10 Blogging Mistakes Every Blogger Make That Ruin Their Efforts

Blogging is one of the latest and most popular ways of earning online money.

However, a majority of bloggers often overlook the fact that blogging is much more than just writing quality content and publishing it every so often.

You probably have often heard people saying “I make a living through blogging”. Write quality content, publish it and get paid! Simple, isn’t it? Well, not exactly.

Just like everything else, it also has a steep learning curve and requires a lot of time, efforts, and patience to actually get the results over time. A lot of people realize this when they sit down and write their first few articles.

Blogging may seem easy but it actually is not provided you know exactly how to go about it and put efforts to make it work. As a matter of fact, nearly 75% of bloggers quit blogging in the first year itself. This is simply because they make a lot of mistakes unknowingly and thus, make their blog suffer the consequences.

If you don’t want to be in that 75% list, make sure you don’t commit these mistakes while blogging.

1. Lack of knowledge

Lack of knowledge is one of the biggest reasons responsible for ruining your blog. As a human cannot survive without oxygen, you can’t run a blog without having the right amount of knowledge about blogging and your niche. You probably don’t need to know every bit of your niche, but you need to have a clear idea about it. The niche you choose should reflect your knowledge and your blog should become a library for your visitors.

2. Not understanding your audience

When you start writing content for your blog, the most common mistake is writing for every web user. As a matter of fact, you cannot write for all. Not every web user is looking for the information you are providing. Therefore, it is important to know what your target audience is. In addition, what they are looking for and what they already know. Otherwise, you may craft a post that include the useless information and exclude the useful points. This way you do write an informative content, but a content your visitors can’t put in use.

3. Blogging about multiple niches

Writing on multiple niches means targeting multiple audiences, which in turn makes it difficult for you to concentrate on one particular audience. It happens. As I told you earlier, blogging is much more that just writing content. You may find it easy to write content on different niches initially, but you will realize it eventually that you are moving without any direction. It is important to know you cannot make anything work on random thoughts, not even your blog. Therefore, direct your thoughts in one direction and make it work.

4. Undefined Goals

You need something to achieve. Everything in this world has a goal to be reached. In addition, you cannot succeed without having any goals and objectives. When it comes to blogging, you do need goals. What is your aim for blogging? Where are you planning to get with it eventually? Your blogging goals can be anything ranging from achieving a particular amount of visitors daily to having a long list of subscribers. Set weekly, monthly and yearly goals for your blog and work towards achieving them.

5. Your writing style is stiff

There is a huge difference between writing for a magazine or a newspaper and writing for a website. However, when starting off, bloggers usually have experience with the former one. But that is not what online content writing is all about. When writing a blog post, you can be more conversational. In fact, this is what web users appreciate the most. They want to feel like they are actually conversing with you on a particular topic. So write as if you are talking to your audience and inspire them with your writing skills.

6. Not writing in plain English

Jargons and technical words are what make your visitors navigate away. It’s true that you want to show off your writing skills and vocabulary information; however, overlooking the fact that you are writing for your audience and not yourself is one of the biggest mistakes bloggers make. Jargons make your readers stop and think about the words you have used in the content. This, as a result, slows down their speed of reading the whole article. When you use fewer jargons and simpler words, you delight your readers. You show them that you care. And this way you earn yourself a constant stream of returning visitors.

7. Updating your blog rarely

A majority of new bloggers start blogging with a lot of enthusiasm; however, after a month or so, their enthusiasm goes off and they start publishing content every once in a while. Though it is not imperative to post blogs regularly, you need to keep your visitors updated with the latest information. Publishing blog posts irregularly make your visitors lose interest and faith in your writing and thus they navigate away to a competitor’s website in a matter of a blink. Don’t make your visitors think you don’t care about your blog. Post at least 3 blogs in a week to keep your readers interested in your blog.

8. Limited social media approach

Social Media is one of the best platforms to promote your blog posts and drive traffic to your website since it is a home for millions of web users. Promote your blog posts as much as possible on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and much more. You can also make sharing easy for your readers by adding social media buttons on your blog.

9. Subscribe Button

You write a post, publish it, your readers enjoy it and you move on to the next post. Is that all? No. You need your readers to come back to your website for more. However, they don’t usually remember coming back unless you give them a reason to do so. Therefore, adding a subscription option on your website becomes a reason for them to come back to your site. Once your readers subscribe, you can always notify them about your new posts through emails. Don’t make them forget about you.

10. Approving all comments

Approving each and every comment is the biggest mistake you are making. Though comments are good for websites and boost up your confidence as well, approving spam comments isn’t going to do anything good to your blog. In fact, such comments are the reason why it takes you forever to improve your search engine rankings. You need to know how to make the difference between genuine and spam comments and approve only the genuine ones. If running a WordPress blog, you can install Akismet plugin to get rid of spam comments automatically.

Overlooking these few common mistakes usually bring your blog down. Learn from your mistakes and stay one step ahead. After all, your blog is too important to commit such mistakes.