Blogging is a multi-faceted process, and it involves a lot of different steps and stages. You have to do a lot of things when conducting research, when writing the content itself, when optimizing said content, and when publishing it.
Since there is so much stuff involved in there, there are likewise a lot of places where bloggers can make mistakes. And depending on how experienced or otherwise you are, you may be facing some trouble with those yourself.
In this blog, we’re going to be looking at some of the common blogging mistakes that people are prone to make and how you can avoid those.
Creating overly promotional content
In a lot of cases, there’s a brand behind a blog. The purpose of such a brand-driven blog is two-fold: promoting the brand itself and providing valuable information to the readers.
While there should ideally be a balance between these two, one of the mistakes that some blogs can make is publishing overly promotive content.
There are a couple of different ways in which this can prove to be harmful to your blog.
First of all, search engines aren’t that fond of content that aims to just do some raw promotion of a brand or a service without providing useful information to the readers. While promotional content itself can rank and does rank, it does so in the “commercial” intent, i.e., in e-commerce.
Blogs, on the other hand, are more centered on providing information and are not the platform for blatant advertising.
Secondly, when you publish overly promotional content, it drives away your readers. While promoting your content is fine and everything, if you do it too much, then your content starts lacking the “compassionate” factor. Your readers don’t feel as if you’re writing for them, and it can make them bitter, to be a bit dramatic.
So, to avoid this problem? Just don’t be too promotional. Focus on making your content informational and helpful. If you do have to add the promotion element, stick it at the end in the form of a CTA or a banner, etc.
Not creating content according to your target audience
This is yet again a mistake that can cost you dearly as far as your blogging endeavors go.
Whenever you want to write a blog, you have to focus on making it tailored to the target audience. If you don’t, your blog content won’t be able to resonate with the people who are supposed to read it, and that – in turn – will negatively affect the overall effectiveness of the blog.
Writing blogs less regularly but in a dedicated direction and for a dedicated audience is better than writing bland and boring stuff on a daily basis.
Here are some things that you need to know about your audience to write good content for them:
- What gender your readers typically belong to
- What region(s) your readers are typically from
- What age group your readers usually fall into
- How much time or attention your readers are willing or able to give to your content
Publishing plagiarized content
Unlike the others, this mistake is perhaps a lot sneakier and a lot harder to avoid.
To understand this one better, we should first clarify what we mean by publishing plagiarized content.
There are basically two types of plagiarism.
One type of plagiarism is the act of deliberately copying something from a source and then using it verbatim without any credit or acknowledgment, or…evident remorse.
As far as this plagiarism goes, there is no “mistake” element involved here. It is blatant and intentional.
On the other hand, the other type of plagiarism is unintentional plagiarism i.e., the content that you accidentally copy from somewhere without even realizing it.
Now, doing this accidental copying itself is innocent. But not finding it and not removing it before finalizing the content is a big mistake.
Here is what you need to do to avoid this sort of situation:
- Write your content originally as you typically do
- Then, once you are done, run a plagiarism check on it before finalizing it
- If the plagiarism check shows that there are parts in the content that match with existing material on the Internet, then take any of the following steps:
- Remove the plagiarized parts
- Paraphrase the plagiarized parts
- Cite the sources and “come clean” to eliminate the plagiarism
Conclusion
While there are a lot of other blogging mistakes that people can make, the ones we’ve talked about above are probably some of the most prevalent. The next time you want to create some content for your blog, just make sure to stick to the pointers we’ve given above.
