What troubled you most when starting out as a blogger?

The first thing that I struggled with was traffic. The solution to me personally was to keep on posting and getting backlinks. After a few months things almost always pick up.

The other problem is what to write about. Here the solution was through participation in forums where you can discover major topics that people need advice.

I would say the first thing is starting out as it can be a daunting prospect with all the different steps involved. My solution is take your time and plan out how you want to get your website/blog up and running. It worked for me and I even surprised myself from actually not knowing a lot, to getting to the stage where I'm driving traffic to my site now.

Second thing is planning for the future and what sort of content you want to put out to your subscribers, how your membership is going to work etc. Just like my first point having a written plan and sticking to it will help you focus on your current tasks.

I hope this will prove useful!

Excellent question.

Honestly, my first struggle was giving up some privacy. My blog is about my efforts to build an IM businsess, sort of a case study. My domain name is my name, and I worked to build a brand based on my name. But, initially putting my name and picture up there kind of freaked me out. I felt exposed! My solution for it was really just to get over it. I don't know what I thought would happen, other than my day job finding out how much I hate it and firing me, or someone stealing my identity or something.

The second struggle, and still is a struggle is traffic. At first I ignored search engine traffic and just wrote for readers. I got traffic through building a presence on forums and blogs in my niche. Right now, I am looking to create some articles that will both contain keywords that will help me get some search engine traffic, AND be beneficial to my audience (quite a concept). We'll see how it goes. If I had a sure fire solution to the traffic issue, I'd probably package it up and sell it!

I personally have no problem to write regularly and I have new ideas all the time about new posts.
The main problem is to get traffic to my blog.
Without traffic you can't earn money from it.

Traffic and efficient monetizing are the biggest hurdles.

Thank you all for sharing. I got some very interesting insights from all responses. I'd like to wish you all good luck and success.

-Dani

1st Problem: I had a Blogger/Blogspot blog

2nd Problem: Didn't know how to drive traffic

3rd Problem: Had Adsense on blog but no clicks

4th Problem: Didn't know how to use blog to sell product

5th Problem: Was scared of Wordpress

My hardest roadblock was using an open source CMS when I created my own CMS. I'm a technical person and I found wordpress extremely hard to work with and very unsecure.

Wordpress would not allow me to do a lot of things that I normally could easily do with html.

The time doing research trying to find plugins that would make doing usually normal things. I only have 2 blogs and found the solution to my problem was to partner with a blogging expert.

We have put together a strategy that will maximize our traffic based on Google's new Hummingbird.

The second biggest problem before we came up with this new strategy was the very time consuming process of getting traffic to the blogs.

I learned a lot from my blogging partner and was able to get traffic coming to a brand new blog in just about an hour.

An hour was just a small portion of the traffic strategy that takes 5 to 6 hours a day for 3 to 5 days a week.

I have an idea for a software product that can greatly reduce the time needed for this strategy because much of it is repetative tasks that can be automated.

But I'm to busy at this time to create the software now.

Content is not a problem for me. The time and knowledge constrants when putting up a new blog is the problem. Now that I know what plugins to use I'm doing much better.

Although, blogging is only a very small portion of my business model.

Best regards,
Steve Yakim