Tips & Tricks To Avoid Mistakes While Blogging
Top Blogging Mistakes To Avoid
20 Blogging Mistakes in 2022, According to Hubby Bloggers
Sometimes, when I tell people I blog for a living, they roll their eyes. “It’s very simple,” he says. “You get paid to sit on the internet all day and write. A monkey can do your job!”
That’s when I roll my eyes. See, people are quick to dismiss blogging as a no-brainer. But when they actually sit down to write their first two posts, it hits them: it’s a lot harder than I thought. Like anyone starting a new job, they mess things up.
That’s right — it happens to every new blogger. Fortunately, these obstacles are pretty easy to avoid if you know they’re coming.
So for all you beginner bloggers who want to get up to speed quickly, keep reading. Below are common mistakes that most beginners make and some tips on how to avoid them.
Anyone can start a blog, but many will never give blogging the attention it needs to become a successful part of the business.
A hobby blog is one thing, but when you want to grow or monetize your blog, there are several things you need to focus on. That is, you need to identify the goal of the blog, know your target audience and what moves them, create a blog site that is easy to navigate, and choose a writing style that you like. resonates with the audience.
Afraid you’re missing out on some of these elements? Does not matter! We are here to help you and your blog succeed. Let’s examine some common blogging mistakes and the solutions that will help your blog move up the ranks.
Most blog traffic is driven organically — in other words, users will search for something on a search engine and click on your blog if it matches their desired topic. However, there are many organizations competing for your audience’s attention, so it’s important to avoid common blog mistakes in order to stand out.
Here are the most common blog post mistakes (and their solutions), according to HubSpot bloggers.
1. Create blog posts that address your larger company goals.
Mistake: You think about ideas that only interest you.
As much as you may read and re-read your blog posts after you publish them, you are not the only reader or intended reader.
When you start blogging, you’ll have ideas at random times—in the shower, on a run, on the phone with your mom. Although thoughts may come at random moments, thoughts themselves should never be random. Just because it’s a good idea in general—or something you’re personally interested in—doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for your company.
Your blog is a honeypot, not a megaphone. Place your content where your audience wants to discover, not what you want to tell them.”
— Amanda Sellers, Manager of Historical Optimization at HubSpot
Solution: Align your blog posts with company growth goals.
Your reason for blogging is to solve problems for your audience and ultimately, grow your business. Therefore, all of your blog post ideas should help meet these growth goals. They should have a natural connection to your industry’s issues and address questions and concerns specific to your prospects.
Need help figuring out what those goals are and how to address them? Talk to your manager about the company’s big goals, and then schedule an appointment with someone on the sales team to hear what they’re asked most often. After both meetings, you should know what goals you need to achieve and have some ideas on how to achieve them.
2. Identify what resonates with your audience.
Mistake: You forget your personality.
If you want your blog content to perform well (i.e. generate traffic, leads and sales), it must resonate with your audience and compel them to take action. One of the biggest mistakes is assuming your content will perform if you haven’t considered your audience or the actions you want them to take.
“Your personality is the foundation of everything you create. Writing for yourself doesn’t always resonate with your intended audience. If instead, you talk about your personality pains, challenges, and goals and they Feel like you’re talking to them, they’re more likely to stay on the page and convert on your offer.”
— Christina Perricone, Senior Manager, Content Marketing at HubSpot
Solution: Understand your personality’s pain points and address them.
By defining your buyer personas and what’s important to them, you can fill in the gaps with your content. If you’re not consciously thinking about your personality pain, you’re just creating content for content’s sake, which is a waste of resources.
3. Write like you talk.
Error: Your writing is too tight.
Writing a blog post is very different from writing a term paper. But when bloggers first start out, they usually only experience the latter. Issue? A term paper writing style is not a writing style that people will enjoy reading.
Let’s be honest: most people who see your post aren’t reading the whole thing. If you want to keep them interested, you have to keep them reading by writing in a way that isn’t easy to read.
Solution: Write blogs that feel personal.
It’s okay to be more communicative in your writing—in fact, we encourage it. The more accessible your writing is, the more people will enjoy reading it. People want to feel like they’re doing business with real people, not robots.
So loosen up your writing. Throw in contractions. Get rid of the phrase. Make up a sentence or two. This is how real people talk—and that’s what real people like to read.
4. Show your personality. don’t tell him
Mistake: You think people care about you as a writer.
It sounds harsh, but it’s true: when people first start blogging, they think that their audience will naturally be interested in their stories and their interests… but that’s not the case. That’s not a knock against them as a person – it’s just that when you’re new, no one is interested in you and your experiences. People care more about what you can teach them.
Solution: Infuse your personality without overshadowing the subject.
While people don’t really care that it’s you who’s writing the post, you can include parts of your personality in your writing to make them feel more comfortable with you. How you do this is entirely up to you. Some people like to crack jokes, some like to make pop culture references, and others have a way with vivid explanations.
Corey Wainwright, HubSpot’s principal marketing manager, is particularly good.
To add personality to your writing, try to find ways your readers can relate to the topic you’re writing about—then write in the first person as if you were with them and Hanging out with them. Talking Make your tone personal, approachable, and engaging, as you would in a face-to-face conversation.
5. Repeat yourself.
Mistake: You hesitate.
Although you’re encouraged to let your personality shine through in your writing, don’t abuse the privilege. It’s one thing to be yourself in the topic you’re covering, but it’s another to bring up too many personal experiences, which will bury the point you’re trying to make.
Don’t get too caught up in these personal anecdotes and analogies – your readers aren’t sitting right in front of you, which means you can’t guarantee they have their undivided attention. If they lose patience, they can (and will) bounce from your article.
Solution: Emphasize your argument over and over again.
To prevent your writing from losing its audience, restate your point in each section of the essay. The best blog posts commit to a broad message and then deliver it slowly, expressing it many times in small ways from start to finish.
If you’re writing about how much water a potted plant needs, for example, don’t spend three paragraphs explaining how you came home to a dead fern after returning from a two-week vacation. This story provides real proof of your point, but what is your point? Some plants cannot survive more than 14 days without water. This is a possible point and should be stated up front.
6. Start with a specific job title.
Error: Your topics are too broad.
When people start blogging, they usually want to write about really big topics like:
- “How to Do Social Media Marketing”
- “Best Business Practices”
- “How To Make Money On The Internet”
Such topics are very broad. Because there are so many details and nuances in these topics, it’s really hard to do a good job of answering them. In addition, more specific topics attract smaller, more targeted audiences, which are of higher quality and more likely to convert into leads and customers.
So, to reap the most short-term and long-term benefits of blogging, you’ll need to get a more specific approach.
Solution: Start with a clear, concise idea.
Nailing down really specific blog topics is crucial to knocking your first few posts out of the park. Let us help you brainstorm with our blog ideas generator. This tool allows you to enter key terms you know you want to cover, and then generates five sample blog topics that work for business blogs.
Keep in mind that a working title isn’t final—it’s just a solid angle you can use to keep your writing on track. Once you’ve completed this stage of the ideation process, writing your blog posts becomes much easier.
Specific posts should still connect to the bigger picture.
Mistake: You don’t tie a particular topic into your reader’s 7 broader struggle.
You already know how important it is to resonate with your buyer personas and understand their pain points. However, there is a reason why they are experiencing pain points and what they need to address.
Solution: Understand the challenges and consequences they are facing.
You should ask yourself:
- What’s at stake?
- What do they gain by taking action?
- What will happen if they do not take action?
All of these things can appear in the content you write for your blog post. Doing so will signal to your reader that you understand what they are going through and that you want to help.
“If you’re not interested in a particular topic you’re writing about, it’s probably because you haven’t stopped to think about the big picture. How it fits into the reader’s broader challenges will help you. Find meaning and value in every post you write, and enable you to better connect with your readers.”
— Caroline Forsey, Senior Content Strategist at HubSpot
8. Use a specific post type, create an outline, and use a header.
Mistake: Your writing is a brain dump.
Sometimes when I have a great idea that I’m excited about, it’s really tempting to just sit back and let it roll out of me. But what I get is usually a subpar blog post.
Why? A conscious style of writing is not really a good style for blog posts. Most people are going to scan your blog posts, not read them, so it needs to be well organized to do that.
Solution: Create your blog with a template, outline, and section headers.
The first thing you should do is decide what type of blog post you are going to write. Is this the way to post? A list-based post? A curated collection post? A slideshare presentation? To help with this, download our free templates to create a variety of blog posts. Once you have the template down, writing your outline will be easy.
Writing an outline makes a big difference. If you take the time to organize your thoughts and create a logical flow to your post, the rest becomes easy — you’re basically just filling in the blanks.
Using headers is also important to the reader’s experience.
“While it’s nice to imagine that your readers are hanging on your every word, the reality is that they’re probably mostly just skimming your posts. When you write, make sure you break down your pieces. Making them skim-friendly: including ample paragraph spacing, clearly titled sections, relevant images, and formatting that makes it easy to find the piece of information they came for.”
— Carla Cook, Senior Manager, HubSpot Blog Team
9. Give your audience something to walk away with.
Mistake: You’re relying on vague concepts instead of concrete information.
are writing about a topic. If you notice, almost all of the results on the first page of Google are writing about conceptual, vague ideas. How can your blog stick out? You can include concrete, actionable steps One of the first things you’ll do in your blog research is look up how other publications for your readers to achieve success.
Solution: Include actionable steps for your readers to follow.
One of the biggest tenets of content creation is that it should be useful, and that means your audience should walk away with something.
“People want to learn how to actually do things, not just theoretically. When you’re done with a blog, ask yourself, ‘Will the reader know how to implement this idea?’ go?’ or ‘Did I take steps to achieve success?’
— Rebecca Reserbato, former staff writer at HubSpot
This could come in the form of a “how to” as you suggest they implement a particular strategy, or it could simply be a suggestion for a tool or tactic to make a process easier.
10. Use data and research to back up the claims you make in your posts.
Error: You do not use data as evidence.
Let’s say I’m writing a blog post about why businesses should consider using Instagram for marketing. When I make this argument, which one is more persuasive?
“It seems like more people are using Instagram these days.”
“Instagram’s user base is growing faster than social network usage in general. In the U.S., Instagram will grow 15.1 percent this year, while the overall social network sector grew just 3.1 percent.” “
Second, of course. Arguments and claims are much more compelling when they are rooted in data and research. As marketers, we don’t just need to convince people to stay with us about an issue—we need to convince them to take action. Data-driven content grabs people’s attention in a way that fluff arguments don’t.
Solution: Use data to support your arguments.
In any good story, you’ll present a main argument, establish evidence, and then conclude with a takeaway for the audience. You can use data in blog posts to introduce your main argument and show why it’s relevant to your readers, or as evidence throughout the post.
Some of the best places to find great data include:
- Pew Research Center
- Marketing Sherpa
- HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report
11. Use examples to back up why what you’re saying is important.
Error: You are not adding enough context.
Meg Prater, the managing editor of HubSpot Blogs, shared with us that “When I first joined the HubSpot blog team, I would constantly get corrections that I wasn’t including enough examples to support my statements. Example Alternatively (see what I did there?), I might write ‘SMBs should expand their social media strategies to experiment with new, cheaper channels.’ Of course, that may be true, but it’s a very broad proposition.”
Solution: Illustrate ideas with examples, visual aids, and additional materials.
It is important to build on your vision with details. “A powerful way to share this with an audience,” says Meg, “is to say, ‘SMBs should expand their social media strategy to experiment with new, cheaper channels. For example, You can test ads run on the question-and-answer platform Quora, or just answer industry questions that your product or service is an answer to.”
