Starting a business blog is one of the easiest ways to grow traffic and build a reputation online. With the increasing effectiveness of content marketing, more and more businesses are investing their time and money in writing and promoting blogs. This includes blogging for their own site as well as carrying out blogger outreach activities and guest post services. Your business blog can make for most of your site’s organic traffic and help you build an authority in your niche. However, many beginner bloggers are prone to making certain common mistakes that can jeopardize your position in the industry.
In this post, we will discuss the most common blogging mistakes that beginner bloggers make and ways to avoid them.
8 Common Mistakes for Beginner Bloggers
1. Not Defining Your Target Audience
For business bloggers, the most common blogging mistake they can commit is to blog without defining a target audience. The target audience for any business is the group of people who are most likely to be interested in your business offerings because it fulfills their specific needs.
For example, the target audience for an infant food brand will be new parents. So, whenever a new parent comes across your product online and visits your website to know more about your brand, they will come across blog posts that might be useful for them, such as posts on child nutrition, parenting tips, etc. This will help them relate to your brand more easily.
But, imagine blogging for the same brand without keeping your target audience in mind. Do you think people could relate to your posts and come back for more? Not really. In business blogging, it's imperative to define your target audience first and then start blogging, or else your content will not resonate with the readers.
If your brand caters to a wide range of audiences, then you need to optimize your content according to the buyer persona. A buyer persona is the representation of your ideal customer, and it can be created by analyzing your current customer base. Depending on your business, you can have one or multiple buyer personas.
Once you have these personas in place, you can focus on developing specific content that appeals to these personas. Customized blog content based on buyer personas can generate 18 times more profit than general content. It also helps in getting more leads for your business, improves lead nurturing, and builds a dedicated customer base.
2. Blogging Inconsistently
If your blog drives a good chunk of traffic to your site, it's never a good idea to pause content creation. One of the biggest reasons why people visit your blog often is because of the fresh content they get to read on your site. If you put a pause on that — another common mistake amongst beginner bloggers — it can put your site traffic in a downward spiral.
Hence, every business blogger must have a content calendar in place. A content calendar allows you to plan your blog content for the upcoming days or weeks and saves you from the pain of discovering new content every time you decide to publish a blog.
A content calendar can be your best friend when you are dealing with writer's block or don't find much time to invest in content planning. You can schedule a few posts for a week on the content calendar and utilize the time to shift your focus to other aspects of your business. Blogging consistently is well worth the effort! Platforms like Writers Work provide connect freelance writers with job opportunities. Check out this Writers Work review before deciding if the platform is right for you.
Planning your blog content is not only beneficial in keeping your blog updated but also allows search engines to index your site frequently. This can help your content to rank well and strengthen your authority in the niche market.
Moreover, Google loves websites that are updated regularly with fresh content.
3. Focusing Too Much on SEO
SEO is crucial to improve the online visibility of your content. However, if you prioritize SEO over user experience, you may end up writing substandard content. The first step in writing SEO content is to conduct keyword research. It helps you to find the terms or phrases that can be added to your content to enhance its online visibility.
While it is essential to do keyword research as beginner bloggers, you shouldn't do it solely for SEO but to discover what your target audience is looking for online. This will help you to create blog posts that can address the problems faced by your target audience.
Following the recent Google algorithm updates, the search engine now gives more impetus to the context of the content than to determine its SEO value. Hence, if you want your content to be read and valued widely, you should focus on writing well-researched and high-quality articles first.
Once these content pieces start adding value, only then should you think of implementing SEO strategies such as keyword optimization and link building.
4. Deviating From the Target Niche
It's often too easy to deviate from the niche market while trying to write new blog posts. This is a typical blogging mistake committed by most beginner bloggers. They tend to cover a wide range of topics to appeal to a mass audience. The problem with appealing to a broad audience is that you don't know what the audience wants to read or whether your audience will like what you write.
Whether you are an individual blogger or a business blogger, you should target a specific niche to blog about. This helps you to reach out to the right audience for your business. When you target the right audience, it increases the engagement rate and grows your blog traffic. It also gets easier for you to establish your authority as a blogger when you blog on a specific niche.
Niche-focused content marketing efforts are more effective in presenting your brand message across your target audience. It also helps to eliminate unnecessary competition in the market and lets you focus on creating highly personalized content on your business blog.
5. Publishing Short Content Frequently
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We already discussed above how consistency is the key to blogging successfully. But, you must notice here that consistency doesn't mean that you need to publish new blog posts daily. Imagine that you run a baking business online. Your blog will naturally talk about topics related to baking, flavoring, icing, and cake decorations.
Now, you decide to write a series of content about fresh fruit cakes and cover topics such as the ingredients you need, the process to bake the cake, how to put the icing on the cake, ways to decorate your cake, and so on. You then go ahead and publish five to seven short blog posts every day covering each step of the cake making process.
Now, someone who wants to learn about making cakes would love to read an extensive article that covers everything about making cakes, right from the ingredients and tools needed to the ways to decorate them. If you take time to compile all your short blog posts into a single pillar content covering everything about fresh fruit cakes, people will find it more useful. This will increase the value of your content and also improve the time spent on a single blog post.
Therefore, it's recommended to all bloggers to focus on creating long-form content of 2,000 words or more to answer as many questions as possible on a given topic instead of writing short content of 1,000 words or below every day.
6. Not Implementing Persuasive Content Writing Techniques
Your content copy has to have a perfect balance of information and persuasion to make a sale. Your blog section is the only part where you share valuable information for your audience and try to offer them value. Beginner bloggers sometimes write sales copy in the name of a blog post. But when you do that, you won't be able to add value to your content, and it's also not recommended from an SEO point of view.
Writing promotional content and promoting the same in the name can cause Google to penalize your site. Google considers E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustability) as a ranking factor for websites. This holds especially true for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites that deal with niches like medical, finance, and legal. Thus, you need to make sure that you are writing content after doing thorough research on a given topic.
Also, to be a great blogger you need to have you grammar down pat! It may seem obvious, but poor grammar can completely derail a piece of writing and distract the audience. There are great courses to teach proofreading if English grammar is an issue for you. Check out these Proofreading Academy reviews and see if this program is right for you!
However, it's also true that content copy that only consists of facts doesn't appeal to most readers. Therefore, you need to ensure that your content is also enjoyable. To write an interesting and persuasive piece of content, you should follow the AIDA rule. It's an advertising formula that roughly translates into A-Attention, I-interest, D-Desire, and A-Action.
So, your content should first be able to grab the attention of the audience through an attractive headline. Next, your content intro should be able to grab their interest and persuade them to read further. The body of your content should be able to develop a desire to purchase your product in the reader's mind, and the conclusion should provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) for the reader to take action.
If you follow the AIDA rule, you'll be able to churn out interesting and engaging pieces of content that have the ability to convert your readers into your customers. It's also essential that you implement a clear content format for your blog, such as breaking long sentences into small paragraphs, numbering lists, adding multiple subheadings, and including videos and graphics wherever possible.
7. Not Promoting Blog Content
As much as it's essential to write new blogs consistently to be recognized as an authority figure in your industry, it's also necessary to promote your content online to increase its reach. With every business trying to make their mark with content marketing, you must promote your blog posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin to increase your content visibility.
Every blogger must promote their content on social media extensively so that people can discover them easily. In the highly competitive market, where there are hundreds of other businesses similar to yours trying to make as many sales as possible, you shouldn't miss any opportunity to bring your blog posts in the notice of your target audience.
If you just focus on creating quality content and don't find ways to promote it, you'll easily lose out in the competitive market. Even if you get enough traffic on your blog posts, you shouldn't shy away from promoting them online because your ultimate goal is to get as many leads as possible and convert them successfully.
8. Not Having a Newsletter Subscription
Many beginner bloggers ignore the importance of newsletter subscriptions for their business. It's one blogging mistake that can limit their effort to reach out to the target audience. Email newsletters are one of the most profitable ways to gain more subscribers and keep them updated on the new content published on your blog.
Even if your subscribers cannot read every new post you publish on your site, a newsletter does the job of notifying them of what they've missed from your blog. They can visit your blog later and take a look at all the posts they've missed reading.
Newsletters are also beneficial in bringing back old readers who once subscribed to your blog because they found your content interesting. Since your newsletter will contain a list of the best-curated content on your site, the chances are that the old readers might be able to recall your blog and revisit it. With a newsletter, you can additionally drive targeted traffic to your site.
Plus, newsletters can help you improve interaction with your regular readers. Whenever you post new content, your readers read and comment on them. You can take the time to reply to these comments, consider their feedback, and improve interaction with them.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Final Thoughts
Blogging is a very lucrative career option for individuals and an absolute necessity for businesses focusing on content marketing. If you take into account these common mistakes beginner bloggers, you’ll be able to develop an improved blogging strategy and drive revenue to your business.
