To effectively drive search traffic to your website, consistent posting of both repurposed and fresh content in your blog is a good strategy that helps in promoting your expertise and thought leadership out there. By doing this consistently, it will enable you to develop your writing skills and produce even more comprehensive articles worth reading.
However, content production is never as easy as it seems. In fact, experts claim that blogging is difficult and mistakes are inevitable the first time around; hence, considering numerous technicalities when blogging.
For beginners, blogging is considered an uphill climb, especially that you need to sustain maximum efforts in maintaining an established online presence, attracting more leads, and creating strategies that trigger interaction with the audience. Mistakes are highly common. That’s why comprehensive planning, researching, writing, polishing, and promoting are necessary.
Especially in today’s time that the blogging industry is getting prominent, here are some of the blogging mistakes that you must avoid in 2021.
1. Being Clueless About Your Target Persona (Audience)
Your target persona helps you determine the kind of content you should be producing in your blog.
The target persona refers to your ideal reader or audience. This points to the kind of people you want or hope to be reading your content, and take action upon reading your compelling thoughts.
If you lack any idea about your target audience, you will find it difficult to steer your content towards the kind of quality that resonates with your readers. To avoid this huge mistake, create a profile of your target persona. It may help to check your existing readers, especially the most engaged ones, and identify their qualities.
Or, you can also examine your biggest competitors and study the kind of people who are following them and their content. For those who are using content as a marketing strategy, you can check your ideal customers and study what makes them ideal for your business.
2. Skipping Competitor Research
The second blogging mistake is skipping competitor research.
When you think of competitor research, you might think of some big-scale research that requires so many tools. However, competitor research can be done through old-school researching—Googling (or whatever search engine you use to search for information).
First, you have to identify who your competitors are. This means looking into your niche and examining which blogs target the same audience that you do, or produce content similar to yours. Next, you check their articles. Study their styles.
You can go even more specific by looking at their article outlines, headers, and even title ideas. Since most of them are already established, you know that their strategies are data-driven and you can rely on their expertise when it comes to making content.
3. Too Much Storytelling
Storytelling gives an opportunity to promote inspiration among readers and add a personalized touch. Anecdotes and stories are commonly used in introductory statements of the blog content.
However, some writers tend to take advantage of the stories just to lengthen the thoughts posed on the blog articles because they believe that stories are everywhere and can be used to illustrate the points should there be times when there is a difficulty in content production.
Subsequently, this becomes a common blogging mistake. The images expressed through storytelling attempts can overpower the content and lose its essence. Remember that in overcoming this kind of blogging mistake, you need to analyze the stories you are about to include and just incorporate the stories that can effectively deliver your message.
Stories may add to the authenticity of the blog post, but if you are already compromising the purpose of your content, it is not worth it.
4. Using Too Many Jargons
Jargons may be necessary especially in niches that require technical terms. Because of using jargon, bloggers can discuss complex ideas and dive deeper into the topics without being misunderstood. It also expresses your authority because blog topics that use jargon encourage discussions of fundamental concepts that non-experts would have no idea about.
However, excessive use of jargon can discourage readers. Most of those who visit websites do not actually read the entire content. Now, if all they read in the body of your article are jargons when they want to get the gist of the information they are looking for, they might leave your blog instantly.
If too much jargon is used, this will drastically affect search traffic and eventually reduce interaction among readers or clients. Remember, people search for ideas that they may be familiar with, but are not always knowledgeable about; thus, you need to reduce using jargon.
5. Writing About Too Many Unrelated Topics
This is another blogging mistake where writers go for blog topics that are random and unrelated to your niche. Should you commit this mistake, you will lose a potential loyal following.
Remember, targeted content really matters especially when you want to just focus on a single niche. This will be challenging if you are committing this blogging mistake. In addition, writing about too many unrelated topics affects the SEO of your blog negatively.
Plan your articles ahead of time. You can write lengthy guides and extract your next articles from these guides. Check which gaps you need to fill in, then write about them.
6. Forgetting About SEO
Another blogging mistake that writers overlook is the power of search engine optimization (SEO).
Because of the promising benefits of SEO as an avenue to establish a strong presence in different search engine platforms and ensure an increase in traffic rankings and engagement, forgetting about SEO will end up affecting your search performance.
To overcome this blogging mistake, concentrate more on SEO. In blogging, SEO is considered the most important investment as this ensures further visibility in different platforms.
Don’t just write content. Make sure your target readers will find what you write.
7. Neglecting Your Outline
Some writers tend to craft blog content in an efficient manner because they are already well-adept with the topic they are writing. Through this, they typically neglect the blog outline so that they can be able to write an article immediately.
Unfortunately, this is a blogging mistake that you must avoid.
Technically, outlining is a process in blog writing where you obtain an idea of what you are going to write. This is considered as the foundation in blogging. Like a house, a weak foundation will give a weak result in your blog article.
You need to overcome this blogging mistake by making sure that you have the blog outline process as your toolbox. Taking note of the topics and subtopics that you are about to discuss will give you points on where you should prioritize.
8. Missing Stats and Relevant Data
Another blogging mistake that writers typically do is that they miss adding stats and relevant data in their articles.
Readers want information. When information includes statistics, trends, and analytical insights, they become more valuable to the readers. This type of information does not only enhance the quality of your blog post but also shapes the readers’ opinions and insights on matters important to you and to them.
9. Plagiarism
Because of the explosion of ideas displayed on the Internet, writers tend to just plainly copy the ideas in times where they find a certain blog topic difficult and complex to discuss.
For blog writers, this is considered challenging because of the situation that the thoughts are difficult to express in a unique way. However, it is never acceptable to plagiarise.
Doing thorough research, writing in your own words, citing your sources especially when using statistics, and checking in different anti-plagiarism tools are some of the things that you can do to avoid this kind of blogging mistake.
10. Not Promoting Your Blog
About 30%of your responsibility as a blog content creator is to write the content. The rest, the 70%, must be spent promoting your content.
Unfortunately, this is another blogging mistake that writers commit. You cannot just expect readers to check out your blog every time unless you have been in the business of blogging for so long already. There is a need to promote your blog and find ways to boost awareness among people by amplifying your content.
There are several ways to promote your blog. Sharing on your social media platforms is just one of them.