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Amateur Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

If you’re new to blogging, click here to find out what blogging mistakes amateurs tend to make and how to avoid them.

Blogging Mistakes

With the rise of digital marketing, the importance of blogging has increased substantially in the past few years. Many marketing agencies and freelancers have started offering professional blog writing services. Blogging offers many advantages. It can help attract new clients, build a community around your website and brand, it can help you earn through affiliate marketing, and it can make you a trusted source of information for your audience. Meanwhile, some people do blogging just for fun too.

Whatever your reason for blogging is, there are some amateur mistakes that anyone new to the blogging world should watch out for. Any of these mistakes can easily prevent incoming traffic to your blogs and spread distrust for you among your target audience, inevitably killing your blog.

Almost all the expert bloggers you see today are guilty of making these mistakes. Fortunately for you, you don’t have to. In this blog, you will learn what some of these deadly amateur mistakes are and how you can avoid them.

Not Prioritizing Your Blog

This is possibly the most basic mistake an amateur blogger will make. When you start blogging, you need to ask yourself if you’re doing it just for fun, as a hobby, or do you intend to make or promote a business through it.

Having answered this question, you can plan for your blog accordingly. If you want your blog to be your business or a part of your business, you’re going to have to keep it a top priority. Improve continuously on your skills, add better content, invest in tools, and devise a strategy. Also, be consistent with your blogging.

If, on the other hand, you’re blogging just for fun, you can be more lenient with it but keep in mind that you won’t be making any major earnings out of it.

Using a Free Platform

Using a free platform means not investing in creating your own domain instead of using websites like wordpress.com or blogger.com to host your blog.

Using a free platform is like building your house on someone else’s land; it’s your home, but you don’t have much control over it now, do you. If the person wishes, they can easily have your house demolished. It’s the same thing when you use a free platform to host your blog; the platform can remove it if they please or if they receive reports against your blog.

Another disadvantage of using a free platform is the restrictions placed on the monetization options that you have. For example, you may not be allowed to run ads on your blog or use your blog for affiliate marketing. Moreover, there might be design limitations as well.

If you intend to make your blog your business or are a blog enthusiast, using a free platform will take a lot of control out of your hands, so it’s better to invest in your own domain.

Blogging about a Topic You Have No Interest In

This mistake might make you give up even before you get your blog up and running. A lot of amateurs start a blog driven by the compulsion to generate quick income. So they start blogging on a niche that is very trending, for example cryptocurrency. Having no interest or knowledge in the topic, the blog inevitably fails.

When you’re starting a blog, make sure to choose a niche that you’re interested in. If you’re writing about a topic that you’re not the least bit interested in, how do you intend to make it interesting for the readers? A lack of interest will also damage your consistency of blogging.

Although there are people who do work their way through the obstacle of having no interest, these people are usually freelancers who offer blog writing services and have years’ worth of experience in writing. But if you are someone that’s just starting, and especially if it’s your own blog, it would be a bad move.

Having a Website That Is Not Secure

Having a secure site is, although overlooked by many, very important. If people click on your blog and are greeted with a warning that the site you want to visit is not secure, many of them will probably turn back.

Therefore, it’s better to get an SSL certificate; this is a form of encryption that keeps the reader’s private information safe, preventing cyber theft. Google also ranks sites with an SSL certificate higher than those without it.

Ignoring the Layout and Design

One of the most common mistakes made by amateur bloggers is to focus only on the content that they are putting up and not on the design and layout of the site.

You can go out and get the help of professional blog writing services to get you the best blog content on the internet. But having a poor design will put that content to waste.

An ugly and clustered design may put off the readers, and they might leave without even reading your content. Your blogs should provide the readers with an enticing experience. So take some time to plan out a simple and appealing design, one that would complement the theme of your blog.

Your site should also be visually pleasing and easy to navigate through. The readers should be able to find what they are looking for without a hassle, and there should be a contact page in case they wish to write to you.

Not Planning Out Your Blog

There are a lot of things that a person learns throughout their blogging journey; if you try to learn and implement everything at the very beginning, you’ll just end up frustrated.

The more you ask around on how to start a blog, the more advice you’ll get. The problem is that some may tell you one thing while the others will tell you another. For example, one person might say to set up an emailing list, while another will suggest focusing on SEO.

A better approach would be to plan out the steps that you have to achieve and steadily work your way through them. Doing everything at once will get you nowhere.

Writer Focused Content

You, as the writer are the life and soul of your blog; your knowledge, experience, and thoughts that you pour into your blogs are to benefit the readers and help them out in similar scenarios. But having content focused too much on yourself might leave the reader feeling unattended.

You need to look at your blog from the reader’s perspective, try to look at your content how the readers would. Ask your readers for feedback and any suggestions they might have. Ask them questions such as their jobs, what age group they fall into you get the gist. This will help you understand who you’re writing for.

A High Readability Index

The readability index is basically a measure of how easy to read and understand your content is. A low readability index means that the content can be understood by kids and adults that do not have deep knowledge of the niche your blog fits into.

Having a readability index that is very high will seem very flat and unenjoyable to people that only have basic knowledge or even mediocre knowledge regarding the subject of the blog. This will most certainly cause readers to lose interest, and it will drive traffic away.

The aim should be to have as low a readability index as you can without compromising the quality and meaning of the content. Various tools are available online which help you to judge the readability of your writing and how to improve it.  

Not Utilizing SEO  

If people go looking on Google or Bing for blogs related to your niche, but your blog doesn’t show up, an attractive design and reader-focused content will do you no good. A big mistake that amateurs make is focusing only on social media and Pinterest to get traffic to their sites; these channels offer a limited scope.

Most people use Google or Bing when searching for content. SEO is the best tool for getting your blogs to rank higher on these search engines. SEO is the most important weapon that all professional blog writing services use. It would be best if you looked into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), learned the basics at least. This will allow your blog to rank higher when searched on Google or Bing and will boost traffic to your blog.  

Not Having an Email List

Having an emailing list may seem unnecessary in the beginning when the number of readers is small. But having an email list is how you retain readers; people who give you their emails are a part of your regular audience.

These people might also be the first ones to purchase a product or service that you’re recommending or promoting. And of course, emailing lists become ever more important when the size of the audience increases. It would be difficult to make an emailing list from scratch with thousands of readers; it’s better to just have one from the start. 

Sticking to Just One Income Stream

If you’re using your blog as a source of income, you should know that there are several ways of doing that. You can sell products, practice affiliate marketing, and run ad campaigns. But the thing is that each one of these methods depends directly or indirectly on the traffic that you’re reeling in.

Unfortunately, traffic often fluctuates. If your traffic decreases, your income will too. That’s why it’s better to not stick to just one income source instead diversify your streams of income so that you earn from multiple sources.

Having Unrealistic Goals

Having goals is really important, as long as they are realistic. You may have read somewhere about someone making $30,000 a month through their blog. Usually,however,  that’s not the case.

If it were this easy to make money from blogs, people would just get professional blog writing services to write up blogs for them, and they would just post them, making huge sums of money. If you set such unrealistic targets at the basic stages of your blogging, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Many people often overstate their incomes to draw you in towards their training courses, luring you in with promises of some magic secrets to blogging. It’s better to set smaller goals such as getting to $1000 in three months and then maybe up to $3000 in the next three months. Setting smaller goals will serve you better; it will give you motivation every time you achieve them.

Unwilling to Invest

Free stuff is great, but not every time. Free themes don’t get updates, the limitations of free hosting platforms were highlighted previously, and free plugins often have bugs. Sometimes investing in something is the smarter thing to do.

Tools, themes, and other accessories that contribute to the value of your blog are worth investing in. refusing to do so might impede the growth of your site, or it may get you going in reverse.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a blogger or a freelancer offering blog writing services but are new to the world of blogging, avoiding these major mistakes should get you a good start in your endeavor.