Most Frequent Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

These days, pretty much anyone can start a WordPress blog. However, that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily bloom into a successful business. As much as it’s romanticized as “easy work,” the most successful bloggers are professionals who realize that it takes attention, time, and effort.

And just as crucially, the best bloggers out there know all the pitfalls that must be avoided. Of course, if you’re going to blog as a hobby, you don’t need to pay much attention to any of this. But if you want to reach a global audience and monetize your content, you’ll need to avoid some of the most common mistakes – which we’ll discuss here!

Not Considering Your Audience

There’s a fundamental difference between growing your blog and hoping your blog will grow – and you definitely want to opt for the former of the two. If your content is going to perform well and get shared across the Internet, you’ll need to write something that will generate website traffic, attract leads, and in some cases, convert them into customers.

So, how do you achieve that? Unsurprisingly, you need to pay as much attention to your audience as you pay to your content. Remember, while you’re probably writing about something that interests you – you’re not the only one to read this. You need to appeal to a wide readership, even in the case of the most niche topics.

With this in mind, you need to define your target audience. Consider what matters to them, why they’re interested in the topic, and what kind of value they hope to extract from your content. Try to discern their “pain points” – in other words, the problems they’re trying to solve by interacting with your content.

Fail to do that, and you’re just writing content for the sake of content – which will never result in a successful blog in the long run, no matter how passionate or skilled you are.

Stiff, Boring Writing

If there’s a topic you’re intricately familiar with or a hobby you’re really passionate about, you’ve got an excellent foundation for a successful blog. However, at the end of the day, there’s one more skill you’ll need to master: great writing.

Or, to be more precise – at the very least, adequate writing. You don’t need to be Shakespeare to run a successful DIY home repairs blog, but you need to be familiar with some basic rules of the craft. That way, you won’t create content that’s difficult to read and ultimately unentertaining.

So, how do you reach an acceptable level of writing quality? For starters, you need to write blogs the way you actually talk in real life.

Remember, this isn’t a term paper – you’re supposed to come up with something people genuinely enjoy reading. And in most cases, people won’t read your whole blog, even if you’re a brilliant writer. Most people skim blog posts for specific information or content they’re interested in.

So, if you’re going to retain their attention, your writing style needs to be effortless enough to compel your visitors to keep reading. The best way to do that is to be natural and personable – in practice, your writing needs to be conversational and approachable.

While writing, don’t think about written content – instead, imagine you’re giving a short lecture on the topic at hand. Then, try to write the stuff you’d say to lead people through the topic, entertain them, and inform them in the process.

Overly Broad Topics

Once people start blogging, one of the first mistakes they make is tackling topics that are simply too broad. Just think of all the low-quality, poorly written blogs about topics like “How To Make Money Online.” Sure, a 5,000-word comprehensive guide or a mini-e-book could cover the topic in sufficient detail – but a short, shallow post on such broad topics will just turn people away from your website in the long run.

So, what’s the solution? To put it shortly: stick with concise, clear, and specific ideas. And if you feel like you’ve started writing about a far more nuanced and broad topic than you thought – no worries, there’s an easy fix! Just turn the topic into a series of smaller, more detailed blogs, and you’ll have half of your content strategy for the month covered!

Plus, if you nail an extremely specific topic, your post is more likely to be practically useful to people – which means it’s more likely to be shared with others online. Also, while choosing what to write about, start with a working title that isn’t necessarily final. Once you’ve completed the blog post, you can always tweak the title to fit the content below better – going the other way around will be much more complicated.

All in all, the ideation stage of the blog-writing process is the most difficult and most important one – once you learn how to come up with great concrete ideas for blog posts, mastering the different techniques and styles of writing will be the easy part.