11 blogging mistakes to avoid in the first year

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Are you a new blogger who makes blogging mistakes that ruin your blog without even knowing it?

Surely yes.

Because if you knew, you would have found a solution to your problem.

There’s a Chinese proverb that says: If you don’t make mistakes, you do nothing.

This is clear enough to say that we all make mistakes while we look for perfection, which is also not attainable.

The biggest mistake we make is to know about what we are missing and take no action.

Many bloggers start their writing journey with no or little knowledge about blogging. They think that it is an act of typing words, creating nice paragraphs and images, and publishing them.

Most of them lack the technical knowledge to solve unexpected issues on their blogs.

I am not saying you should know everything. This is what distinguishes you from experts, but at least you should know the basics. Otherwise, you need to hire someone from time to time to solve your issues.

Anyway, if you believe that you need to know whether you are making mistakes or not, this post is definitely for you.

Let’s get started

Writing without keyword research is the first blogging mistake

The First blogging mistake to make as a beginner is to write without a plan.

Your plan must start with keyword research which is the bedrock of writing a blog post that can drive traffic.

In other words, you must choose a keyword that generates traffic, a keyword that people are looking for.

To do so, you don’t need to compete with experts who have been in the business for a long time.

The best way to overcome competition is to choose long-tail keywords, not short ones.

For instance, instead of choosing the keyword “blogging mistakes” which has high SEO difficulty and is hard to rank, I chose the long-tail keyword ” 11 blogging mistakes to avoid” instead.

This strategy allows you to escape high competition and have more chances to rank your posts on Google.

There are many keyword research tools available in the market.

As a beginner, you may not have the budget to afford paid tools like Semrush or ahrefs, instead, go for free tools like Ubersuggest.

Starting on free platforms

I have always encouraged people to stop thinking about how to start a blog and to start now.

It’s not just to motivate them but because I don’t want them to waste time that may take months.

If you are a passionate writer and want your friends to read your pieces of writing, then it is okay to use free platforms like Blogger or Google sites.

You can have your free blog without paying a penny.

But, if blogging is part of your future business and you plan to monetize it, then choosing a free platform is another blogging mistake you make.

I started my journey using Blogger, but when my traffic was increasing, I noticed that I made my first mistake.

Then I moved my posts to my new domain. I could also redirect my traffic, but I wouldn’t change my permalink structure, so I lost that traffic.

You may also face plagiarism issues if the old post is indexed in Google and you are copying it now.

Free platforms give away your content, while if you deal with a good, reputable hosting company, you will have full control over your blog.

Moreover, regarding SEO, with paid platforms like WordPress, you will get all the plugins that will help you optimize your posts, like Yoast and others.

It will also rank them, while you don’t have this privilege on free platforms.

To fix it, all you need to do is choose a simple plan for the first year, and then you can easily upgrade it.

The two best choices that I recommend are Hostinger and Bluehost.

They both offer you a free domain, so you don’t have to pay a penny. Hostinger also offers free SSL forever.

Click to install free WordPress on Hostinger and have your website in five minutes.

By doing this, you’ll have your new website live on the internet for just 2.95 dollars.

Get a free domain and SSL for 1 year

Not knowing your niche

One of the deadly blogging mistakes many bloggers make is writing about too many topics.

How can you persuade people that you know about all the stuff you write about?

Imagine someone visiting your blog to learn about SEO, for instance, to find posts about health or crypto.

This is the fastest way to destroy your blog.

To build your business, you need to focus on a specific niche, something that tells people that you are the man who rocks in this domain.

Writing about a specific niche gives you authority and drives more traffic to your site.

Moreover, you’ll become an expert in your field and people will follow you to find answers to their queries.

And one more benefit of choosing a single niche is that you don’t have to compete with people in other niches. Keep your eyes on your niche and get more experience.

Last but not least, when you write about a single niche, you tell search engines what your blog is all about, helping them to classify you and benefit you later.

All you have to do is to choose a niche and write 15-20 pillar topics about it.

A pillar topic is your masterpiece, an in-depth article that covers everything about a topic. It acts like a magnet for links and comments, where many people will point to them.

If you don’t know how to choose a niche, take your time to figure it out. It’s a one-time choice, so don’t rush into making your decision.

Again, write about a single topic.

When you get a lot of loyal traffic, you can scale up, expand, and add more topics if you want.

This is how to get free traffic to your website

Not building an email list

Despite the fact that social media is expanding tremendously, email marketing is still one of the best strategies to build a loyal readership around your blog.

It has a return on investment of 38$ for each dollar you spend. Yes, as you’ve read.

Building an email list is a must for your blog.

People who visit your blog organically (via search engines) may never come back to visit your site. This happens because billions of results exist and others emerge every day.

Don’t fool yourself by thinking you’re the only and the best one on the internet.

By having an email list, you have the ability to send your subscribers emails every time you publish a post or any announcement you need to make.

It might be a good idea to offer a free e-book or a giveaway.

My last piece of advice is that, even though we hate to do that, try to find experts in your field and subscribe to their newsletter.

Check how often they send you emails, what they include, how they write the titles, and how much information they put in.

Copy that and learn.

Not promoting enough

What is the purpose of writing a killer post if no one is able to see it?

Writing is 20% of the whole blogging story, whereas promoting is 80%. This is a rule you should keep in mind.

As I wrote in another post, and I quote

A blog without traffic is like a car with no steering.

Zeeanswers

What is the benefit of a blog if no one can see it?

It is like writing a biography in a notebook and throwing it under the bed.

You need to put in the maximum effort to expose your blog to the masses.

By promoting your blog, you are creating brand awareness around your topics, getting traffic that hopefully will become your loyal customers, and increasing your revenue.

There are two types of traffic. organic traffic, and paid.

The starting point of organic traffic is doing your SEO properly; the technical, on-page, and off-page.

this will lead you to rank on the first results page of search engines, where people can see your posts and click your links when looking for the same keyword you use.

The next step is to publish your posts freely

Promote your blog posts on platforms like Medium, tealfeed, Pinterest, and Quora.

Learn how to promote your blog on Quora.

Social Media is the best place nowadays for its huge numbers of users.

Promote on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter(microblog), LinkedIn, and TikTok.

This is an example of our blogging community where we promote our content and answer readers’ queries. Join to participate in our community and expose your business.

As a beginner, you may not have the budget to pay for promoting your posts or even lack knowledge about advertisements and how they work, but let’s have a look.

It’s the PPC method that you are going to use.

Pay Per Click means that you pay Google an amount of money to promote your post for a limited time.

Google puts your post at the top of the SERPs as an ad, and whenever someone clicks on it, it deducts from your budget.

The good thing here is that you rank in minutes and you won’t pay if nobody clicks on your post.

Now it’s up to you and your budget to use PPC in addition to the free methods.

Not writing consistently

We are not here to talk about amateurs like students who post for fun or other reasons.

We are talking about real bloggers who set goals to build a real business.

Inconsistency in posting to your blog is a short way to destroy your blog.

As soon as you lift your feet off the gas pedal when it comes to your WordPress blog, the traffic drop starts.

Neil Patel

Whatever number of posts you are able to publish per week, stick to it by training your brain to write at a specific time spontaneously.

Learn how to turn your brain into writing mode.

The other trick to consider is using a calendar to help you focus on the time you need and the time left for another post to be published.

It is obvious that the more you post, the more readers you get, and the more revenue you can expect. That’s why beginners tend to write 3–4 posts per week, but they forget the truth about the time that’ll come when they run out of content ideas.

Here are 15 places to find content ideas for your blog.

The other deadly blogging mistake they make is that they rush to write thousands of words, neglecting the quality of their content and the importance of content to SEO, which is the normal way to get more visitors.

Stick to a timetable, and write valuable content in order to build your blog and gain authority and trust among your readers.

Preferring quantity over quality

Too many pages create too many problems.

backlinko

This is true when you recognize that Brain Dean writes in-depth articles once a month or even more.

He gets more than a million views from search engines every month. Why is that? because he covers everything in his topic.

Everything you need to know about the topic you are looking for can be found in one place.

As a beginner, you may have been told to write 2 posts per week in order to fill your blog with content. Then what?

What if your content is not unique and doesn’t solve the problems of readers?

It is not going to rank and nobody will see it.

Here’s what you need to do.

• Be prepared and armed with research. Take your time to know everything you need to offer>> learn how to find content ideas.
• Focus on building high-quality content that outranks your competitors’ content, no matter if it takes a week or more to write.
• Train your brain to always be ready to write every day. >> Learn how to turn your brain into writing mode.
• Craft the best catchy blog title.
• Spy on your competitors to know what their most performing articles are and analyze them to write better articles.
• Before publishing any post, relax and read it more than once. Add content where necessary, and remove unwanted words.
• Proofread to adjust your sentences and correct any mistakes that will negatively affect users’ experience. (use this checklist)

Website speed

Users’ experience is unquestionably a ranking factor.

As experts always say: write for humans, not machines.

If your goal is purely to rank in search engines, then you may do it for some time, but what’s next?

What will keep your readers on your website if it takes forever to load a page?

Think about it and remember that users have the choice to read millions of blog posts other than yours.

You are not the only one on the internet, so you need to make the users’ experience extraordinary, especially when we talk about your page speed.

Users will, at any time, leave your blog and bounce to another. This will increase the bounce rate and decrease the dwell time, while we need to do the opposite.

Read: WHAT DO WE MEAN BY DWELL TIME AND BOUNCE RATE?

Always compress your images and convert them from JPEG and PNG to WebP. They’ll maintain quality and decrease in size.

Also, try to create your own images using Canva or other tools and avoid using Google images because you may choose a copyrighted image accidentally and get penalized for that.

You can also download free images from pexels or pixabay. Use the small size before you download any image, and then convert it using online free tools like convertio or others.

Always check your page speed using this free tool and if you find your speed is low, try these solutions:

• Remove unnecessary plugins.
• Change image formats to WebP
• Enable image compression and caching using the Smush plugin for WordPress.

You may also like to browse: how to make your website load faster

Poor website design

Imagine that you are visiting a stationary store to select some items for your desk. The store is full of items stuffed over each other, not categorized, and no labels do exist to help you choose.

How bad will your visit be?

Now, what if I tell you that there is another store next to it where everything is managed professionally? I bet you will change your location.

This is what happens if your website is not organized and has a bad design.

You are definitely encouraging the visitor to bounce back quickly to check another website.

Most beginners try to fill their blogs with unnecessary pages to make them look like professionals, but wait, remember that more pages mean more problems.

All you have to do is simply choose a nice theme that should be relevant to your niche.

Then avoid this multi-color front page that may annoy your readers.

Keep it simple, categorize your posts to let people find what they are looking for easily, choose a simple theme (you will upgrade later), and create nice and magnetic featured images.

Short content

Content is king.

Bill Gates

But what content?

All newbies start their blogging journey by writing thin posts that they think are acceptable to readers.

They think that writing a 500-word post every day will attract more visitors. This turns out to be disastrous.

Remember that your blog is not a Q&A platform where people ask questions and get answers.

People visit blogs to find detailed content that solves their problems, and the more it is explained, the more satisfied they are.

A new study shows that posts of more than 1400 words are 3 times more likely to rank on Google than shorter posts.

But wait!

It is not the number of words to be considered as a priority, but the quality of in-depth posts that really matters.

Along with writing valuable content, you have to make sure you are not stuffing words to increase their numbers, hoping to rank.

This is the same as writing short, poor content. They are both blogging mistakes to avoid.

With the help of the Yoast plugin, you’ll be able to monitor your number of words, keyphrase distribution and density, meta description length, and other features to help you write a great article in terms of word count and SEO.

Giving up early

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.

bloggerspassion

You are one of the thousands who watched YouTubers promising you to start making money immediately after watching their videos or after 2 months.

If you have this idea in mind, you will likely give up very soon.

Friends, I’m not demotivating you now, I’m just telling you that whether you build any business online or not, there is nothing we can achieve in a night.

We need to be patient for months or even years to achieve financial freedom.

Look at it from a different perspective.

Do you prefer to give up after some months and lose all your efforts, or be persistent for more time and get rich?

Every time you look at analytics, tell yourself that whatever you see, you’ll put in more effort because, eventually, you will achieve your goals.

I have gone through lots of ups and downs, I didn’t let myself panic for a moment because this business is all that I have and it started to pay off.

Do not allow anything to let you down.

Browse more blogging resources:

• HOW TO START A BLOG THAT GENERATES MONEY? FULL GUIDE
• WHAT IS BLOGGING? HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH IT?
• HOW TO START MAKING MONEY ONLINE? MY FIRST DOLLAR
• HOW TO START A BUSINESS ONLINE? MY FULL STORY
• SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, THE SECRETS OF THE MONSTER
• 10 PROVEN WAYS TO TURN YOUR BRAIN INTO WRITING MODE
• THE 25 BEST CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR BLOGGERS

FAQs

Final thought

Blogging is a profitable business. And like all businesses, you are going to make many terrible blogging mistakes.

The faster you learn how to avoid these mistakes, the wider your audience growth will become.

Don’t panic if you make mistakes, learn quickly, and keep in mind that blogging success is a long way where you face many obstacles and need to be patient.

What blogging mistakes are you making? it’s time to share your thoughts in the comments below.