Let’s discuss the top beginner blogging mistakes most the bloggers make in their early days. Learn the right way to avoid blogging mistakes made by beginner bloggers.
You have a blog. It’s well designed. You have published “enough” content.
But looking at your blog’s web metrics, it’s very discouraging.
You have done all you think is right to grow an audience but still, results are not good. You must be asking yourself this question, “What am I doing wrong?”
I know the feeling. Been there.
Bloggers work so hard to grow the audience until they begin to miss the simplest of acts and end up making huge blogging mistakes along the way.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the mistakes bloggers make when trying to grow the audience and how to fix them. I hope you find them helpful.
Let’s get started.
Top Beginner Blogging Mistakes & How To Avoid Them
The following beginner blogging mistakes and the recommendations to avoid them could be very helpful even if you are in the business for long.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. are some of the great social media platforms where bloggers can promote their work.
Facebook is just not for fun and the 140 characters in a tweet can help you reach billions of people across the globe within a very short period.
Your friends and relatives are on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Don’t be shy to ask them to promote your content by sharing with their friends.
First of all, create a Facebook business page for your blog if you don’t have one.
A Facebook business page for a blog serves lots of purposes. Some of which include:
- With a business page for a blog, you can always keep your blog away from personal life. I mean, you won’t have to spam your friends’ and relatives’ timelines with stuff from your blog. Not everyone on your friend list is interested in what you are blogging about. A Facebook business page gives you the right audience. For someone to like a Facebook business page about baking cakes, he/she must be interested in cake baking. That’s a perfect audience. Someone you would sell to.
- A personal Facebook account provides for a maximum of 5K friends. A business page allows an unlimited number of followers. It, therefore, means that with a Facebook business page, you can promote your blog in front of millions of Facebook users.
- A Facebook business page gives your blog a professional look. Or should I say a business look? A recent study showed that people tend to take seriously information posted by a company on its Facebook business page than when it’s posted by one of the employees of the same company.
- You can also create Facebook Ads from a Facebook business page.
In a nutshell, find out where your audience hangs out and create social media accounts in those places. You don’t have to be active in all networks.
Be active in the selected platforms and make the best out of them. It’ll help you grow the audience for your blog.
Read more – 20 Tips for Beginner Bloggers – The Lessons I Learned The Hard Way
#2 Thinking That SEO Is Crap
What is SEO? And how is it important for my blog?
I get these two questions so often from beginner bloggers.
Well, in simple terms, SEO which is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is a way of increasing the chances of your content or blog post appearing in the first pages of search results.
It involves the acts of adding your site to the webmasters’ tools and optimizing the articles and link building. Every blogger needs to do all these to ensure that his/her blog ranks higher.
I have noticed that most bloggers ignore this step. They look at it as the technical stuff.
Well, SEO is technical but once mastered correctly, it becomes the most interesting aspect of internet marketing.
- To get started with SEO, you need to have your site indexed by Google first. You can do this by adding the site to Google search console and then adding the XML Sitemap.
- Secondly, optimize your blog posts and pages. Write SEO friendly articles.
- Third, practice link building. Find other bloggers within your niche to link to your posts and pages. You can email them around ask if they could link to your site. Give them the particular blog post’s URL that you’d want them to link to.
As I said, SEO may seem to be technical at first but once mastered correctly, it can be your favorite internet marketing tool.
Here are some of our popular blog posts on SEO, you can take a look at them;
#3 Not Having A Consistent Publishing Plan
A consistent publishing plan is good for both your audience and the search engine crawlers.
Design a realistic publishing plan that is favorable to you. For example, you can design one that allows you to publish one blog post every seven days.
That way, your audience will always be on the lookout to see what you post every seven days.
Don’t set a goal of publishing a blog post every day if you know you won’t be able to realize it. Have a realistic publishing plan.
#4 Keyword Stuffing
It is important to conduct keyword research before you dive into creating a blog post. Very important. Keywords help bring organic traffic to blog pages.
The one mistake many beginner bloggers make, that using the keywords repeatedly in that particular post increases the chances of ranking high on the search engine result pages.
Which is very wrong.
For example, a blog post with a keyword: online dating.
The keyword should be used once in the first 100 words of the article. Also, it needs to appear once in the title of the post.
Using the keyword like two or three times in every paragraph is what is termed as keyword stuffing.
Google might penalize you for this.
Avoid keyword stuffing. By all means.
#5 Not Taking Email Marketing Seriously
An email list consisting of 100 subscribers is more powerful than a Facebook business page with 10000 likes.
Why?
Because if one agrees to give you his email address, trust me, he is ready to commit and is more likely to buy something from you.
And what about the 10000 Facebook page likes? These are people who might not be ready to commit.
By the way, I have this habit of liking Facebook pages I find on my news feeds. Funny thing, I don’t even read the posts they share.
Do you see the sense?
Good.
Email marketing is the way to go. Ignoring it or not starting as early as day first is one of the most common blogging mistakes made by beginners.
With email marketing, you own your audience. No one can take them away from you.
How To Get Started With Email Marketing?
First, you need an email autoresponder. Here are the amazing autoresponders I can recommend:
Second, you will need a freebie.
Something that will make your blog visitors sign up for your email list. It could be an ebook, a cheat sheet, a workbook or a checklist. Something simple but useful.
Third, design an opt-in form and then add it to your blog. It could be a popup form or an embedded form.
Finally, create the first autoresponder email.
This is an email a subscriber receives upon subscription to your email list. It should contain the instructions on how to get the freebie and also a little introduction to your new subscribers.
That’s it. You now have a way of collecting emails.
What next?
Email your subscribers.
What Do I Email My Subscribers?
- Blog posts
- Tutorials
- A new trick that you learned during the week.
- News
- Coupons
- Offers and promotions
When Should I Send My First Email Campaign?
Immediately.
How Often Should I Email My Subscribers?
If you can do it like once every week, that’ll be okay. But that, I know, when you are just starting, it is very hard.
You can email them twice a month. Just to make sure that they don’t forget about you.
Harsh of Shoutmeloud.com boasts of an email list of over 300,000+ subscribers. He gets huge traffic to his blog posts from the email campaigns. Every time he publishes a blog post, he lets his subscribers know by sending an email campaign. You can imagine the kind of traffic he receives. That’s the power of email marketing.
Conclusion
While working so hard to grow the audience for your blog, try to avoid the listed mistakes.
If you follow every little thing I’ve talked about in this blog post and ignore the beginner blogging mistakes, you will begin to see tremendous growth in your blog’s audience with time.
In summary, here are the 5 mistakes you must avoid while trying to grow the audience for your blog:
- Ignoring Social Media.
- Thinking that SEO is crap.
- Not having a consistent publishing plan.
- Keyword Stuffing.
- Not taking Email marketing seriously.
Did you find the article helpful? Is there any other beginner blogging mistakes you would like to highlight, do share your thoughts via the comment section below.
As always, happy blogging.