Top 10 Mistakes You Should Know About Blogging

Just as your living room is the center of your home and where you invite guests, your blog is the hub of your business and serves the same purpose. Most of the important activities and content are found on your blog.

There are common blogging mistakes that new and seasoned bloggers make. These mistakes can easily be avoided, if you know about them. Here are 10 mistakes you should know about blogging to help you improve your blogging skills and get the results you deserve.

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10 Mistakes You Need To Know About Blogging

1: Choosing a Broad Niche

Choosing a broad niche is a mistake that many new bloggers make. But even seasoned veterans who know about blogging can find themselves in a similar predicament, if they extend their topics to meet their audience’s needs. You can’t be everything to everyone. Consider the differences between talking about the broad niche, “Movies” and focusing on the market niche, “Vintage Movies.” Narrowing down the “Movies” niche to “vintage movies,” helps to cut down on the amount of content needed. It also makes it easier for vintage movie buffs to find the info and products they want.

If you want to be a successful blogger, specialize. Having a specialized niche means your blog posts can be much more focused and reach a more dedicated audience. When you choose a sub-niche, it’s much easier to provide the information/solutions they want and need.

2: Losing Focus

Losing the blog’s niche focus can happen to the best bloggers, especially if they’ve been covering the same topics and problems for years. When they feel they’ve covered everything a million times, they often write about marginal topics.

If you start running out of content ideas, reconnect with your audience. Do more research. Read industry news. Survey your audience to get ideas. Start a focus group to discuss niche related issues and problems. Use the information you discover to bring your blog back into focus and create a content plan to help you stay on topic. Schedule time to do research and plan each week.

3: Skipping Audience Research

In trying to get your site up and running, you may have skipped some of the research. Audience research is one of the areas business owners tend to skip altogether or do minimal research. Don’t assume you know your niche audience. In order to promote solutions effectively, you need to know the cold, hard facts about your audience.

The only way to learn is to do the research and get proof of what you suspect to be true. Use the info to create an ideal customer profile and look at the profile before you create content or send out a promotion. Make sure your content addresses problems and solutions that are relative to your readers.

4: Creating Bland Impersonal Content

Publishing bland, impersonal content is one of the worst mistakes you can make. Not only is it boring to readers, it doesn’t help to set you apart from the competition. Incorporate your personality into the content. If you crack jokes, use puns, have a sassy attitude, etc., include those writing styles (or voice) in your content. While you want to be yourself and give your readers a sense of what you’re like in person, you still need to be seen as a professional.

 5: Focusing On Yourself

Your blog isn’t really about you, even if you are writing about your travels, cooking, decorating, or other experiences in a particular area of life. It’s about what your audience wants and needs to know regarding the niche. Sharing your experience is a good lead-in when introducing a niche related concept. However, it’s easy to forget that your audience is more interested in what you can teach them rather than what you had for breakfast. When you lose your perspective about what is important and why people read your blog, you will also lose followers and buyers.

6: Using Out of Date SEO Best Practice

Implementing current SEO strategies will ensure that your blog is easily discovered and read by your target audience, while it also receives frequent search engine visits. For example, if you’re still trying to use a keyword as many times as possible throughout your content, you’re using out of date SEO best practices.

Use on-page and off-page SEO for best results. On-page SEO is done on your blog. Examples include keyword rich titles and ensuring your page loads quickly. Off-page SEO involves what is said and done on other websites and platforms. Examples include links to your pages and visitor/customer ratings. SEO is important to your readers and search engines. Stay up to date on the latest strategies.

7: Failing To Edit Thoroughly

While you want to be yourself and give readers a good idea of your personality, you also want to avoid making errors that undermine your credibility and authority. One of the key tips to know about blogging is to double check your content before publishing. Look out for misspelled and misused words, poor sentence structure, run-on sentences, unclear phrasing, and anything else that makes it difficult for visitors to read and understand your content, such as big words.

You can improve readability with practice but the best way to be sure about it is to use a plugin like Yoast SEO. Failing to edit and read your content can leave you with what appears to be inaccurate and unprofessional information.

8: Inconsistent Posting

When you start blogging, writing post after post without getting a response or “like” can be quite discouraging. But remember that it can take a while for your target market to find you and spread the word. Don’t give up! There will come a point when your devotion and determination pay off.

Make it a habit to post blog content regularly. Track the stats for when your people read the content. Schedule posts for those days and times. Train your audience to visit your blog on “new post” days to get the latest scoop. Until your readership picks up, you can keep yourself busy by posting evergreen content that educates, engages, and informs your audience. These types of posts will still work hard for you years after you post them. Also, remember to share your posts on Facebook and other social media outlets to drive traffic to your blog.

9: No Clear Goal For Content

Every piece of content should have a purpose/goal, such as driving traffic to the blog or promoting a specific product. When it comes to creating effective content, you need to have a content plan in place. Planning content before it’s to be published gives you time to identify a need/problem, choose the topics/issues you want to cover, set a goal for the content, and get it written.

Having a plan and a clear goal for your content keeps you accountable and on track with your marketing strategy. If you can’t identify the purpose that an article serves or the goal it should achieve, don’t post it. Save it until later, when you can identify and define these details.

10: Limited Site/Blog Promotion

If you aren’t actively “inviting” your target market to your blog or website, you’re making a serious blunder. Sending your “invitation” is easy. Notify your email subscribers with a weekly update email to point out the new posts they may have missed. But more importantly, share the newly published post on your social media networks to reach a broader audience.

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