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Major Mistakes You Should Avoid When You Are Starting a Blog

Starting a Blog

FindItMore | It is not surprising to find out that blogs are becoming a popular form of expression and marketing, both for companies and individuals. Numerous companies are seeing the increasing presence of people on online platforms, and are choosing to begin the blogging process – in fact, more than 70 percent of companies started and increased their production of online content in 2015 alone.

However, the benefit of increased connectivity has led to a problem – an increasingly crowded landscape of content marketing. The problem is so prevalent that companies are only getting a fraction of their expected traffic annually.

It is important to lay a correct foundation so that you get success, but many companies and individuals alike mess this up when they are starting out. The bad news is that it becomes very hard to recover as the problem persists. Here are some mistakes you should avoid (and many of them are very common, you might have no idea you are committing them).

Failing to define your target audience and blogging strategy

In the main step when you are searching on tips regarding how to start a blog, you will find this tip everywhere – regardless of the type of blog you will create. This is because you cannot make much progress when you do not know who you are targeting; it is like a headless chicken running around with no sense of direction.

Before you even start that blog, make sure you ask these questions. For instance, is the audience male or female? Who are they, and what jobs do they hold? What income levels do they earn? What do they enjoy doing as hobbies and other interests?

For you to succeed, it is very important to know both general and specific details about your audience, and what you will cater to. This will help you to develop a serious blog strategy that will help you stand out in the long term to your audience, and search engines.

Keeping your audience in mind when creating your content involves use of inclusive language, remembering their cultural backgrounds, using words accurately, as well as using specialized terms only when the audience understands it. In addition, you need to use words that have appropriate associations, and plain words instead of complicated ones.

Failing to create an email list

No matter how much you want to succeed in your blogging endeavors, you are guaranteed to fail when you fail to make an emailing list. Sadly, many people learn this the hard way, yet it is a mistake you can avoid easily.

Email is actually more effective than social media, contrary to what you might think. It will always guarantee a steady stream of traffic to your blog or website, unlike social media where the update is lost in the noise of other updates by other people. The best part is that it is very easy to create email newsletters, much more than social media updates.

When it comes to email, those that are on the list will always be engaged and very loyal, and you will notice them among the first people to comment on your blog posts. In turn, they will share the articles with their friends on social media platforms and other platforms, so you do not need to extensively invest in trying to create buzz on your own.

Failing to stick to a schedule or editorial calendar

Here is the worst thing about failing to stick to a schedule when posting your content: the drop in traffic begins immediately, and it is going to be exponential in its rate.

Many beginner bloggers seem to encounter this problem – they fail to stick to a proper, regular schedule, which makes them post sporadically, and they end up losing traffic that they cannot recover from. In addition, if you consider social media as a major source of your traffic, the impact of not posting is even worse.

If you are serious about growing your blog and its reach, then you need to post regularly, and schedule the posts correctly on the dashboard. Otherwise, you will risk failing in your quest to grow your reach, yet you have worked to get it to where it is.

Of course, the schedule you decide to follow will depend on your target audience and niche, so your strategy will ultimately depend on that. An editorial calendar is a great tool to help you focus, since you can figure out the topics you need to tackle when posting next, and plan your delivery mode around those themes. It will also remove the harrowing problem of Writer’s block, and builds the SEO of the blog itself.

Instead of telling a story, you start becoming self-indulgent

Here is the truth – your content is likely inspiring to your visitors because they see you can understand their points of frustration, so they take the advice you give them and see it to improve themselves. That is mainly why they visit your blog regularly and read the posts.

So, when you decide to post irrelevant stories about yourself and the problems you are going through, it becomes quite boring quite fast to the audience, and they stop coming. Unfortunately, this is a common problem many beginner bloggers make, all in the name of ‘being honest and open to their readers’.

The solution to this is disciplining yourself. For every word you write, teach yourself to have the audience at the front of your mind and do not deviate from that purpose. If the posts you are releasing have no relevance to them, then it will hurt your blog in the long term, and you will stray from your business goals.

Of course t is good to be honest with your audience, and you can even include fictional stories into the post that adds value to the audience. This will add a sense of identity to your writing. However, you must always ask yourself if it fits the context of your blog content, and whether it will add clarity to the overall point.

You can also add a button for user interaction on your blog similar to the one present on the Donation website.

Final thoughts

Starting a blog is easy, but maintaining it is hard. Before you go ahead, always have a clear strategy in mind, as it will guide you throughout the content creation process.

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