Common Blogging Mistakes Beginners Make

When it comes to growing an online presence, you will agree that a blog is one of those ways to achieve it. Apart from demonstrating your expertise, it is an easy way to grow traffic for your business.

It accounts for why a lot of blogs springing up daily. Although many loss on this venture due to some common blogging mistakes. The good news is that these mistakes are avoidable if you take note of them. Businesses now invest in creating content and promoting content for their blogs. The results are many times outstanding.

In this article, I will focus on this beginner’s mistake and see how we can avoid them.

13 Common Blogging Mistakes

1. Target Niche not defined

Many newbies come into the field without defining their target audience. Some start creating content without a set niche. It is a common blogging mistake you must avoid.

Your target audience is a group or class of people who will be interested in your kind of content or business. They believe in what you offer and are in search of the outcome of your product.

A good example is the dog food niche. The target audience is dog lovers. So when dog lovers come across your website, they will expect to see dog-related content, like age and different diets associated with dogs. Although pigs are large animals, content relating to them will be irrelevant here.

So blogging without keeping your audience in mind will make you lose the audience. People will not confidently rely on your content. You need to define your audience and start creating relevant content for your audience.

If you write for a large class of audience, then you must optimize your website for this diverse class of audience.

Whichever class you think you will want to belong, start by creating a buyer persona. According to Hubspot, a buyer persona represents your ideal customer. It is based on collected data on your existing customer. When creating your buyer persona, you should consider your customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.

2. Deviating from Target Niche

In a bid to create new articles you can easily deviate from your niche. They commit this blogging mistake in a bid to cover a wide range of topics. It is because of the desire to meet the demand of a wide range of audience.

Irrespective of the scope of your business, you should focus on a specific niche. Also, concentrate on raising content for that niche. So doing your engagement rate will increase, and the probability of social media platforms and search engines to broadcast your content will increase. Top of it, establishing your authority within your niche market will be easy.

Focus on creating niche-related content. It may look narrow and ineffective, but it is the best way to present your brand message. It will reduce your competition and increase your authority in your desired market.

3. Inconsistent content Creation

Another common blogging mistake is inconsistency in content creation. People naturally visit blogs with fresh content regularly. If you begin to receive traffic flow, you must do your best to post content regularly.

An easy way to achieving consistent content creation is creating a content calendar for your business. It is a schedule for your content creation and promotion activities. It will help you plan your blog content days and weeks. With this, you will not need to think of what to write every time you want to create content.

Writers who work with content calendar do not have issues like writer blog. Their content is planned aforehand before its time for creation.

4. Creating Too Short content

In a bid to post consistently, some bloggers create short content of low quality. Consistency in content creation does not mean you have to create content daily or hourly.

Taking the dog niche we used as an example, you may decide to write a series on growth f a dog and talk about the different stages for a particular breed. While someone will do a comprehensive article on the growth process, someone else will decide to brake it into various pieces.

5. Not Building an Email List

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing. Top bloggers like Niel Patel continuously emphasizes the need for an email list. They say it is much more effective than any other marketing channel.

Your subscribers are sets usually set of customers who are loyal to your brand. You can rely on them when it comes to commenting on your blog content and sharing your social media content.

A simple way to gain subscribers to your email list is by offering them something of value also called lead magnet.

6. Not Creating A Content Schedule

The moment you are not creating content and promoting it, you can be sure to experience a drop in your traffic. Unfortunately, this drop is not going to be linear. It is exponential. It multiplies itself.

Most beginners post content irrationally, they don’t create a content schedule to guide their content creation. You need a schedule, or a calendar to guide your content creation and promotion. That way, you will not be out of ideas. Also, you will create content consistently.

Based on your niche, devise a content creation strategy that is the best fit for your business. Ensure it aligns with your marketing strategy. There are different ways of creating a content calendar, from the excel spreadsheet to WordPress plugIns. You can decide on any that is the best fit for your business in terms of convenience and cost.

7. Not Promoting your Content.

Let us figure it out together, will creating good content alone drive traffic to your website?

My answer is NO

I very well agree with you producing good content. But you need to promote your content. Create a strategic plan for pushing out your content.

8. Focusing too Much on SEO

Do not compromise quality user-friendly content in a bid to gain good ranking in search engine. Many beginner bloggers make this mistake a lot. They give higher priority to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at the expense of quality user-friendly content.

SEO practices like keyword research are highly essential but do not do it for SEO alone. Do it to discover your audience interest. So doing, you will be creating highly targeted content. Google and other search engines will continue to prioritize quality content. Focus on researching quality content.

9. Not been persuasive in your writing

Sales will not come from just been informative. You must be persuasive in writing. Do not get it wrong. I am not saying focus on selling in all your writing. Your blog section is for sharing valuable information and not for making reviews.

As an expert, you need a blend. Craft your headline and introduction well. Empathize with your audience pain points and offer bonuses that can generate instant gratifications. It will help your readers engage with your content and also take profitable actions.

To create a balance, produce an interesting, and persuasive article, follow the AIDA rule. It is an acronym where A stands for Attention, I stands for interest, D stands for desire, and A stands for action.

Your content should focus on capturing your audience attention first. It is where your headlines and introductory paragraph comes in. Next, your content must be interesting and persuasive to keep your audience attention. Also, it must be able to stimulate a desire to buy in your audience and lastly you must be able to generate action via a clear call to action statement.

With AIDA’s rule, you will produce content that is easy to read and also persuasive. Another recommendation alongside is using a Proofreader like Grammarly. It will ensure your errors are to the barest minimum. As such, your content will be easy to read and understand

10. Relying on Google Adsense as income

Can you imagine selling your competitors product in your shop? That is what you do when all you rely on as income is Google AdSense. Truth be told, Adsense is an easy way to monetize your blog, but it is not always the best.

You should sell your product or worst-case scenario, do affiliate marketing. Build your sales funnel, it takes a lot of effort. You will need to test the products and also survey your users, but they are all efforts in the right direction.

11. Using Copyrighted images

Images are easily copyrighted, but they could lead to a lot of troubles. You can be losing as much as 1,000 dollars f you could have gotten for 8 dollars. Be very careful with picking images from places like Google.

Do your best to avoid safety, use free images from platforms like canva or use images taken with your camera or from friends, family or colleagues. That way you will be playing it safe.

12. Starting with a Free Blog

I see people saying they want to try it, they start with a free blog. It is easy to start with a free blog. There are lots of free blogs available. Bluehost and a host of other hosting companies offer services with their free blogs.

But face the fact, your growth and monetization on free blogs are very limited. If you want to test the waters, you need something you can influence and control. Don’t put your efforts in the hands of hosting companies, put effort into it. It will work.

Start your website, sign up for paid hosting with Bluehost. I have used this company, and you can rest assured to get good services from them. You can always access my free WordPress course and learn how to maintain your website.

In conclusion, starting your WordPress website can be a lot of headache without appropriate guidance. The above mistakes are some of the common mistakes you are likely to make. If you are starting, these mistakes are avoidable. Learn blogging from proven bloggers – join the Wealthy Affiliate Platform Wealthy Affiliate Platform

In case you have made some of them and have or have not made corrections, it is not too late. You can always make the necessary amendments.

Sharing your experience in the comment section will help both new and experienced bloggers.