Introduction
In this era of digitalization, there are several opportunities for people to make money from the internet. One such opportunity is to create blogs.
Blog is a great way that allows users to create articles on a particular topic or subject. With the help of the blogging sites, the users can share their information or perspectives on a particular subject with a particular audience.
Let us understand the meaning of a blog.
What Is a Blog?
A Blog is a piece of written content present on the web that helps to engage online traffic. It allows the bloggers to attract leads and connect with their audience.
The audience of a particular blog depends upon the niche of that blog. The blog circulates on the topic on which it is written. You can easily attract traffic to your website with the help of blogs. These blogs also allow the users to establish brand authority.
Hence, a blog is one of the best ways to grow your business and attract an audience to your products or services. According to research, businesses can see 13 times more return on investment (ROI) with the help of building a successful blog.
With so many advantages, you can pursue your career in the blogging industry. However, creating a successful blog is a daunting task.
It consists of a plethora of elements that you should consider. Generally, at the beginning of blogging, the blogger may make numerous mistakes.
However, there is nothing wrong with making mistakes. As we all know, man learns from his mistakes. But committing the same mistake again and again will decrease the traffic to your website. If you make various mistakes, you will not see growth in your blog website.
This article is meant to let people know about the common mistakes that bloggers may commit while beginning their career in this industry. Once you know the different mistakes and how to fix them, you can easily pursue blogging.
Let’s have a look at the list of blogging mistakes that bloggers should avoid.
Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid in 2023 Especially by Beginner Bloggers
1. Lack of Blogging Strategy, top blogging mistake
One of the biggest blogging mistakes is not building a business blog strategy. Before you start your career in blogging journey, you should create a blogging strategy.
This strategy is the basis for your creation of blog content and articles. Collecting relevant details about your audience and the latest trends in the blogging industry can help you create a blogging strategy for your new content.
You should create a blogging strategy that aligns with the requirements of your audience. It should help your new blog rank on search engine pages and stand out from the rest.
So, before creating a blogging strategy, make sure that it helps your blog reach as many people as possible. You can do this by writing content that is required by your target audience.
The blogging strategy should also determine the language in which you write the blogs. Besides the language, it should define the platform on which you will publish them.
To further enhance your blogging techniques and strategies, you can use tools to analyze your competitors’ success. These tools will help you assess the activities pursued by your competitors to achieve blogging success.
You can learn from these activities and the experience of your competitors.
2. Common Mistake of Stiff Writing
When people start their careers in blogging, they will face the problem of writing blog posts accurately. Generally, the individuals may make the writing too stiff. However, you should remember that the audience that reads your blogs needs something to maintain their interest.
If you make your writing too stiff and technical, it may become boring. So if you want to engage your audience, you should pick a writing style that interests them enough to read further.
For this, you need to write blogs in an easy language that is simple to understand and effortless to go through. You should definitely avoid writing in a stiff or monotonous style.
To avoid writing in an overly formal or stiff way, you should always write in a conversational tone. When you write in a conversational tone, your audience can directly relate to you.
Each person will not feel as if you are talking to them while keeping the whole audience in mind. Rather, they will feel personally connected to your content.
This will engage them more, and they will enjoy reading the blogs. The main reason for this is that the audience should feel as if they are speaking to real people rather than robots.
So you should include an informal tone in your writing to enhance your blogging experience. For this, you can use various metaphors and phrases. You should write as if you were speaking directly to your audience.
3. Lack of Copywriting Techniques
If you want to engage your audience with the help of your blogs, you need to follow different persuasive copywriting techniques. These techniques are followed by some of the best and most professional blog writers.
Following different copywriting techniques or tactics from the beginning of your blog can help you achieve great success.
At the start of your blogs, you can hook your audience with the help of a catchy introduction and headline. Then, inside the introduction, you may introduce your topic to them. Based on this topic and introduction, the audience will decide whether they want to stay on your blog or not.
Now you can continue writing your blogs using different headings and other copywriting techniques.
Let us have a look at different copywriting techniques. You can follow any strategy or tactic according to the requirements of your blog and target audience.
APP Method
The APP method stands for Agree, Promise and Preview. You can use this method as your copywriting technique. As the name suggests, first of all, you need to agree under the APP method.
But to whom and what must you agree? The bloggers need to agree with the requirements and problems of their audience.
For example, you may be creating a blog post on the topic, “How to Create Blogs?” As per the APP method, you can agree with your audience on different problems faced by them when creating blogs.
You may write, “It is difficult to attract the audience and turn them into regular subscribers.” This will help the audience to feel a personal connection with you.
Once the “agree” step is over, the next step is to “promise.” You should promise your target audience that you will provide them with a solution to their problem.
Essentially, you must promise your target audience that you will assist them in resolving the issue mentioned in the “agreeing” step. Continuing the above example, you can provide a solution to the audience to attract them and turn them into regular subscribers.
For this, you can write, “To attract traffic to your blog posts, you can use search engine optimization features and other social media integrations. Further, you can convert your potential customers into regular subscribers by providing them with quality content. This content should align with the requirements of your audience.”
Once you provide them with a solution or proof, they are likely to be drawn to your blog posts.
In the end, you need to follow the last step known as the “preview” step. As the name suggests, in the preview step, you can provide a preview or conclusion to the readers.
This conclusion should include all the crucial points of your blog that can provide a solution to the problems of your audience.
AIDA Method
AIDA is another copywriting method that can be used by beginners in the blogging industry. This method stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
The AIDA Method is an advertising strategy. Hence, this technique helps beginners in the blogging industry to expand their audience.
Let us understand the meaning of each letter in the acronym.
- Attention
As the name suggests, you can grab the attention of your readers with a hook at the beginning of your blog. To create a hook at the beginning of the blog, you may ask a question of your audience. Or, you can also quote a famous personality to explain the meaning of the topic to your readers.
Another popular way to grab the attention of your readers in the beginning, is to start your blog with a story. A story about an experience is likely to generate curiosity in the audience. This will entice them to read further.
- Interest
To interest the readers, you can provide them with facts, information, and data related to the content. Creating intriguing subheads will help you maintain the interest of the target audience.
- Desire
This letter in the acronym means that you need to convince your audience to believe in your content. For this, you can state proven benefits and facts to support your content.
- Action
Once the reader has read the entire blog post, what is he or she supposed to do? If you do not provide the next step, the reader might just press the back button on your blog.
Hence, you need to end your post by compelling the readers to take action on this. Their bloggers need to end their posts with a call to action. The call to action will make it easy for the readers to know the next step they need to take.
4. Choosing a Very Broad Topic
One of the most important elements that determine the traffic to your blog is its topic. Before choosing a topic for your blog, you should conduct effective research.
This research will help you know whether your topic is specific and will attract an audience or not. Using the research, you can assess the demand-supply level of your topic.
The demand-supply level of the topic will help you determine its profitability. When you assess the demand-supply level, there can be two situations.
In the first case, the demand may be greater than the supply. This means the audience or readers want to read blogs on a particular topic. However, due to the low supply, they are not getting blogs on this topic.
So you can create a blog on this topic to attract a larger target audience. By creating such a blog, you will help to balance the demand and the supply.
In the second case, the supply may be greater than the demand. This means the web is full of blogs on a particular topic. However, due to less demand, the readers do not want to read the blogs on this topic.
So you should not choose this topic as your blog topic. This is because when you write an article on this topic, it will add to the already existing list of worthless blogs present on the web.
So the topic that you choose should be specific enough to be addressed to a particular target audience. This is because pleasing all the people out there in the market is not possible. So you should choose a specific topic that aligns with a specific audience base.
To choose a specific topic, you can use different tools. The tools can help you find specific topics based on certain factors. These factors include some suggestive blog titles or the keywords based on which you want to write about a specific topic.
So once you learn how to choose specific topics for your blog posts, the rest of the process to build a blog becomes much easier.
5. Not Explaining Broadly About a Topic
Choosing a broad topic is not recommended. However, not explaining broadly about a specific topic is also not recommended. Beginners in the blogging industry should understand that blogging is aimed at sharing information with the target audience.
When you create a blog on a particular topic, you explain the topic to the readers. Moreover, you align with the requirements of the readers to provide them with solutions for their problems.
So, to explain the topic broadly, you should understand the situation of the readers. You can answer specific questions to determine what information you need to provide about the topic.
- What is the meaning of the topic?
- What is your goal in writing this blog on this specific topic?
- What benefits will users receive if they follow the actions you recommend in your blog?
- What are the problems and requirements of the audience related to the blog topic?
Answers to all such questions can be included in the content of your blog. When you provide answers to the above questions, the readers will know that you understand their problems and situations.
So being interested in the blog topic can help to engage the audience. If you are not interested in explaining the topic clearly to the readers, then they will not read your blog.
6. Lack of An Editorial Calendar or Schedule
In this digital age, there are a plethora of blogs on the web. This increases the competition for each blogger. You can survive this competition only if you have a particular schedule or follow some blogging strategies.
The importance of the blogging strategy has already been explained above.
In the beginning, the most common mistake that bloggers may make is the absence of a schedule or an editorial calendar. Due to such absence, they may post blogs inconsistently, without a fixed schedule.
However, inconsistency can lead to a traffic drop. This traffic drop is generally exponential in nature and not linear. So you need to be very careful while posting the blogs.
This is the sole medium for bloggers to connect with their audience: their blogs. If they stop posting content for a longer period, their audience may forget them.
As a blogger, you need to build a habit of writing and posting frequently and regularly. For this, you can create a posting strategy based on your target audience and niche.
To create the posting strategy, the bloggers may build an editorial calendar. You can stick to this schedule to maintain consistency in your posting process.
However, before creating your schedule, you should keep in mind your marketing strategy. The schedule should always align with your marketing strategy. A schedule that may work for you, according to your marketing strategy, may not work for your competitors.
To create a schedule, you can make use of the editorial calendar plugin in WordPress. This plugin is present on the WordPress dashboard.
With a drag-and-drop interface, the WordPress editorial calendar plugin is very easy to use. Moreover, it is freely available for the audience. So if you are a blogger in the industry, you can use this additional plugin.
Another software that can help bloggers prepare their calendars or schedules is Trello. You can create schedules based on various cards on this platform.
Firstly, you may create blog topics under a card. Once you start writing on any blog topic, you can shift it to the “pending” card. When you complete the blog, you can further drag the topic from the “pending” card to the “completed” card.
7. Forgetting About Your Target Audience
The main reason for bloggers to create blogs is the target audience. So you should write each sentence of your blog with the target audience in mind.
Knowing your target audience is one of the most essential parts of blogging if you want to grow your content base. To know your target audience, you can research them. This research will help you learn various elements about the target audience.
Some of these elements include the blog requirements of the target audience, including their interests, preferences, tastes, demographics, etc. According to these elements, you can align your writing style and content.
Once you know the target audience, you can easily choose the blog topic. Not only this, but knowing the target audience will also help you frame content for the blog according to the requirements of the target audience.
You can research your target audience in various ways. In this digital age, conducting research and knowing about the audience have become easier than ever.
For this, you may interact with your readers through email or comments. In the comments section, you can discuss their requirements. This will help you know the types of blogs they are looking for in your niche.
Bloggers may also keep an eye on the moves of their competitors in the same niche. This will allow them to know the interests and requirements of the target audience.
8. Less Usage of Research and Facts
You should always back up your statements in the blog with research and data. The numerical figures in your blogs can help increase the credibility of your data. The arguments become more supportive and compelling once they are backed up with effective research and data.
This is because when you provide only content to the readers, they are less likely to get convinced. On the other hand, research may consist of numerical figures or data from a similar target audience.
In this case, the readers are likely to get more convinced. Due to the particular situation that has been undergone by the people. Not only do they know the situation, but now they also know the reaction or the consequences of this situation.
Moreover, simple content may not be able to attract the attention of the public. On the other hand, arguments with the data and statistics are likely to attract and engage them.
To explain the main topic of your blog, you can use data as proof. This data will help you show the relevance of the topic to your readers.
However, before including research, facts, and data in your content, you should check their credibility. False data can severely impact your blog’s reach. If the audience comes to know that you use false information, they are likely not to visit your blog site again.
Let’s understand the importance of data, research, and facts with the help of an example.
Let us say you want to create a blog on the topic of “Instagram marketing.” Out of the two sentences mentioned below, which one will you prefer in your content?
- In this digital age, more people are using Instagram to enhance their businesses.
- The increase of Instagram can be seen from the latest research. This research shows how more than two million advertisers use Instagram to satisfy their advertising requirements. Moreover, more than 1 billion people use Instagram every month. In this figure, approximately 88% of the users reside outside the US.
Out of the two sentences, which one do you think can make a more compelling impact on the audience? The obvious answer to this question is the second one.
The reason behind this is simply that the second statement has more power to influence and convince the readers. This is because it consists of different statistics that help to increase the credibility of the content.
9. Using Images from Google
Let us say that you have created a very high-quality article. However, you added copyrighted images to this article from Google.
Instead of making profits from your blog, you could incur several losses. This is because using images from Google can even get you sued.
The reason behind this legal suit is that you use images from the internet without the permission of their creator. In this way, you violate the copyright of the images, either knowingly or unknowingly. For this, you will have to undergo the legal process in both cases.
Some of the bloggers think that they may use the images by giving a backlink to their creators as credit. However, this is also wrong. The most important thing is that you need the permission of the creator of the image to use it.
To avoid this problem, the bloggers starting their careers in their industry should stop using Google images. However, inserting images in the blogs is crucial. So from where can you get these images?
The web has several free image editing sites and tools that provide the images to the users. These images may belong to different niches and categories.
So to search for such websites on Google, you should use words like “copyright-free” or “royalty-free images.”
Some of the websites or applications that help you download free images in HD quality are as follows:
- Burst
- Pexels
- Unsplash.
- Canva
- Pixabay
- Kaboompics
- Free Images
The above platforms help users download free pictures. Besides this, the users can also use the editing tools of these platforms to create their pictures according to their requirements.
The users may even search for royalty-free images with the help of the Creative Commons licence. This means that you need to give credit to the owner of the pictures by linking back to their website.
10. Lack of Examples
Adding examples to your blogs is very crucial. Bloggers can use examples to back up their written content and make it easier for readers to understand. Besides this, examples also serve as the storyline and help to engage the attention of the readers.
So the bloggers should always explain their content with the help of examples. But before adding an example, you should check if the example is relatable to the context of the content or not.
The examples should also help the readers understand your content. For this, you can answer certain questions like:
- Will the readers be able to visualize the example?
- Can they understand the acronym in the example?
- Will the example confuse the audience instead of serving its purpose?
Let us say that you want to create a blog on digital marketing. In this blog, you explain the various elements that can help you pursue digital marketing.
However, the content becomes quite boring due to technical data and monotonous information. Not only this, but understanding the information is also difficult.
For this, you may cite an example of how a particular company pursued digital marketing. In this example, you can see the various digital marketing techniques adopted by the company.
The example should also illustrate the consequences and effects of the different digital marketing techniques on the company.
11. Traces of Plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to copied content that bloggers may place in their blogs without the permission of the content creator. Generally, individuals beginning blogs may choose to copy and paste content into their blogs.
They may think that using the copied content will make their work easier, and no one will know about it. However, plagiarism can be detected by the editors and even the readers. This is because when you use copied content, the tone of the blog changes.
Sometimes the bloggers may replace the words of the copied content with their own synonyms. However, in this case, too, the readers can easily pick out the incorrectly used words.
So you should avoid using plagiarized content in your blogs. Plagiarism can even get your site sued by Google. So instead of using the content of others without giving them credit, you can use their content with their permission.
For this reason, you should give credit to the users when you use their content. All you have to do is cite the people’s content and give them credit.
12. Absence of An Email List
One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers may make while starting to create blogs is to neglect their email list. According to research, email marketing is one of the best forms of marketing for businesses.
This platform has proven to be 40 times more effective than social media marketing. Hence, with so much popularity, the bloggers should reap the benefits of the growing email marketing industry.
Emails can help you bring repeated traffic to your website. Not only this, but email newsletters are quite easy to create. The email subscribers of a blogger include the audience that is the first to read their blogs.
They also help you share your blogs and increase your network through social media. They may share your articles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
So, how can you attract users to your email list? For this, you may add several features at the end of your blog. Including a free ebook or a course for the users related to your niche can help.
Once the users fill in their email addresses, you get a chance to connect with them even without your blog.
The email subscribers of the bloggers are more likely to be convinced by the content of the blog. If you promote a particular product or service in the blogs, then these are the people who are likely to purchase it.
13. Emphasising on Immediate Traffic to Your Blog
Another mistake that you may commit while starting a blog is focusing on immediate traffic on your blog. By committing this mistake, you may focus on the analytics of immediate traffic.
This immediate traffic includes the target audience that comes to your blog through RSS feeds, email subscribers, or social media sharing.
However, relying on immediate traffic to sustain your blogs in the long run is pointless. These sources will allow you to attract traffic to your websites only for a short period of time.
Due to this mistake, the bloggers may get frustrated because they do not tend to attract a larger target audience over a longer period of time. They think that they cannot create blogs and may leave the industry.
However, the solution to this problem comes from attracting organic traffic over time. So instead of focusing on short-term traffic, you should emphasize organic traffic.
Attracting organic traffic to your blog website happens due to the high quality of your content. Once you have good-quality content with the required SEO keywords and phrases, it will rank on the search engine result pages.
This will allow the readers to see your content and open it. Hence, attracting organic traffic solely depends on the amount of hard work you put into the blogs and the quality of your writing.
To gain more long-term traffic, you should verify the durability of your content. This means you should see whether content can survive in the long term or not. For this, the bloggers can create evergreen blogs.
Evergreen blogs do not become obsolete after a certain period of time. Leaders can obtain information from them even after years have passed.
Moreover, research shows how evergreen posts help attract the majority of organic traffic to a blog website.
14. Starting a Free Blog
Generally, the main purpose of creating a blog website for the users is to earn income through their skills. However, these individuals may create a free blog initially.
You should avoid making this mistake. If you use WordPress to create a free blog, your domain name may end in.wordpress.com.
There are many limitations or disadvantages that come with creating free blogs.
- Self-hosted or paid blogs provide more control to the users. On the other hand, your free blog website may get damaged anytime without any proper reason.
- One of the biggest disadvantages that comes with creating free blogs is the ownership of the content. When you create content on free blogging platforms, you do not own it. Instead, these platforms own the content and can take it at any time.
- Not only this, but the free blogging platforms also do not allow the users to monetize their websites.
- These platforms provide limitations to the users. The limitations may include several advanced features, space, and bandwidth.
So you should choose a paid blogging platform. Before that, the user should always estimate the related costs of setting up a paid blog website.
One of the best-paid hosting services is Bluehost. This platform will cost approximately $100 for a single year. So this is a good investment in terms of blogging.
15. Not Editing Your Post
One of the most important aspects of creating the article is editing it. Once you have stopped writing your article, you can edit it. In the end, editing will help you remove all the grammatical errors and mistakes.
The reason behind editing is that grammatical errors and mistakes show your unprofessionalism as a blogger. When readers come across any such mistakes, they may think that you do not know how to write. If you cannot provide the correct content, then how will they trust you?
No matter if you have high-quality content, grammatical errors and mistakes may turn off readers. So once you have finished writing your article, you should read it after some time.
You can also get your article read by a friend or an editor. Reading the article out loud will help you hear the mistakes. You can also hear the sentences that are not framed correctly.
Besides manually editing the article, the bloggers can also use different editing software. This is because even after proofreading, your content may contain some careless errors.
Hence, you can use different grammar checking tools or software that will help you verify your written content. Such tools can check your content for spelling, punctuation, grammatical errors, sentence structure, readability, writing style, etc.
Some of the tools also analyze the tone, style, and syntax of your article. They can provide you with a percentage of the number of passive and active voice sentences and the readability of each paragraph of your blog.
To enhance the readability of your blog, the tools also provide suggestions and recommendations to the users. You can replace the words with their ideal synonyms to improve readability.
Let us now take a look at the various tools that can assist users in editing their blogs.
1. Grammarly
One such tool that can be used by bloggers to edit their content is Grammarly. Grammarly has more than 20 million users and is the top editing software.
The credibility of the platform is shown by the fact that more than 600 universities use it to satisfy their writing requirements.
With the help of this tool, you can check the misspelled words, reframed sentences, punctuation, and even the active and passive voice sentences.
It assists users in editing their content by utilizing the detection feature.This feature detects more than 400 types of grammatical errors in blogs.
Besides editing, Grammarly also allows users to scan their content for plagiarism. It has a robust algorithm that allows it to verify for plagiarism and grammatical errors.
The database of more than 16 billion web pages will help you make sure that your blogs do not have any copied content. The software has three plans: free, premium, and business. You can choose a plan according to your requirements and budget.
2. Outwrite
Outwrite is another grammatical and plagiarism checking tool with a cloud-based interface. The tool is integrated with an AI engine that helps it to scan the text of the users for plagiarism and grammatical errors.
This software will help you assess your punctuation, spelling, grammar, and quality of writing and will provide recommendations. You can improve the readability of your content by simplifying the sentences using Outwrite.
Not only this, but it also helps the users convert their passive-voice sentences into active-voice sentences.
To avoid using plagiarized content, you can use the plagiarism detection feature of the platform. Outwrite can even help you maintain the word count of your blogs through its customized suggestions.
With all such advantages, you can use the different plans of Outwrite. The software has three plans: the essential plan, the pro plan, and the team plan.
3. Pro Writing Aid
Pro Writing Aid is a trusted application for detecting grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and plagiarism. The software helps scan your content for more than 20 errors.
Once your blog is verified for errors, the tool will provide you with a report. It can even provide users with more than 20 reports.
The major advantage of this tool is its compatibility with different file formats and applications. The software can even connect with applications like Google Docs, Chrome, Gmail, etc.
With so many features, you can subscribe to the different plans of Pro Writing Aid.
The software has three plans. These plans, according to their pricing options, are the free plan, the premium plan, and the premium plus plan.
4. White Smoke
As a proofreading application, WhiteSmoke has many grammar correcting features. These features offer users more than 100 templates. Using the tool, you can check your content for spelling mistakes, sentence framing, capabilities, style, punctuation phrases, tone, etc.
The outstanding elements of white smoke are its dictionary and translating elements. The software’s dictionary has more than 50 languages. This allows the users to easily write in different languages and edit them on the software for their target audience.
The easy to use interface also allows the users to easily learn the usage and navigate through the platform. You can use the software on different devices due to its compatibility with Mac OS, Android, Windows, iOS, and different web browsers. With so many benefits, you can subscribe to WhiteSmoke’s various plans.
As a result, these are some of the applications that can assist you in editing your blog. Choosing the right software at the beginning of blogging will improve the quality of the content.
So before choosing, you should see whether the elements of the tool align with your requirements or not.
16. Lack of A Newsletter and Call to Action
Once you start blogging, you may gain lots of readers. These readers read your blog and go back to it.
But what is its benefit to you?
How can you allow these readers to become your regular viewers and read your blogs regularly?
The bloggers can do this by placing a call to action and newsletter at the end of their blogs.
Once the readers finish the blog, they do not know what to do, so they simply click the back button. However, you can provide an action for the readers and tell them the next step to take after reading the blog.
For this, the bloggers should place a call to action in the newsletter. Such a call to action or a newsletter will help you gather the emails of your regular readers. This enables you to increase your list of subscribers and gain more traffic.
The bloggers may also create a landing page for their subscribers. This page should be meant to attract traffic from different social media pages to your website or email.
You can significantly increase the number of your email subscribers by adding several call-to-actions or the “opt for email” button at the end of your website. Once you have the email address of the target audience, you can send them welcome emails.
This will help them to feel a personal connection with you. After the welcome email, the bloggers should create a regular newsletter. This will help you to engage the attention of your readers and keep them interested in your latest content and blogs.
17. Choosing Self-Indulgence
For whom do you create blogs? What is your main goal in creating blogs?
The answer to these questions is simply that a blogger creates blogs for his or her target audience.
The goal before creating blogs is to satisfy the target audience and provide them with relevant information related to the topic.
However, when you create a blog and explain a particular topic, you may even talk about yourself in the blog. This gives your blog personality and shows users that you are a person, not a robot. They can feel a personal connection with you and are likely to trust you more.
However, being personal and being too personal are two different things. You should not choose self-indulgence for your entire blog.
It is important to create a personal connection with the readers. But if you keep on telling or boasting about yourself, then you may be looked upon by the readers as a narcissist.
So how can you stop your blog from being too personal? For this, the bloggers showed they always used facts, research, examples, and case studies in their blogs. They can also quote some famous personalities to increase the credibility of their content.
Hence, the major goal of the bloggers should be to share information while maintaining a personal connection with the readers.
They should, however, make certain that they are not completely transparent about their personalities to the audience.
18. Choosing a Bad Web Hosting Company
When you are starting to blog, choosing a web hosting company is a crucial step. However, new bloggers may prefer to sign up with cheap web hosting companies to save money.
Investing in a web hosting company is a crucial investment. As a result, you should not consider saving money in this step.
You will receive poor quality features and customer service if you choose a bad web hosting company. As a result, you have a variety of web hosting companies to choose from. Bluehost is one of the best web hosting companies for bloggers.
It has an easy to use interface and is quite affordable. Moreover, the platform provides a 30-day money-back guarantee to its users. So you can test out its features during this time and decide whether you want to use it further or not.
19. Striving Towards Perfection
As a beginner in the blogging industry, you may strive for perfection. However, perfection is just a myth. There is no such thing as something that can be perfect in all aspects.
So while striving for perfection, all you are doing is modifying your blog again and again, wasting your time. There are numerous bloggers that want the perfect blog name, the perfect website design, and other perfect features in their blogs.
But while striving for perfection, these bloggers may risk their growth. They are afraid to take risks, and face new challenges while creating different types of blogs. This stops their growth.
They simply waste their time refining the small details of their blogs, which do not matter. So in reality, your blog post will never be perfect.
There will always be some aspects that can be improved. You may think to put better phrases, better images, and better humour in your content.
So you should stop making things better and just publish, rather than postponing your post. Remember, you should never publish a post with grammatical or spelling errors. You can edit the post, but do not strive to make it perfect.
20. Lack of Media
Just imagine that while surfing the web, you come across a blog article. This article consists of 800 to 1000 words. However, the screen is all black and white because the blog post does not have any pictures or media on it.
It simply has a white background with black text on it. There are no paragraph breaks, bullet points, or subheads to make the text look appealing.
Don’t you think that it is quite exhausting to read this full article? Moreover, just at a single glance, the readers will find it tiring to read the article and may leave it.
To avoid this mistake, the bloggers should include video clips, GIFs, and pictures in their article. However, make sure that you do not include an excessive amount of media.
This can increase the loading time of the website, which, in turn, may annoy the users. The readers can leave your blog if it takes more time to load. So maintaining a balance between the written content and the media is important.
21. Relying on SEO and Social Media for Traffic
As a beginner in the blogging industry, if you are relying solely on social media and SEO for traffic, then it is a big mistake. This is because many beginners may create backlinks without even gaining the audience’s trust.
Their sole purpose is not to provide quality content and satisfy the writing requirements of the target audience. On the other hand, all they pursue is attracting traffic by modifying the algorithms of the search engine.
To modify the algorithms, they may stuff a huge number of keywords into their blogs. These keywords may not make any sense. But they will just help the bloggers increase the position of their blog on the search engine result pages.
So all such techniques as a low-quality article, content with no value, and keyword stuffing are known as “black hat” strategies. These methods allow the bloggers to cheat their audiences and the algorithms of the search engine.
However, if you pursue these techniques, then your website will gradually die.
As a beginner, you should know that only your hard work and the quality of your content can help you attract an audience. If you help to solve the problems of the target audience through your blogs, then your blog will attract great traffic.
You should also add keywords to your content, but only if they are compatible with the sentences. What you should do is search for popular keywords to help your content reach an audience.
In the end, you need to create brand authority with the help of your content. As you keep on writing high-quality content, you can use other techniques to make that content reach your audience.
Similarly, you should not be pursuing social media strategies before creating good content. To facilitate search engine optimization keyword research and social media marketing, you can use different tools.
Let us have a look at these tools.
1. Yoast SEO
You can improve the on-page SEO techniques for your blogs. Yoast can help you find keywords and naturally add them to your articles.
2. KwFinder
With an easy-to-use Interface, KwFinder has different features that help the user find keywords. This software is primarily meant for searching for long-tail keywords.
While showing you the results for the keywords, the tool also shows the search volume trend, level of difficulty, and CPC.
3. Buffer
Buffer is another tool that helps users schedule their social media posts. The users can schedule their posts in batches at a certain time to maintain their productivity.
This will facilitate social media marketing that can help you attract traffic to your blogs. Buffer can be connected with your different social media accounts. You can schedule your posts and post them on all or any one of the platforms.
4. Semrush
Semrush allows bloggers to find keywords according to the niche or topic of their website. Not only this, but when you search for the keywords on the software, you can get details for each keyword or phrase.
5. Ubersuggest
If you want a free keyword research tool, then you can use Ubersuggest.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another platform for keyword research. It provides the most accurate keywords for the users’ blogs. While the bloggers research their keywords on different platforms, they should focus on long-tail keywords.
22. Lack of A Blog Community
As a blogger, it is necessary for you to network with other bloggers. Once you start blogging, if you know a group of similar people, they can help you.
On the other hand, if you are unaware of the other bloggers in your industry, you are missing out on various opportunities. If you know the bloggers, you can learn from them and take up their techniques and strategies that may work for you.
To expand your networking outreach, you should comment on the posts of other bloggers. This will help you build your blog community by having conversations with people.
There can be situations when you mention other bloggers in your articles. In these cases, you can email them the published article to let them know about the credit you gave them.
There can be chances when they re-share the post which can help you to grow your blog community and attract greater traffic.
When you have a blog community, you know which techniques work and which do not. You can also learn from the experience of other bloggers to see the consequences of particular situations.
The two best methods can assist you in developing a blogging community.The first way is to create a Facebook group.
Once you start blogging, you can create a Facebook group for this purpose. Here, you can connect with other Facebook groups that have the same niche. This can help you link with other bloggers and talk with them.
The second way is to create an email list to build your blog community. Once you build an email list, you should provide free material to your subscribers like eBooks, courses, giveaways, etc. You can also provide newsletters and educational content to engage them.
23. Cluttered Design
As a beginner in the blogging industry, the users make the big mistake of choosing a cluttered interface for the blog website. Sometimes the bloggers may choose a cluttered design to provide several features to the users.
They may think that they are making their website easy to navigate. But, in reality, they are making an uncluttered design that annoys the readers.
So, the less cluttered the interface of your website is, the more space you will receive. You can use white space to attract and engage the audience with different banners.
The white space also helps to enhance the written content, headlines, and images of the blog.
24. Quantity Over Quality
In the beginning, bloggers may think that quantity is more important than quality. It is due to this reason that they may create five low-quality articles rather than one in-depth article.
However, in reality, quality always beats quantity. It is better to create a single article that has detailed information about a particular topic. High-quality content can attract more traffic than a number of low-quality articles.
There may be situations when you have to create articles on complicated topics. In such cases, you can use real-world examples and researches to make high-quality content.
So, in the end, it is the quality of your content rather than its quantity that determines the success of your blog.
25. No Plan to Monetize Your Blog
A monetisation plan is another important factor that decides the success of the bloggers. If you have created a monetization strategy according to your budget, it can help you in your blogging process.
However, the bloggers may not create a monetization plan in the beginning. They just create blog posts and wait to attract traffic so that they can monetize them. But this is the wrong method.
Other than this, the bloggers should create a monetization plan in the first year. They should assess things and know how much they need to make money from their blogs.
But comparing your blogs with someone else’s blogs is not correct. Your growth pace may not be the same as others’.
Some of the monetization strategies that you can choose as a Blogger are as follows.
1. Offer Your Services
With the help of your blog platform, you can offer different services to your target audience.
The services can help making money from your blog include:
- Freelance content writing services
- Digital marketing services.
- WordPress services.
- Website design and development services
- SEO related services
All you need to do is create your services page. You can link to this page from your blog posts. This can help to attract the target audience and improve lead generation.
2. Sell Different Products
As a blogger, you can also sell different products to make money. These products may include digital as well as physical products, namely, digital products.
They range from a variety of online courses to ebooks and other online materials. All you need to do is enhance your marketing strategy to attract an audience that can purchase your product.
3. Sell Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for bloggers to earn passive income. Researchers show that approximately 80% of bloggers earn income from affiliate marketing.
Under affiliate marketing, the bloggers need to promote a particular product or service. They can do this by placing affiliate links, in their blogs or articles.
Once the viewers click on these affiliate links, they are redirected to the official page of the particular product or service. If they perform any action on this page or purchase the product or service, the bloggers earn Commission.
This commission may be in the form of a certain percentage as provided by the company.
There are a number of affiliate programs that you can pursue if you want to make money. These affiliate programs are in different niches.
However, you should promote a particular product or service only if you are satisfied that it would be useful for your audience.
Conclusion
As is often said, prevention is better than cure. This article illustrates in detail the biggest blogging mistakes to avoid that bloggers may make while starting the blogs. Once you know all such mistakes, you can avoid them.
This will save you from the consequences that bloggers may face through careless articles. Each mistake also provides the fix or the method with which you can fix it.
Hence, by creating high-quality content, you have greater chances of attracting traffic to your website and improving your brand’s image.
