We are so excited to participate in a blog hop with a few fabulous ladies! We’re going to be sharing tips for other bloggers! This week the topic is something you wish someone had told you before you started!

What is one tip you have for anyone that may be thinking about starting a blog — something you wish someone had told you before you started?

Pumps & Push-Ups has been a blog for three years now and my what a three years it has been! Three years full of experiments and learning curves. When we started our blog we had a vision of the content we wanted to share, but what we didn’t know was how to get anyone to read that content. We spent hours on Google looking for the best ways to build a following for your blog, boost your traffic, etc. For the most part, every article would tell you how important your social media following is to your blog traffic. While social media is important to the whole premise of a blog, especially if you’re trying to make your blog a business, when it comes to traffic, our experience has been that the social media has little influence over our actual blog traffic.

We wish someone had told us that social media is not always the only way to build blog traffic.

For the first year of blogging, we spent hours upon hours on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, just trying to grow and connect. We built a decent following on those channels, but very rarely would visits be referred to our blog. Something BIG we missed in our first year is how important it is to network with fellow bloggers. In our second year we started to connect with some of the bloggers we met on Instagram, on their actual blogs. Instead of spending all of our time on Instagram, we started dedicating time to networking. We visited blogs, left comments, found new blogs, participated in give aways and collaborations and guess what, our traffic grew and our following grew. Then blogging became a lot more fun. Some of the very first blogs we ‘connected’ with are participating in this blog hop with us and we so honored to be with them. Over the years we have watched their blogs grow, along with ours and it’s been a lot of fun!

So, for anyone embarking on a new blogging journey our advice is not to ignore your social media, it’s important, but don’t invest all of your time in it. Be sure to spend just as much time connecting with other bloggers on their actual blogs!

Hop on over to Peaches in a Pod to see what Blaire and Whitney have to say!

– Brooke & Erica