10 blogging mistakes to avoid in 2019
If you’re one of those people who has won accolades for your writing, having readers glued to your content up to the very end of your blog post, genuinely aimed at solving some of the critical challenges of your readers, then you can definitely take credit for your efforts.
We should not blog just to add weight to the internet indexes. Each post that you publish, should inspire, induce, and strike a chord with the reader lasting an impression, at least for a while.
As it turns out, 2 million blog posts are published every day. This is a lot of clutter to cut through and emerging successful amidst this noise needs a lot of understanding about what to do and how to do it.
Bloggers are making these mistakes so often that they’re not able to achieve their goals due to these small but super dramatic roadblocks. So, let the next year be free from these blogging flaws!
10 ridiculous silly mistakes to avoid for a blogger
- Define the purpose clearly
If you are someone who’s always drenched in blogs on the Internet, it is not an uncommon scenario for you to come across shallow blog posts that are created for the sake of it. More often than not we come across content that takes us nowhere.
This is a common mistake that bloggers make. This is particularly found in the beginner’s who are thrilled about their blog and hit publish every now and then not bearing in mind the value that needs to be sent across to the readers. The thrust to create more content, and churning them out in a snap is a great talent. But, this is not commendable when you look at the big picture.
Why?
Eventually, the success of a blogger is measured by the ardent followers they have earned. Their willingness to spend their time reading your creations. Implanting excitement when they are notified about your content. Hence, before you begin hitting the keypad, think about the purpose of the blog post you are willing to create that day. Stick to that goal, consistently try to educate and provide value to your readers through well-researched and engaging content.
Cultivating this habit would pay you off and you will begin to see the perks of it as you keep creating posts with purposes.
2. Just hit that publish button
There are some bloggers who are indulged in their work. It is very hard for these folks to get out of the research zone and phase out their obsession over trying to perfect every line. As we just learned that blogs need to have a purpose, it is also necessary that you adhere to the timing.
Timing is everything. Though, adding an additional piece of detail to your blog and excessive editing will help you mold a flawless sculpture, having OCD over perfection can make you miss on a lot of things. As we are aware of the fact that there are thousands of posts that come out every day. If you miss publishing your content, someone else will.
Never stress over making every post a masterpiece. Sometimes it is okay to make peace with your research and feel adequate about your work.
3. Track your traffic
Nope. You can’t just keep writing and posting things online. It doesn’t work that way. Tracking your traffic is such a crucial piece of your blogging cycle. They need to be tracked and monitored periodically to understand various touchpoints.
Understanding your audience and growing with them is very important to sustain the competition and always be likable. If you have your own website or if you are a contributor, weighing analytics against the kind of content you need to create will always help you stick to trend and interests of your readers.
There are tons of ways to measure your traffic. Head over here to get a deeper understanding of how traffic monitoring works.
4. Enable subscription for users
It is super hard to convince a reader to subscribe to your content. It takes a lot of discipline to be consistent, educative and inspiring through your content. Now, let’s say your posts are incredible and most of your readers are willing to be notified about your updates.
If you don’t have an option to subscribe, you are not only losing on the potential traffic to your site, but also on a chunk of readers who have expressed an interest by taking the pain to find a way to subscribe.
Subscription to content helps you build a stronger relationship with your audience as you would go straight to their inbox, offer such a personalized invite into your platform. If you’ve not done this already, make sure you enter 2019 with a blog that has its own valuable subscribers.
5. Spend time on editing
30-minute editing will refine your copy to make it free from grammatical errors, poor sentence construction, redundancy of words, and flaky sentences. Most of you would argue saying, well, I complete a post in less than thirty minutes, there’s no way I’m going to spend such kind of time on editing them.
Well, bravo on that skill. But, let me tell you, considerable time on editing your copy is what will polish your copy, make it an excellent blog post. Proofreading will help you identify sentences that went on the document as it sounded in your head. One might think it is conversational, but there is a very fine line between a conversational writing skill and writing as if you casually talk. The latter pulls down standards.
Even the most successful bloggers, who are pros in writing need editing. Editing is an essential skill as you need to let go of the sentences that you enjoyed writing but in reality, you can do away with it. Editing is, in fact, a more challenging process than writing itself, which is why we are able to deliver tight copies with editing and not just by writing.
Check out the best blogging tools to amp up your content with the best titles, images, and analytics.
6. Don’t write just for Google
We all know that the ultimate aim of our content is to make it the dearest for Google. As it is the most happening search engine with millions of users, we all thrive and compete against one another to surpass the Google algorithms and rank on the search results.
Well, that should be your aim. But that should not be just it. Writing for Google is completely different from optimizing your content and layering it with some SEO elements. If you are not doing the latter, then you are doing a mistake. A lot of bloggers are not over this myth yet. If you know SEO, then you definitely know writing is not a robotic process. It is a perfect blend of emotions, illustrations, research, opinions, and answers.
Google, in fact, will rank your content only if it is deep and well-written. Do remember that once the bots are done with crawling your content, humans are going to read it. Just do not get too much into SEO and save some part of your writing for potential readers.
Do not give up on your creativity. Write your initial copy with no bot-intentions in mind, and then, spend time optimizing it.
7. Keep conclusions actionable
The conclusion is an essential part of the blog post. When you are framing your blog outline, you must definitely brainstorm the ideas for your conclusion. This is the last portion of the blog and has a tendency to leave a lasting impact on the minds of the readers.
8. Back up your facts
Adding meat to your content through facts and statistics is a great way to boost authenticity and credibility to your content. Citing examples and numbers needs to be given original source credit by either stating them explicitly or by hyperlinking that piece of information by tying it back to the origin or source.
This does not only help your readers dive into a greater pool of knowledge, but also saves you the trouble of copyright issues. As a blogger, you already have bigger things to address and you definitely do not want to trouble yourself with problems like these.
This is particularly important when you create infographics. You often forget to include the credit section and just in case your post gets viral, you may have to be guilty of enjoying the success that did not belong to you in the first place.
9. Focus on detailed articles
As we already discussed, a blog needs a clearly stated purpose and more often than not, a blog with a good intent to educate the clan that consumes it is a pretty long article. Your blog need not necessarily run to several pages and a gazillion words. But, if you are stating advice, sharing knowledge, then, it should be deep enough to have a reasonable takeaway.
If you spin out a story with minimal content, that's cool too, as crisp posts are preferred to hook the readers on the page. But, certain posts need detailing, deepen your thoughts, question your readers, answer their doubts, cite examples, include images and screenshots.
10. Schedule your writing
Discipline. A blogger’s ultimate skill is scheduling. I would recommend framing a plan and sticking to it. It need not always be stringent. As writers cannot have a set of topics that can go live in chronological order. Ideas flow in our minds while we are in the shower, at the dining table or when we are already working on a blog post.
Scheduling is all about consistency. Don’t publish an awesome article on a Tuesday and disappear for the next two weeks. Your blog is not just about you and your time and preferences. It is about your audience who like your creations. You need to respect their time and their appreciation for your content as not all the bloggers out there get it.
There are a ton of free tools on the Internet you can download to set up your editorial calendar. For me, I live for pen, paper, and sticky notes. I like a jot down of to-dos. But you can do what works for you. All I want you to do is disciplining your schedule by looking back to your calendar.
Wrapping Up
As 2018 draws to an end, look back and identify if you have made these mistakes in your blogging career. If you have, it’s okay. Ensure that your 2019 is full of awesome blog posts that are flawless. If there’s anything I would like to stress upon in this post again, it is to make your content useful for your audience. This will help you in the long-run and you would be surprised to see the kind of response and appreciation from the community for your efforts in genuinely trying to enlighten them.
Holidays are almost over and the new year is almost here. Wishing you guys a glorious 2019 with a lot of goals, growth, learning, and awesome blog posts. Happy new year 🙂
Originally published at digitaldyno.wordpress.com on December 29, 2018.
