Blogging Introduction
If you’re using a blog for content marketing, your primary goal should be to increase both, directly and indirectly, brand awareness and trust, word-of-mouth marketing, sales, and loyalty. Every company should have a high-quality blog that is frequently and consistently updated with helpful, educational, and entertaining posts. Unfortunately, many bloggers, including business bloggers, commit common blogging mistakes that jeopardize their success. Your chances of success drop if you make blogging mistakes. The first step is to recognize them and then devise a comprehensive strategy to avoid them.
Why do bloggers fail?
Bloggers fail because they fail to recognize that blogging is a business that requires time, effort, and focus. Anyone can start a blog, but few will devote the time and effort required to make it a successful part of a business. Some bloggers fail because they do not conduct audience research, do not appropriately tailor their content, write inconsistently, do not use SEO best practices, or do not promote their content.
A hobby blog is one thing, but you must prioritize several factors if you want your blog to grow or be monetized. You must specifically identify the blog’s goal, understand your target audience and what motivates them, create an easy-to-navigate blog site, and choose a blog platform.
The basics of blogging
When businesses understand that blogging is the best way to stay relevant and competitive in the digital age, they create a blog on their website and begin posting content for a few months. Still, they never see a significant increase in traffic to their site. Unfortunately, most of these companies abandon content marketing and return to their old ways.
You’re going on the incorrect path if you’re writing primarily about yourself, your company, or your employees. Your blog is for your customers, and its purpose should be to educate them. Answer their questions and show that you understand their needs. When someone searches for a question about your industry on Google, the content you create will appear in the search results. With each new blog post, you can answer another customer question.
10 Common blogging mistakes
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is yet another search engine optimization (SEO) spam technique that, if discovered, will land you in hot water with Google. Keyword stuffing occurs when a particular keyword or keyword phrase appears too frequently in a blog post or on a web page.
If you sell pearl necklaces and want your blog post to appear near the top of portal results pages when people search for pearl necklaces, you might be tempted to repeat that phrase in your blog post. Keyword stuffing is seen as a black hat strategy and may harm the search results for your blog post and your entire website.
Solution: Aim for a keyword density in your content of no more than 3% so that search engines do not flag your content as spam
Thin Content Publication
A blog post or web page with little value to users is thin content. Thin content will not only not rank well, but it may also be flagged as spam. Remember that Google’s goal is to furnish the best results to users based on their search terms, which typically means that a page must be filled with helpful information to rank high in search engine results.
Solution: Once again, the best way to avoid this error is to consistently publish high-quality, original content that adds merit to the user experience by assisting, educating, or entertaining them.
Excessive Promotion of Your Company and Brand
Nobody wants to read a blog full of self-promotional posts. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Would you want to read a self-serving blog that consists primarily of written advertisements? Most people read advertisements to be educated, informed, or entertained, so your blog posts should accomplish one or more of these goals. That does not preclude you from promoting your company, products, or services in your blog posts. The key is to do so when and where it makes sense.
Don’t publish self-promotional posts more frequently than posts that educate, inform, or entertain your audience.
Solution: Make sure that at least 80% of your blog posts are not self-promotional. Most people are willing to accept this compromise as long as they are not bombarded with advertisements of little or no value.
Writing for yourself instead of writing for your audience
You may want to write about topics that interest you when writing blog posts. But are these the most important topics for your target audience?
You don’t want your blog post to be the next negative viral story, so proceed with caution. Remember that you’re writing for a particular audience, not for yourself, when writing for a business blog. As a result, all content must represent your brand consistently and meet your audience’s expectations for your brand. What type of content will your target audience accept from your company? What are the best topics for your brand to be an authority on and write about?
Solution: Understand your audience and create content that will benefit them rather than you.
Failure to Publish New Content on a Regular Enough Basis
Google and other portals prefer new content; you must regularly update your blog. Follow the data-driven recommendations for how frequently to publish content on your blog, and develop a publishing schedule you can stick to.
Consider each blog post as a new entry point for visitors to your blog and business website, where they can browse, learn about your brand, and make a purchase. Furthermore, each new blog post gives people more ways to share your content on their social media channels and more content for you to share on your own social media profiles, in your email newsletter, etc.
Solution: To increase your brand’s reach and search engine traffic, publish new high-quality content on your blog multiple times per week and share it on social media, email, and anywhere else.
Writing without a structure or flow
Your writing is a brain dump. It’s tempting to sit down and let a great idea flow out when you have one. But you could get a mediocre blog post in return. Why? The writing style of stream-of-consciousness is not appropriate for blog posts. Because most people will scan rather than read your blog posts, they must be exceptionally well organized.
Solution: To get started, use time-tested blog post templates to create various blog posts. Writing your outline will be much easier once you have a predetermined structure. Outlining is highly beneficial. The rest is simple if you organize your thoughts and create a logical flow in your post — you’re just filling in the blanks. Headers are essential for the reader’s experience as well.
Publication of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one of the most effective ways to reduce search engine traffic to your blog. Google and other search engines prefer websites and blogs that publish original content, so make an effort to write high-quality posts that share your knowledge, experiences, tips, warnings, and opinions.
Remember that duplicate content does not simply refer to content that has already been published by someone else. That is plagiarism, and it is illegal. Duplicate content also includes republishing your content. Bottom line: If Google crawls your blog post and discovers a text that has previously been published elsewhere online, it may flag the content as spam.
Solution: To avoid duplicate publishing content, use tools like Copyscape and Plagiarism to check your content for duplicates before hitting the Publish button.
There are no links to other pieces of content.
Assume someone discovers your content through an organic search. They read the entire article and believe it thoroughly answers their question, but they now have additional questions about the topic they want to research.
- Are those answers available on your website?
- Do you have any guidance for sources that might have the answers?
The reader is left hanging, unable to proceed to the next piece of content.
Solution: To address this, include links in your business blog articles to help the reader navigate. They want to continue their research, and if you have more relevant content on your site, links are a great way to move them from one of your pages to another.
Previous content is not being updated.
Getting your content to the first page of the search engine is one thing; keeping it there is another. Potential customers are unlikely to leave a positive impression if they visit your website and discover outdated statistics and broken links. However, how frequently do you go back and tweak, update, or revise older content if you’re focused on creating and publishing new content?
Solution: To maintain rankings, it’s critical to return to older pieces of content (especially high-performing ones) and regularly update them with new information. You don’t want an article that consistently drives new traffic and converts leads to deterioration.
Allowing for the publication of subpar titles
A good article with a wrong title is on its way to being a lousy article. That’s how important titles are. Titles are critical to readers and search engines for two reasons:
- They explain the topic of the article.
- People are encouraged to click on the link and read the content.
Unfortunately, I see many businesses put in a lot of effort to write their blog articles only to slap on a mediocre title as an afterthought.
Solution: As you write, make a list of working titles. Begin by narrowing down your working titles until you have the perfect one. After you’ve finished writing the blog post, spend some brainstorming a catchy title.
Conclusion
As a business, blogging is always about planning for success and knowing and understanding your audience and the content they want to read and see. Maintaining proper grammar, title, and blog organization, staying on brand, and connecting with your target audience will only help your business grow. We hope that this list of blogging blunders will help you improve your skills. After all, the benefits of maintaining a healthy business blog outweigh the time and effort required. Connect with us to understand more about blogging and how it can help you enhance your content strategy in the long run.
