Are You Making These Common Blogging Mistakes?Having a blog is a necessity for almost any business that has an online presence. Everything from an independent contractor to a large corporation. Blogging is a versatile marketing tool that you shouldn’t ignore. While utilized properly though, a blog can do amazing things for your company, but some mistakes can cost you thousands of potential new clients, sign-ups, or product purchases.

It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging for fun or for profit, the idea is to get people reading your blog and following it on a regular basis. You want your blog to be their go-to source for the industry you’re in. Use the blog to become a subject matter expert in whatever field you are operating in.

If the goal of your blog is to establish you or your business as a leader in the industry, but you feel like you’ve stalled out with forward progress, you might be making one of these common blogging mistakes. No worries though. New bloggers and veteran bloggers both still make mistakes in the world of blogging. It’s bound to happen with the constant changes in platform algorithms and the sheer amount of content already on the internet.

Avoiding these common blogging mistakes will help your blog stand out in a crowded space where everyone is shouting to be heard.

You Don’t Know Your Audience

This is probably the most common issue, but it is one of the most important things to learn in writing. You’re not writing for you or even the algorithm. You’re writing for a like-minded audience who has a similar interest as you. Knowing your demographic and what type of content they want to consume is key to having a successful blog.

Another way to look at this same problem is thinking people are on your blog to hear about you, your company, and your experiences. While it is okay to inject your personality and personal opinions into your blog posts, you should never focus too much on your own thoughts and opinions. Your blog posts should be roughly 80% facts and information and 20% opinion. That is if your opinion is important and relevant to the topic.

People are coming to your blog for information about a product or service you offer or to learn something specific about the industry you’re in. Taking the time to understand your audience will help you retain readers and convert those loyal readers into loyal customers over time.

Are You Making These Common Blogging Mistakes?

Always remember to ask yourself why your topic matters to your readers. If you can’t figure out why they would care, then you need to go a new direction with the topic or pick an entirely different topic that resonates with your audience.

Your Publishing Schedule Is Inconsistent

One major mistake that new bloggers and blogs on big company websites make is not publishing their content on any sort of regular schedule. There are many reasons why this is important, but the main two are Google prefers and gives preference to consistent content, and second, your audience doesn’t know when to expect new content.

Publishing one good blog post this month, then three blog posts the next month, and then none for two months after that isn’t a great way to get your blog noticed. You need to create a list of content topics to write on and stick to using a content calendar.

Publishing only once a month isn’t ideal either, but even consistently once a month is better than sporadically throughout the year. Ideally, you want to publish 2 to 10 posts per month depending on your capacity. For our blog, we publish two posts per day for a total of 10 per week. Whatever frequency you decide on, remember that consistency is key.

One of the biggest keys to making your blog successful is posting quality content consistently.

Your Content Topics Are Too Broad | Niche Down

Don’t think too broad about your topics. One of the reasons that you can’t keep people on your blog is because you’re just trying to do too much. Instead of being “a blog about writing” be “a blog about writing for businesses” or “a blog for freelance writers.”

Ask yourself a few questions:

  • What is the goal of my blog and blog posts?
  • Who reads this type of content? Who is your audience?
  • Can my high-level topics be narrowed down or broken into multiple topics?

At the very least, you’re going to want to niche down your topics and specialize a bit. There are dozens of benefits for a business to run a blog, but it would be insane to try and include all of them. However, you can keep this simple and make it a numbered list; The Top 5 Ways Businesses Benefit from Running a Blog.

Get as specific as you can in each blog post. Dig deep into every subject. Not only will you never run out of things to write about, but you’ll also see more engagement from your audience. One thing you’ll notice as you do keyword research and see what content is already published is that it’s either outdated or very basic. That is your opportunity to take that content topic and create 10X content by going into much more detail.

Lack of Research and Facts to Support Your Points

blogging content researchNot only does Google reward long-form content (right around 2000 words), but your readers are looking for specific explanations to their problems or answers to their questions. Your content does you no good if you spend the entire time talking about something with no proof that you know what you’re talking about. If you want to establish credibility you need to put the time into doing the research.

Whenever possible, use facts and statistics to back up the claims you make in your content and always link to the sources you pull that information from. By using reliable sources, well-known research websites, medical journals, Universities, and news outlets, people will trust your ability to give them truthful and accurate information.

The type of facts or statistics you use will depend on what topic you’re writing about. For a blog post covering health and wellness, you might cite a medical journal. On the other hand, if you’re writing a blog post on current events or breaking news you might be citing a poll conducted by a school or some other institution. Using a strong blend of facts and opinions in your writing will make it more appealing to your audience.

Don’t be afraid to inject your personality into the blog post, but don’t go overboard with it. Instead, put your time and effort into the research, find relevant statistics that are current, and find a creative way to use them to illustrate your point.

Focusing on Quantity Over Quality of Content

While it is extremely important to focus on publishing new content regularly, your quality should never suffer to meet publishing deadlines. Take the time and produce the best quality content you can for your blog. You’ll make much better progress this way rather than just pumping out massive amounts of blog posts every week.

Next to publishing inconsistently, the next biggest mistake is publishing an endless stream of mediocre content. Yes, publishing a lot can be good as long as you are ensuring that content is all of the highest quality.

Make sure that every piece of content you publish is going to benefit your audience in some way. If you’re just out there writing about anything and everything,  then you can pretty much count on very little traffic or none at all.

Make sure that you ask all the important questions before you hit “publish.”

  • Does this speak to the reader?
  • How does it help the reader?
  • What does it teach the reader?
  • Why do they care about this topic?

If you can’t answer at least one or two of these questions, then you need to go back to brainstorming and researching the topic.

Do your best to focus on evergreen content; that is content that will be relevant in your niche long after you hit publish. This is going to help you continue to grow your audience through organic search results when your blog post eventually comes up in someone’s search. Evergreen content is like passive income. Over time it just keeps producing results.

Put Your Plan Into Action

Putting in a little extra effort during the planning and research phases of your content strategy goes a long way. It will show when you see your analytics numbers and social media following grow with your blog. Taking a little extra time to polish your content before you hit publish is always a good idea.

By avoiding these mistakes, you’re already on the way to providing better quality content for your audience. None of these mistakes is something you should feel bad about. Almost every blogger, including myself, has fallen victim to at least one of these mistakes. Own your mistake, learn from it, and keep moving forward.

By Published On: May 13, 2021Categories: Writing How-To7.8 min read1524 wordsViews: 661