5 Blogging Mistakes Every New Blogger Should Avoid

Every blogger makes a few blogging mistakes – but these also offer a lot of learning. As a part of the blogging community, I feel it is my duty to share what I have learned as a blogger during my short journey.

Trust me, I am still learning every day; I am applying all the innovative ideas and putting my most creative mind to work when I pen down a new blog. In the end, I want my readers to derive some value from my blog.

As a moderately successful blogger, I would like to share my share of blogging mistakes and learnings through which any new blogger can learn and get a new direction.

Blogging Mistake 1: No clear niche

Like many other bloggers, I too started as a personal blogger, an open diary blogger to be specific. I never knew that the concept of an open diary blog had died a decade ago.

All I knew was that I wanted to write and share my voice with the world. I cluelessly created my very first blog with a random name, no niche and no idea to keep it rolling.

Gradually I identified my niche as Mental Health Awareness.

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Blogging Mistake 2: Mixed language

I never thought that we are supposed to write in only a single language in a blog. I thought it is my platform to express, myself and that language is no barrier to expression.

With this rule in mind, I have written blog posts in English, Hindi and even in Hinglish. When my pen gained a little momentum, I started writing poetry too.

Unaware of the fact that poetry does not help you to monetize your blog, and that mixed content kills your blog quality, I penned down over 350 articles.

Blogging Mistake 3: Inconsistent for the first year

I created my blog in January 2017 and I used to write a single blog post in a month. After a few months, I even started doubting my writing skills as I hardly had any visitors to my blog.

When there is a high volume of competition and excellent content creators available in the blogging world who write regularly (and by regularly I mean at least 3 – 4 blog posts a week), who will notice a blog like mine?

I have come across some bloggers who write two blog posts in a single day and yet maintain their blog quality.

Be consistent without compromising on content quality.

Blogging Mistake 4: Spending time on social media

I always read and heard about finding an audience and defining your target audience. I started with social media; I won’t deny that I have got many consistent readers over a period from various social media channels.

But after a certain period of time, it reaches a point of saturation. First and foremost, your friends and family on social media are not your audiences – you need to write for Google.

It is when someone lands at our blogs through search engines and reaches us, that we start growing as bloggers.

Stay present on social media, manage your accounts, and define a content strategy so that you don’t have to waste a lot of time thinking about what to post and when to post. Connect with your readers.

Blogging Mistake 5: Experimentation without knowledge

I will be very honest here – right from the basic and free WordPress plan to a premium and now business plan,The free I have tried it all.

Free plan is the best way to start with, for any new blogger. It offers very limited resources so after one year when I learned that I need to be consistent in blogging and I took it very seriously I opted for a premium WordPress plan, which gave me a personal domain and unlocked many themes and plugins.

Then after a year when I was up for renewal and even more serious about blogging and wanted to take it a step ahead, I opted for the business plan offered by WordPress.

No wonder it helped my blog look great and I could unlock useful plugins and themes but when I compared the pricing with the self hosted blogs, it cost me heavily.

Apart form trying all the options, I tried some backend work myself. I am not at all a tech person and yet I had the audacity to touch the technical aspects, which got my blog shutdown for a day, showing error 404.

Just imagine the panic and havoc it must have caused me in that duration. For someone like me whose blog is more than just a writing tool, I could not sleep that night and learned a big lesson – never EXPERIMENT in areas you don’t understand.

Five ways to rule out blogging mistakes

Now when I am done talking about my blogging mistakes and learning in the last two years, I will discuss the things we as bloggers should take care of if we want to make a career in blogging.

Create Original Content

Content is the most essential part of  your blog. Original and quality content is the most important skill we need to demonstrate as a blogger.

Write longer blog posts, do not think who will read them. If you still doubt what I am saying, type any search query on the google search engine, click the top most blogposts displayed by google and examine their length.

Ideal length for any good blogpost is 1000 – 1200 words.

Differentiate between Pageviews and Visitors

The count of pageviews is the total number of times the pages of your website were viewed or refreshed within the selected time period.

A visit is a single browsing session. If a visitor views another page on your site within 30 minutes of the last pageviews it is counted as the same visit.

Learn the importance of a niche

I figured out the importance of adopting a niche for my blog very late. I had two options, either to revamp or rework on all my existing work, which is an exhaustive list of 350 blogposts.

Or start a new blog straight with my area of interest i.e. my niche. If I had started it right two years ago I would have started earning through my blog by now.

I also tried to demystify certain blogging myths that people have on earning through blogging.

But it is never too late and I am all open to learn and adapt new things. I will share about what I chose out of these two options in my coming blogpost!

Focus on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can make a huge difference to your blog. If we apply proper SEO features starting from Blog title, Headings, Tags, Meta data, Image attributes, Image size, usage of keywords in our blog then we could qualify as a relevant answer to many reader’s’ questions.

The Internet is all about searching for information and writing a blogpost with SEO helps us to make that information searchable and reachable to the viewers.

Learn some basics of SEO, it will help your blog to qualify for ranking gradually.

Seek professional help

Not every blogger here is from a technical background. We might be good writers but we may fail in managing a technical area of our blog.

When you get stuck, do not simply waste your time in searching for solutions over the Internet and overwhelm yourself as a result.

Seek professional help and fix all the issues.

Avenues for earning through your blog

If you start it right, then you can find yourself earning money through the following ways:

• Writing Services: you can work as a freelance writer if you possess amazing creative writing skills.
• Copywriter/Editor
• Affiliate Marketing (Amazon Associates)
• Google Adsense (You can submit your account for ads approval; if it gets approved you can rent a part of you blog to show relevant ads)
• Sponsored posts

While there are many ways a blogger can earn, to reach the point of earning, one must have a lot of patience and dedication.

Openness to learning and an adaptive approach will surely help.

Thank you all for being a part of my blogging journey!

First published at author’s blog

Image via Unsplash

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