comes from social media.
My questions are:
Which network has better RPMs for recipe websites, Mediavine or Raptive?
Is it possible to get $20–$35 RPM with fewer ads?
Does Mediavine accept websites using AI-assisted content and social media traffic?
Has anyone been rejected by Mediavine and later accepted? What did you change?

Hiiii! This is coming from someone who do not show my face often and grew my page from my 3k to 18k on Facebook.

I have roughly 10 groups in total to reach demographics. My main group is over 500,000 members and active.

Some months ago I came to you all about blogging and you all reminded me of my roots. My blog. Now I’m here to help you all.
——

I started from little to NO following. If you have even 100 dedicated followers, get them to join you in a community. Especially on Facebook? Restricted public. Not entirely public or entirely private.

Have them ONLY ask you questions and receive advice from that group. It cannot just be you posting. Others have to post too— even if it’s asking questions or sharing quotes.

Make it optional, but ask members for their email to start growing your email list.

My email list is now in the thousands from this. I do not force anyone, I give them options. My visibility on Google and other search engines are in the top searches.

A drawback: Now I find this to be extremely valuable if you have a niche that helps people. I am not sure for hobby blogs UNLESS it helps others.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Hi guys,

We’ve recently started working on a blog. It’s new, baby-staged, but we’re enjoying the process.

I’m currently considering translating our articles, French to English. Im looking for early stages advices: where to start, what common mistakes to avoid, your own experience.

And, regarding web design, I’m also looking for resources on how to proceed. We’re on WP with a divi builder.

Thanks in advance for the support
Cheers

I've been blogging on and off since 2010 - longer if you count LiveJournal days - and a lot has changed in that time. Alongside SEO considerations, I think the biggest change to how I blog is what's worthy of coverage in the age of search algorithms and AI.

So I'd love to know from long time bloggers, what are you doing differently now that you didn't five or ten years ago?

Hey all,

I'm working on something for recipe creators, but it's nowhere near ready to release, and I'm not here to sell anything.

Before I put in more energy, I'd like to understand what running a food blog is really like. If you publish recipes anywhere, I'd love your take on any of these:

1. When writing a new recipe, where does most of the time go, and is there a step you hate doing?

2. Where does your traffic come from, and (if it does) how does that equate to income?

3. What's the most frustrating thing about running your blog right now, and what have you tried to fix it?

4. Have you ever worried about losing your audience or your recipes (algorithm change, a platform shutting down, AI scraping your recipes and taking your viewers), or has it ever actually happened?

5. If you were to start over today, what would you want from a place to publish recipes that you can't get now?

Thanks in advance for your time!

Apologies if this kind of thing isn't allowed

Hey everyone,
I’ve been thinking about a collaboration model for blogging and wanted to hear from people who have tried something similar.
One person already has an established blog and focuses on the content, while the other focuses mainly on SEO, traffic acquisition, content opportunities, and growth.
I have experience with SEO and generating real traffic from external platforms, so I’m particularly interested in the traffic/growth side.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of arrangement?
How did you structure the partnership and revenue split? And what problems should someone watch out for when doing this with an AdSense-monetized blog?
Curious to hear from people who have actually tried it.

I publish new pages on my site all the time and kept falling behind on Pinterest. After a lot of trial and error, here's what actually made it manageable. None of it needs paid tools.

**1. Make 2–3 pins per post, not one**

Same link, different image. Pinterest treats each new image as a fresh pin. Space them about a week apart so they don't compete.

**2. Pin seasonal posts 6–8 weeks early**

People search for Christmas ideas in October and Halloween in September. If you pin the week before, you've missed most of it.

**3. Write pin titles like search terms**

"Easy pumpkin bread recipe" beats "My cozy fall bake". Pinterest is a search engine, so type your idea into the Pinterest search bar and borrow the suggestions.

**4. Turn on RSS auto-publish**

If your blog has an RSS feed, Pinterest can create a pin for every new post automatically (look under Settings → Bulk create Pins). Point each category's feed at a matching board. Easiest win on this list.

**5. Use bulk CSV upload for your back catalog**

You can upload a spreadsheet of pins with publish dates. Two gotchas that cost me a day: image links must be public and point straight to the image file, and board names must match exactly, capitals included.

**6. Batch it once a week**

Spend one hour on Sunday making the week's pins and scheduling them. Daily pinning is what makes people quit.

**7. Tag your links**

Add UTM parameters (like ?utm_source=pinterest) so your analytics show which pins bring visitors, not just which get saves. Saves feel good; clicks pay the bills.

Bonus: if you're technical, the Pinterest API can automate all of this. That's what I eventually did, but the steps above get you 80% of the way for free.

What's worked for you? Especially curious if anyone's found a good way to make pin images faster.

As Blogger - somewhere along the way, something happens.

People begin to recognize you.

Not because you've become famous or reached some imaginary finish line.

Because they've been watching you do the work. They've learned how you think, what you believe, and what you're willing to change your mind about.

You become familiar.

I was wondering if anyone here is still using Travelpayouts and how it's been performing for you lately.

I used Travelpayouts on my blog a few years ago and received payouts in 2024, so I know it worked well enough for me back then. However, I eventually shifted the direction of my blog and stopped actively using it.

I recently logged into my account for the first time in ages and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had accumulated some earnings without doing anything! I also noticed that my old affiliate links are still getting clicks almost daily, despite not having promoted them in quite some time.

It's made me consider giving Travelpayouts another go, especially since those older links seem to have some staying power.

Is anyone here still actively using it? Have you noticed any changes in conversions, commissions, or payouts over the past couple of years? I'd be curious to hear whether it's still worth investing time in, particularly for smaller or niche blogs.

Thinking about starting a blog about my field. Not for money, just to share what I know and build some credibility.

But between AI summaries and everyone posting on LinkedIn, I’m not sure a blog still makes sense.

Anyone here blogging professionally right now? Worth the effort, or am I late to the party?

Hello fellow bloggers. Sometimes, I received guest posting request from agency or backlink platform.

I usually open to all niche for guest posting, except porn and gambling.

How about you? Do you accept all niche or decline some niche because your moral/standing? Or do you only accept guest posting that is still within your blog niche.

Curios. What is your consideration of accepting content placement/guest posting. Hope you wouldn't mind to share :)

One year on Journey by Mediavine, RPM stuck at $2 to $5 (it was $15 on Ezoic) and support never answers.

I want to share my experience with Journey by Mediavine and ask for advice, because I'm honestly fed up.

I run a science blog in the wildlife biology and ecology niche. My content is not all informational posts, there are bunch of career posts (jobs, applications, internships). Majority traffic from USA.

Before Journey I was on Ezoic, where my RPM was in range of $15 to $20. I switched because everyone kept saying Journey is a strong network with some of the best RPMs out there. On Journey my RPM has always been around $2 to $5, rarely touching $10.

I understand small sites aren't Mediavine's priority. But if they accept small sites, there should be at least some working support. Emails go unanswered. The community they point you to doesn't answer either. I've spent a year waiting and waiting, hoping things would improve, and they haven't. I implemented all the best practices from their blog.

I'm now seriously planning to move. My traffic fluctuates between 15,000 and 18,000 pageviews a month.

Questions for anyone who has been in a similar spot:

Has anyone moved from Journey to Monumetric? How did RPM and support compare?

TL;DR - I canceled. Here's why.

Some of you may remember my post a few weeks ago asking who had joined Meta One, whether you’d noticed any real benefits, and whether Meta was delivering on its promises.

Thank you again to everyone who shared their experiences. I said I’d report back if I tried it, so here I am!

After my lowest readership day and lowest Facebook click-through rate in over 270 days, I finally took the leap last Friday, Oct. 2, around 9:30 a.m., and started the one-week Max trial.

I didn’t see ANY sustained improvement that justified paying $399 for a full month. That was my desktop renewal price; the mobile offer was $499 for what appeared to be the same plan.

At that price, I needed it to earn its keep!

My Page was already in a downturn before I joined, so I’m not blaming Meta One for that decline. I wanted to see whether the advertised feed exposure, search placement, and automatic follow invites could help turn things around. Facebook is historically my website’s biggest referral source, so this matters a lot to my business.

Here’s what the numbers showed:

Meta Insights, Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days:

• Views: down 27.2%
• Engagement: down 26.0%
• Page visits: down 22.0%
• Follows: down 19.8%
• Facebook monetization earnings: down 42.5%

Separately, Facebook referrals to my website were down 14% for Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days, according to Clicky Analytics.

Views did improve for a few days after joining, which briefly gave me some hope! Then they fell back. I couldn’t distinguish that improvement from the usual Facebook ups and downs.

What I saw from the advertised benefits:

• Featured in feed / more discovery: No sustained lift. Non-followers accounted for 62.2% of views during my 1-week trial with Meta One (max tier), versus 68.4% in the week before joining Meta One. That’s a drop of 6.2 %. Certainly not the added boost in discovery that Meta One promises.
• Automatic follow invites: New follows were down 19.8% during my time with Meta One compared with the previous seven days. I couldn’t confirm that automatic invitations were being sent at all. The benefit description specifies “Facebook professional profiles,” leaving me unclear whether my publisher Page was even eligible for something included in its offer.
• Extra analytics: I couldn’t find any additional Facebook insights available through the plan.
• Unlimited links: No added value for me during the trial. My Page is categorized as Media/News Company and hasn’t received the two-link monthly restriction, so I continued posting seven to eight clickable article links daily. Publisher Pages are reportedly exempt for now, although I couldn’t confirm exactly how Meta defines a “publisher.” I appreciate that unlimited links could be much more valuable to those of you already facing the restriction.
• Instagram/Threads: Only my Facebook Page appeared subscribed. Instagram and Threads never appeared properly linked, which matches problems others shared here.
• Multiple Pages: My subscription listed just one Facebook Page as covered. Others have reported the same. If each Page needs its own $399 Max subscription, four Pages would cost $1,596 a month. That adds up quickly!
• Support: I didn’t test the human support benefit during my one-week trial. Other publishers and creators who have tried Meta One, as I've seen reported in other groups, say it remains poor. Their reports include being unable to reach a real person despite that being listed as a benefit, being told the issue was “out of scope,” and still not reaching anyone after upgrading. That is secondhand, but it was consistent across several people.

Facebook monetization earnings fell 42.5%. Website ad revenue held up despite fewer Facebook referrals.

The main concern remains how many readers Facebook sends, and I saw no sustained improvement there from Max.

On Oct. 8, the final full day of the trial, Facebook referrals were down 37% compared with Oct. 7, and total website visitors were down 25%. That’s a separate daily comparison, but the brief improvement hadn’t held as the trial finished.

These are just the findings for one Page and one week of use, and the results don’t establish that Meta One caused the declines. That said, nothing I observed justified continuing at $399 a month. I canceled before renewal, with benefits ending this morning at 9:30 a.m. I've seen no noticeable drop in readership since the blue tick was taken away 2 hours ago, but I’ll keep tracking now that the trial has ended.

Hopefully this helps anyone here who’s been weighing up the same decision. For my Page, I saw no sustained benefit, and every Facebook metric listed above declined during the comparison.

I’d still love to hear from other publishers who completed the trial, especially anyone tracking website clicks, sessions and earnings alongside Facebook views. Did it bring enough additional readers or revenue to cover the monthly cost?

And is anyone’s Facebook Page still flourishing and sending strong traffic back to their site, despite the declines many of us have reported over the past four to six weeks? If yours is, please chime in! I’d love to hear what’s working for you.

Thanks again, everyone, and happy Friday!

Your blog is the journey you are on, not the report you file at the end

I was in the middle of writing a post for my blog today when this came out of me, and I had to stop and read it back because it’s the thing I wish somebody had handed me years earlier than they did.

A blog isn’t a place where finished people go to publish their conclusions. It’s the record of somebody building something, written while they’re still building it.

You’re taking your reader along with you: what you tried and how it went, what worked, including the part where you weren’t sure it would, and what flopped completely and cost you a month you’d really like back. It’s what you believed in January that you’ve totally changed your mind about by September, and what changed it.

Nobody needs you to have arrived. They need you to be moving, out loud, somewhere they can watch it happen.

That one shift changes what you’re allowed to write about, and it changes it a lot. If you’ve ever felt like you had nothing to say, it’s probably because you were measuring yourself against some finished expert. Measure yourself against the person two steps behind you instead, and you’ve got something worth writing every single week, because every week you learn something they haven’t learned yet.

My own message has changed more than once over the years. Not because I was wrong to start, but because you can’t think your way to the right version from a standing start. You write, you watch what lands, you adjust, and the blog carries the whole record of that. The people who’ve read me the longest didn’t stay because I had it right at the beginning. They stayed because they could watch me work it out.

Anyone else feel this way? What’s something you’ve completely changed your mind about since you started blogging?

Hello, how is your blog in Google AI overview era? Mine is decreased, but right now it is recovering a bit.

Survival tips of blogging in this AI era and where click from Google decline:

1. Make non-commodity content: content that contain first hand experience. Example: I made blog post of experience how to manage time during my master degree: working while also doing my master degree
2. Sell something: Selling content placement, service, product, affiliate, you name it. Monetization will make the blog survive, at least to buy domain and hosting renewal fee
3. Personal branding: give your blog a nice branding so it will gain traffic from navigatinal intent. Off-page SEO will help too
4. Try to optimize for Google Discover: search for trending topic in Google trend, so there is chance the blog post to show up in Google Discover.

Do you have any other tips to survive as blogger in this AI era?

Hi everyone,

I just received a notification that my site has been suspended from Journey by Mediavine with a 50-day reapplication countdown.

The reason given is: "evidence that your site has been receiving traffic from invalid sources."

To give some context, I recently suffered massive bot traffic spikes coming from Singapore that completely messed up my analytics and stats. As soon as I realized what was happening, I immediately implemented Cloudflare to block them and protect the site. Unfortunately, it looks like Mediavine's automated systems caught the residual impact of those bots before or during the cleanup.

I'm quite stressed about this and not sure how strict they are during the appeal or reapplication process. Also, I've been hearing rumors lately in the community that ad networks are tightening things up aggressively.

If you've been through a similar situation where bot traffic triggered an invalid traffic (IVT) suspension, Did you manage to get reinstated before the 50 days by contacting support with Cloudflare/Analytics proof? What kind of evidence did you provide to show you fixed the issue?

Any advice or insights would be hugely appreciated!

The standard Pinterest keyword advice is type your topic into the search bar and see what comes up, that works for finding broad terms but it does not tell volume, competition, or whether the keyword trends are rising or falling.

The question is whether a dedicated keyword tool for Pinterest adds enough signal to justify the cost compared to the free search bar approach, for someone running a content site and choosing bw 20 potential pin topics each week, knowing relative search volume changes which topics get prioritized

Hi y’all…

I haven’t built anything that is ready for release yet.

However, I am wondering how many people would be interested in using a social media platform that is blogging-style. Nostalgic of the Tumblr days for sure.

But with new ideas and simplicity of real social media and interactions.

If this post isn’t allowed my bad.

Just trying to gauge interest before I keep putting in energy. :)

Hey everyone! I have 70+ blog posts and over the last 3 months, my site got around 20K impressions but only about 100 clicks from Google.

I don't really want to keep publishing new posts right now. I'd rather focus on optimizing my existing posts and improving their CTR/rankings.

For those of you who have experience with SEO, what would you recommend I focus on first? Things like titles, meta descriptions, keywords, internal linking, content updates, images, etc.

Any tips or a practical process for going through 70+ old posts would be really appreciated!

Hey everyone, I have a question.

Are there any of you who blog full-time for a living? If so, are you solely focusing on writing posts for your blog, or do you do other things alongside it, like running a YouTube channel?

The reason I ask is that my goal is to become a full-time blogger, but I've realized it's incredibly difficult to generate high revenue purely from ads here in Korea.

AdSense is the most common ad network here, but the structure makes it hard to make a living off it alone. Because of this, many Korean bloggers turn to YouTube to sell e-books or paid courses. When you look at their content, they always claim it's "easy" to make around $10,000 a month doing this. But in reality, from my own experience of actually writing and running a blog, I'm finding it hard to even make $10 a month, let alone $10,000.

I'd love to know if the reality is similar for bloggers in English-speaking countries, or if things are completely different over there.

If you don't mind sharing, it would be really appreciated if you could mention your blog's niche and a rough estimate of your monthly income. Thanks!

Since October 1, Journey has mostly stopped showing real ads on my site. I’m seeing empty ad spaces/placeholders instead. Is anyone else experiencing this, or know what could be causing it?

As a blogger, writer, or reader, are there things you look for to be able to tell (for sure) that a post / article is AI generated?

I think we're all familiar with the overuse of "—" (em dash) by agents such as ChatGPT and Claude, as well as other dead giveaways, like certain phrases that popup in almost every article that's written by AI.

What are some indicators you personally look for when reading a piece to know that it wasn't created by flesh-and-blood intelligence?