Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart.
Considered an easy task by appearance, but truly tough by nature; it makes or breaks the best of us.
It’s like when you sign up for that half-marathon a week before on a whim with no plan and think to yourself: “it can’t be that hard.”
The ominous day finally comes, and you’re left with cramps a plenty and scolding yourself for being ill-prepared.
Blogging is a lot like running. Practice, evaluation and consistency is key. Setting short- and long-term goals weeds out the serious from those who are simply just in it for the social media posts.
And, just like running, sometimes you’re in the deep of it and you feel like its never-ending.
When you just start out, it’s easy to make mistakes. The important thing is catching them and learning from them to improve yourself.
Blogging is usually considered an underrated task, but it should be an essential component of your overall marketing strategy. WordPress has indicated that over 400 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month. That’s a lot of people and a lot of opportunity to have people view your site!
Here are the top 4 common blogging mistakes.
Mistake 1: Not Setting Goals
Goals are necessary for everything you do in life. It’s how you track your progress and better yourself for the future.
Runners usually don’t run for the sake of running (although there’s nothing wrong with that too). Typically, there’s another goal in mind, be it training for a marathon, improving health or to relieve stress. It could be as simple as setting a distance goal for yourself. Similarly, blogging shouldn’t be done simply for the sake of it.
As mentioned, blogging should be included in your overall marketing strategy. It’s important to align your blogging calendar with the company’s objectives. As important as it is to write about topics you’re interested in, it’s equally as important to write about topics that will interest potential customers or address questions that the business gets asked frequently. Blogging is supposed to serve its purpose of growing the company and helping your customers.
If you’re unsure what the company objectives are, have a meeting with your manager to become more informed. If you want to know the frequently asked questions, consult the sales team or look at your company’s social media to see what questions consistently get asked.
Mistake 2: It’s Missing the Extras
Let’s get back to our running analogy here.
Let’s say, for example, you decide to yourself: “I’m going to run 10k on the treadmill” without bringing any music to entertain yourself. It still works. You get the job done, but the task lacks the added pizzazz, right?
People have an attention span of 8 seconds and these days, visuals are attention grabbing.
Images in blogs are the icing on the cake. Info-graphics are also an excellent way of being informative but visual.
Most importantly, content needs to be search engine optimized (SEO) so that people can find your blog. You must be conducting keyword research to figure out what people are searching for and including it multiple times throughout your blog. If you need help with that, check out our other blog all about keyword research.
Mistake 3: Lacking Consistency
Consistency is key.
If you’ve got a marathon scheduled for October, you wouldn’t only prepare during June, right? Probably not if you’re hoping to be successful.
Remaining consistent with blogging is also important. If you set a goal to write two blog posts a month, map out some ideas for as far in the future as you can, and stick to it. Blogging too often may make it difficult to stick to a consistent plan. If you post five blogs one week and one the next, it will be hard to stick to a plan. Producing and scheduling a variety of content helps relieve the pressure and stress.
Mistake 4: Not Reviewing Your Work
You grow when you learn from your mistakes.
Whether it’s reviewing your running averages or reviewing your work, reflection is a must.
Proofing your work is crucial and sometimes, even eye-opening. Before publishing your work, you have to review it: check for grammar, spelling, typos, sentence structure, etc. Asking someone to review your work helps too because sometimes you get so lost in your work that it’s easy to miss mistakes. If you’ve inputted inbound and outbound links, be sure to double check to make sure they work.
As mentioned, learning from your mistakes is essential. At some point, even the best bloggers have made these errors at some point in their career.
The key is to get started.
If you don’t know where to start, or you have trouble with writing, contact us at NetGain SEO!