10 Deadly Blogging Mistakes That Can Ruin Blogging Careers Before They Start

10 Deadly Blogging Mistakes That Can Ruin Blogging Careers Before They Start

Blogging is a significant aspect of any digital marketing plan. It helps in increasing website traffic and defines your credibility in your niche market.

Content marketing generates three times more leads than the conventional means of marketing. It is one of the best ways to drive inbound traffic and increase conversion rates.

However, developing a successful blog is time-consuming. At times, it can take years to create a money-making blog.

Well, making mistakes throughout the learning curve isn’t shameful, but you will be able to build a blog more efficiently when you avoid inevitable mistakes or know how to fix basic errors you have made.

Check Every Critical Mistake That We are Going to Cover and Try to Fix Them,

1. Picking the Wrong Niche

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers tend to make is they go to narrow or broad with the niche. Do not underestimate the benefit of focus. You need to make sure that you have a niche that is focused and valuable.

New bloggers often make the mistake of covering several topics. Don’t do that. Choose something you are passionate about and can communicate your ideas easily.

Readers pay more attention to experts and covering too many niches will not make you one. It is better to concentrate on one niche to develop outstanding content. When you have a specialized niche, it will reach out to a dedicated audience.

You can always choose a sub-niche. This way it is easier for you to provide solutions and information that readers need.

When you cover broader topics, it can be overwhelming for you, as well as for the readers.

For instance, ‘movies’ is a broad niche. You can narrow it down to ‘vintage movies.’

Focusing on ‘vintage movies will enable you to cut down on the total content needed.

Also, vintage movie fans will find what they are looking for on the internet. Focusing on a niche is a win-win situation for everyone.

You can use tools like Google Trends, SEMrush & Google Keyword Planner to see what people are interested in the niche you offer. From here, with this data, create a blogging plan.

2. Working Inconsistently on the Blog

Another big mistake that newbie bloggers make is not working consistently on the blog. The problem is that you are not maintaining a regular schedule for your blogs.

Make sure you blog regularly, as this is essential for securing more leads and customers.

It will generate more traffic and lead to higher CTRs and longer sessions. If you are producing more content, you are offering more value.

Valuable content generates more inbound traffic than any other marketing activity.

You can fix this problem of inconsistent blogging by using the blog ideas generator of HubSpot.

Blog Ideas Generator Hubspot

It is not unusual to suffer a writer’s block or spend several hours every day to come up with the blog post for future schedules.  Deciding on the topic for the blogpost and its headlines can be pretty daunting. However, you can use the tool to get new ideas instantly.

With such help, you will have several ideas for topics and schedule your blogs consistently every month. You will not have to spend a significant amount of time just to come up with a plan.

Use a calendar for scheduling the ideas. Merely having the thoughts in hand will not help. You will have to schedule it adequately and then stick to the plan to make sure your site gets enough traffic.

If you want, you can use a plugin for creating your calendar. Once you have planned, it will be easier to write posts every month. It is because you will be notified when needed.

3. Creating Content Without Keyword Research

Your blog might not be attracting more traffic because you are publishing them without researching appropriate keywords that people are searching in that area. Random content may be good but will not be picked up by Search Engines.

Keyword research is the process of finding ‘terms’ or ‘words’ audiences mostly use while searching. Proper research followed by on-page and off-page optimization generates more leads and traffic. A well-optimized SEO content can drive more traffic for the long run as compared to the content without any target keywords.

It is always necessary to do keyword research. There are many tools that you can use for doing it, such as Semrush, KWFinder, or Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest

When you do your research, you should focus on the long-tail keywords. These usually contain four or more words.

Long-Tail-Keyword-Info-Semrush

Source: SEMRUSH

For instance, ‘best messaging apps for iPhone’ is a long-tail keyword.

A long-tail keyword ranks better than short-tail keywords such as ‘best messaging apps.’

Thus, the next time you search for a keyword for the blog post, make sure it is long tail.

Use it in the title, URL, description, and heading tags like h2 and h3 for optimizing the content for search engines.

4. Not Formulating Fresh And Unique Ideas

Posting boring and impersonal content is a grave mistake you can make. This kind of bland content can make the readers feel bored and don’t make you different from your competitors. Finding your voice doesn’t mean that you should write as you talk. If you do, it can lead to several issues.

How to Fix It?

Integrate your personality into the blog post. A great example is Neil Patel’s Blog:

Neil-patel-blog

Another Great Example is SmartPassiveIncome by Pat Flynn

Smart-passive-income-pat-flynn

Make your content fun and exciting to read. Even though you would like the readers to know how you are personally, you should write like a professional.

5. Not Using Rich Media On Your Blog

You might have heard the English adage, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. This principle is also applicable to your blogposts.

Blogs are now details and researches that people like to give time to. Just words are not going to engage your readers. Videos, charts, and illustrations make your content more interesting to read.

A recent study has shown that readers only read 20% of the written content. Infographics and videos are great for emphasizing a point. These help in validating the message you are conveying. It will show the audience that you are not faking it.

Whenever you are comparing data, you should always present infographics. Include relevant images wherever you can. If you want people to remember what you have written, add videos, images, and infographics. You can use online resources like Visme, for designing your infographics.

6. Ignoring Audience Interaction

Many bloggers do not give importance to responding to the comments made by the readers or to interact with them. Interacting with the audience or the readers helps in building a relationship with them. Interaction makes them feel that they are acknowledged, and hence they will come back for more.

Some people often take blogging as a one-directional means of communicating instead of making it an active conversation with the community.

Even if your content is interesting, it will only appear to be valuable when you interact with the audience.

You should reply to the comments on the blog, as well as the social media channels. When you improve your interaction with the reader, more visitors will automatically come to your blog.

7. Not Planning Blog Marketing Activities

Another common mistake made by bloggers is not promoting the blog post or planning marketing activities. You might have the best content on your blog, but if you are not ready to promote it, then no one will come to know about it.

Not marketing the blog will keep you from expanding your audience base. Creating content is not enough, you will have to inform the readers about it.

You can start by maintaining an email list and email your post to the subscribers. Cross-promotion can also prove to be helpful.

You might ask others in your field to promote your blogs and promote theirs in return. It will help in securing more readers.

Maintain social media channels and promote your blogs on them. If you have capital to spare then programs like Facebook Ads and Google AdSense will help a lot in driving traffic to your blog.

8. Neglecting SEO Factors like Yoast

While creating blogs, bloggers often forget that they will have to optimize the content so that the readers can read it. Thus, they end up neglecting the SEO best practices. It is one of the biggest mistakes that bloggers can make

You should make sure that you are maintaining SEO best practices. Use keyword-rich title and URL, section headers should be descriptive and should use keywords, include anchor texts, and use self-hosting blogs.

Moreover, your blog needs to have a plugin like a Headspace found in WordPress. It will help you to create your meta description tag and a title for the post.

9. Not Tweaking Your Writing Style To Blog Writing

Writing a blog is not like writing a composition or a research paper. In the beginning, you might not be aware of the proper writing style.

Don’t forget your blog serves as a solution to problems that audiences are looking for over the internet. In case you do not tweak your writing style and write efficiently, nobody is going to read it.

How to Fix It?

Blogs should be conversational. It will enable the reader to feel that they are having a conversation with the writer and will make the piece more interesting to read.

Readers should not think that they are communicating with robots and should relate to the content easily.

Your blogs should be of different types. Here are some styles to consider:

  • Listicles like this one
  • How-To Posts
  • Stories and Case Studies
  • Experience Posts
  • Press Releases
  • What Posts
  • Reviews and Comparisons

10. Keeping Unrealistic Expectations

No doubt, we are all searching for fame and glory. However, most of the time, it is an unrealistic expectation. Do not expect all your content to be viral or receive thousands of visitors every day.

Just 1% of the blogposts online get more than 1000 shares. Most of them get below 100. So, do not feel discouraged when your blog post doesn’t get viral.

You can use a tool to search trending topics, as this increases the chance of your content going viral. One such popular tool is Google Trends.

Using-Google-Trends-to-figure-niche

It will save time and enable you to find out topics that are worth your time. It is better not to waste your time on something that the readers are not going to read.

You are going to make several mistakes, especially if you are new to blogging. The tip here to make mistakes but learn from them as fast as you can.

Like said earlier, building a blog takes time (and a huge deal of effort) and if you are able to avoid the deadliest mistakes, you will be able to grow the blog at a faster pace.

Read The 15 Essential (Free) Blogging Tools Every Blogger Should Use

Tags: ,