10. Anti-social behavior. I’ve not been interactive enough with the blogging community here (and beyond) DIY Bride. I’ve not kept up with responding to commenters and connecting with other bloggers as much as I feel I should. This is something I’m working very hard at right now. Loving it!

9. Back ups? You mean every 10 weeks isn’t enough? This is one heck of a lesson that I’ve had to learn a few times. I’ve lost tons of data to not having proper backups when needed. I’ve been hacked, have had hosting companies completely disappear, have recently been dropped by a hosting co. without warning, and have messed up the site on my own … all with no recent backups. I back up my site every.single.night. You should too.

8. Took long breaks between posts in non-emergency situations. Besides the time when my husband had a grand mal seizure and when I gave birth 3 weeks early, I’ve had some pretty big gaps between posts. Readership always goes down during those times. Always have a few unpublished posts on hand in case you need to be away. Or round up some guest bloggers when you know you’ll be offline.

7. Experimented with too many gadgets and doohickies. I’m a hopeless nerd when it comes to neat tech gadgets and blog thingies. I’ve wasted a lot of time implementing things that were never really useful to my readers and/or that negatively affected the site.

6. Tried out snark. It didn’t reflect my true self or my writing style and it really disappointed some lovely people.Your audience knows when you’re disingenuous.

5. Overcomplicated the navigation and made it hard for visitors to find the information they were seeking.

4. Lost focus on the blog’s purpose; got off topic, got too personal, got way off track. Readers dropped like flies.

3. Not monetized earlier and with a better plan for profitability. I’d like this blog to be self-sustaining so that I can spend more cash on projects, projects, projects for my peeps. I have grand ideas and a tiny budget.

2. Spent more time on style over substance. I’m never, ever satisfied with the blog design so I end up redesigning it a lot and that takes away precious posting time. I wish I had spent at least half of those design hours on projects for the blog rather than the blog being the project.

1. Totally underestimated the time it takes to run a blog. Email, design, project creation, photography, image re-sizing, formatting & writing posts, SEO, ad management, networking, administrative tasks all take an enormous amount of time.