Before you begin your blogging journey, learn the blogging mistakes to avoid first. These are the mistakes that many seasoned bloggers wish they knew earlier.
With this article, I want to warn newbie bloggers like you so you will not fall into these pitfalls.
— I understand your excitement to start a blog and publish your article. But you also should know some beginner blogging mistakes beforehand as your blog does not take the wrong direction.
So, from my experience, I will share a few common blogging mistakes and some best practices to avoid them.
Without wasting much time, let us jump right into those.
Why Avoiding Mistakes Matters in the Beginning?
Firstly, we will start by knowing what makes a blog fail. Imagine you are a newbie who has started a fresh blog and is excited to start your journey.
— Usually, in the beginning, your focus will be on learning new things, starting to write content, and publishing your blog.
With this mindset, you expect everything to go smoothly. However, it is common to make beginner blogger mistakes initially while learning.
But jumping directly into writing content without following some basic aspects in establishing your blog is a blunder from my point of view.
Initially, your journey should begin with researching what people are already doing in the blogging field. In addition to searching for blogging mistakes to avoid, you should also dig deep into learning what the most common blogging mistakes are.
Now, you may think, why am I stressing about mistakes and avoiding them? There is nothing wrong with making mistakes.
Even I had made many that delayed my blog’s growth. Then, I realized if I had done enough research and understood what not to do when blogging, I could be more careful.
Many new bloggers overlook the importance of promotion, but learning the best blog promotion techniques for beginners can make a huge difference in growing your audience.
Thus, from my experience, I would like to help a newbie like you understand crucial aspects first before writing your content for a smooth start to blogging.
Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid for Beginners
In this section, I will highlight a few beginner blogging mistakes. Further, I will share a few tips to avoid them.
1. Not Researching & Knowing Your Target Audience
Firstly, you should understand that your content is for your audience. Am I right? So, for that, you should do enough research to understand:
- What is your niche?
- Who your audience is?
- What problems do they have?
- How can you solve them using your content and your knowledge?
Let me give you a short example.
Assume you are a travel blogger, and your audience will be travelers interested in traveling. But, think this way.
The traveling niche is a broad category, which part of the users do you want to target? Local travelers, international travelers, solo travelers, female solo travelers, devotional travelers, etc.
Your niche and your audience should be as specific as possible. Then only you will be able to understand their problems and what you can do to help them.
2. Not Posting at Regular Intervals & Sticking to a Schedule
Hopefully, you have established a niche, a target audience, and strategies that will work for you. Therefore, you want to start writing blogs and publish them.
Initially, everyone’s excitement will be high, and set unrealistic goals for themselves as posting 4 to 5 blogs a week.
So, you may follow this practice for a couple of weeks and then cannot produce enough content for some reason.
Thus, your posting schedule will be affected, and the quality of the content will decrease. As a result, your audience will get confused when to expect your next article.
So, this is one of the crucial blogging mistakes to avoid. Don’t be afraid to start small when you are just beginning.
Instead of 5 blog posts a week, you can aim for one blog per week and try sticking to it for a few days/months.
Thus, you will be able to pay 100% attention to a single post and hence the quality of it increases automatically.
Always remember Quality > Quantity.
Whatever you decide on your schedule, try to be consistent. Consistency is what transforms an average person into an excellent one.
3. Not Paying Attention to SEO Basics
SEO is the most crucial aspect of blogging that I cannot stress enough on. The purpose of blogging is to gain visibility.
In the beginning, you need not master every aspect of SEO. I understand that learning SEO is a bit confusing and time-consuming.
— Due to this, we neglect to optimize our blog for search engines. But ignoring the basics at least is one of the blogging mistakes to avoid.
Keyword research and incorporating the right keywords at the right place in the article come under basic on-page SEO. So, try learning a few basic essential aspects to optimize your blog posts.
One common mistake is neglecting blog SEO tips, which are crucial for attracting organic traffic to your site.
With the right practice only, search engines display your blog to your audience. Eventually, it leads to your blog’s growth.
4. Not Optimizing for Mobile Blog Readers
Now comes the interesting aspect. Do you know that most people consume content from their mobiles? But, while writing content, what we do is write from a desktop or laptop and optimize in the same way.
So, what about the people reading from their mobiles? This is also one of the blogging mistakes to avoid as a beginner.
Usually, if we write 3-4 lines in PC, in mobile it displays as a huge paragraph of text. Most people don’t prefer reading bulky paragraphs of text.
So, if you do not optimize properly, you will lose many readers consuming from mobile phones.
Hence, break down the sentences when needed and use bullet points of numbers for a more eye-appealing blog.
5. Underestimating the Impact of Visuals
As you all know, an image speaks more than words. Initially, when starting a blog, we may not pay much attention to creating visuals while concentrating only on writing blog posts. Visuals can be images, videos, graphs, etc.
— This is one more crucial blogging mistake to avoid. At the beginning of my blogging journey, I made the same mistake. Soon, I realized this and started incorporating more relevant images in my blog posts.
I am not a video person yet. Hence, I have not used any of my videos in my blog posts yet. So, try to understand which type of visuals you can create for your blogs. With this, you can easily convey a piece of complex information.
Also, if you are using any numbers or statistics in your blog, you add the relevant graph to your post to gain your audience’s trust.
While you can update your blog with visuals at any time, remember that nobody is going to check if your older articles have updated images.
I recommend adding visuals when you write the blog post. Visuals will make the content fresh and leave a positive impression on your readers, who will engage more.
Beginner’s Guide to Avoid Blogging Mistakes
So, till now, we have seen a few blogging mistakes to avoid with some beginner blogging tips. Now, let me share a few strategies so that you can be well-prepared to begin your amazing journey.
Let us start.
Tip 1: Creating a Content Calendar & Schedule
To create quality content consistently, you need to have a proper strategy. For this reason, you must have a content calendar.
Here, you can include your article topic, keywords, volume, when to publish your post, etc. Also, for article ideas as well you can have a sheet and note them down whenever you get it.
So, to maintain consistency it is crucial to have a proper realistic schedule and try to stick to it.
As I said before, you can try to aim to publish 1 post per week. Gradually from there, you can increase the frequency of your posting schedule.
To maintain it, you can use Excel or Google Sheets and plan 1 month’s content so that you can dedicate some time every day to your blogging activities.
Tip 2: Build a Strong Foundation
To achieve anything big, a strong foundation is the key. It is the same in blogging too.
Before writing your 1st blog post, build your strong foundation.
That includes the basics of blogging setup, planning your content, creating your content calendar, and keyword research till SEO basics.
— In my opinion, a smooth blogging journey begins with all the basics covered and learned. For my blog, I prefer using Google Keyword Planner to research keywords.
Also, learn to incorporate relevant keywords in your content without stuffing. Because of this, I keep a variety of keywords, such as one focus, secondary, long tail, and related keywords.
Thus, you will have more keywords to use instead of stuffing with this practice.
Tip 3: Have Strategies to Engage with Your Audience
Do you remember that I have talked about identifying your target audience in the previous section? So, apart from that, you need to engage with your audience, too.
The more you engage with them, the more you will build a strong connection and community.
But you may ask how to engage with your audience. For this reason, you need to have the right strategies. While you can engage in your blog’s comment section itself, there is much more to it.
— If you started your blog as a professional business, you can create separate social media profiles in the name of your blog. Simultaneously create content there as well and respond through comments and DM’s.
With this practice, you can understand their pain points. Also, you can conduct surveys and ask for feedback on your content.
So that you can tailor your content to your users’ problems and needs and build a strong foundation.
Conclusion of Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
To conclude, among the key lessons you can learn from this article is:
- Research basics and initial mistakes that people already made
- With this, you will have a strong foundation and have a smooth start in your blogging journey.
- But have a positive mindset and learn from your errors if you make any.
I hope this article will be your go-to guide during your process.
— Also, if you did not find a blogging niche yet, feel free to check out my detailed process to find out the best fit for you.
Share this message with your blogging friends who need to hear it.
Happy Blogging!
