Beginner bloggers tend to make a lot of mistakes, first of which is Careless Attitude.
No matter how good your industry knowledge is. No matter how familiar you are with your language. If you don’t know the rules of blogging, there’s no way you can climb the ladder of success.
Following are some basic mistakes that can be easily attributed to their attitude – that should be avoided at all costs.
Avoid These 10 Basic Mistakes Most Beginner Bloggers Make
1. Creating Posts that Do Not Serve Your Company Goals
This is one of the most common mistakes most beginner bloggers make
It’s not only you who’ll be reading your blog posts. You’re writing for the people out there. So, don’t just choose from the ideas that randomly strike you. Instead, the ideas should not be random. They should be aligned with your company’s betterment and flow of work.
This is where, creating a content calendar is absolutely vital so that you and your team can go through it, debate, discuss and come up with a stream of content that flows with your work. Consistency and flow of content makes it more realistic, and your readers will keep coming back for more.
2. You Write Like You Talk But Your Writing Is Too Stiff for the Readers
A term paper is different from blogposts, but bloggers tend to make a mistake of not differentiating between the two. The term-paper kind of stuff is quite boring, and online readers don’t often like such writing style. More importantly, people won’t read the entire post. So, keep them interested in a compelling writing style.
3. You Want to Show Your Personality but People Don’t Care Who You Are as a Writer
It’s one of the harsh realities of life that you have to accept. The sooner you do, the better it is.
It’s natural when people start blogging, they think themselves as a newborn star. They have a misconception that their audience will be would be keen to read their stories (which may or may not be interesting). However, it’s a complete mirror image of what they have in mind.
The biggest reality of this world is: people like to take an interest in new things, be it learning. So, instead of showing them your experience, you have to convince them that whatever you teach will change their lives for good. Include your experience in the later stages of blogging when people really start to show interest in your posts.
4. You’re Deviating Readers too Much to Emphasize Your Point
It’s true that bloggers are encouraged to highlight their personalities, but there’s a difference between using and abusing the privilege. Be yourself while covering the topic, but avoid including too many personal experiences because you will end up burying your point instead of emphasizing it.
Too many examples deviate attention from the topic. Since the people you’re talking to are your readers not live audience, so there’s no guarantee of 100% focus and attention from them. Your readers simply bounce as soon as they lost interest.
5. You Think Your Titles Are Specific But They’re Too Broad
As a beginner, your aim would be to get as much traffic as you possibly can, thus, you’d start with big topics, such as:
- Best Practices related to Your Business,
- How to Smartly Perform Social Marketing,
- How to Make Money Online and the likes.
In reality, these topics are quite broad. Social Media Marketing is not the same thing as it used to be 10 years ago. This topic has got so much detail that you cannot cover everything in one blog post. The same is true for online money-making gigs as well as business best practices.
Instead, you should pick a really specific topic so that you can attract a smaller audience that’s more likely to convert. In short, be very, very specific in topic selection, so that you can achieve your short-term and long-term goals. Choosing specific topics within a broad topic would give you more content creation opportunities.
6. Your Ideas Flow But They’re Not Organized
It’s a good thing to write down the ideas as they strike you while you’re writing a post. But most of the time, the end result turns out to be a sub-par post. So, don’t just post whatever you’ve written.
Go through the post at least twice, so that you can organize the content according to the scanning trends.
Remember, more people will only scan your post than the ones who actually read it. So, make your posts presentable, organized, and attractive for your readers.
7. You Don’t Back up Your Claims with Data Research
No. 7 on our list of 10 Basic Mistakes Most Beginner Bloggers Make is the inability to make your post more credible.
Let’s take a look at the following examples and decide which one is more convincing.
- “Instagram users have been increasing day by day, as compared to other social networks.”
- “In the United States, Instagram usage has grown at a rate of 15.1% while the social network’s growth is just 3.1%, this year.“
Option (b) appears to be more convincing, isn’t it?
To make your claims and arguments more compelling, you have to provide authentic proofs. These proofs become the basis of your authenticity so that your audience can rely on your words, and take actions as per your desires.
Data-driven posts are more catchy and attention-grabbing, whereas fluffy arguments are simply unconvincing and vague.
8. You Cannot Avoid Plagiarism While Drawing From Others’ Ideas
Plagiarism simply doesn’t work for any blog. So, don’t think that as a new blogger you’ll get away with copy/pasting. It’s an old-school principal. You can’t get away with plagiarism and get penalized for doing so.
While there are smart tools to detect plagiarism, regular readers and editors can easily tell whether it’s a copied content. When you copy others’ ideas, your voice and tone change unnoticeably.
So, always cite the statement while taking help from other resources. It’s a sign of honesty, plus, your audience would believe that you present genuine information with proofs.
9. You Believe In 30-Minute Editing Rule But Don’t Follow It
Just go back to point 6 and think about the results if the post wasn’t proof-read.
And it’s quite natural because people tend to think they wrote so perfectly, there’s no point in wasting time on editing.
Once, you start revising your written script, only then would you realize the mistakes you tend to make while writing.
10. You Take a Lot of Time to Make Your Post Perfect
Which is a pure waste of time, because there’s no such thing as perfect, especially in the world of blogging.
What’s more important is timing.
So, instead of spending too much time on re-phrasing, adding more images for better emphasis, and including spicy touches, stop getting obsessed with the write-up and publish the post!
Finally
There may be a few more mistakes you’ll get familiar with, as you go ahead with your blogging activities.
But if you prevent these basic blogging mistakes at the initial stage, other errors can be corrected pretty easily.