Almost 10,000 blogs are created everyday and only a small percentage of those blogs go on to become successful blogs and achieve the desired result of the blog owner. There are many reasons for this and most of this can be avoided if you spend some time learning the basics of blogging beforehand. Below are some common fatal mistakes of a new blogger and some steps to avoid them.
- Choosing a topic – When you first start a blog you believe you can write about anything and get hundreds of people to read those posts. It takes a while to realize that the Internet doesn’t work that way and it takes some effort to get traffic to your blog. Unless you are very dedicated it is advisable to avoid highly competitive niches like technology, healthcare etc. Start with a smaller audience and expand from there.
- Choosing a domain name – Whether it’s a business blog, a personal blog or informational blog it is important to have keyword rich domain names. This will help in SEO, branding and also makes it easier for people to remember your blog.
- Posting frequency – This is an area most new bloggers struggle. Most will try to write one post a day and get fed up within weeks. It’s a good idea to start small, like one post per week and then increase the frequency gradually.
- Making connections – Blogging is more fun when you interact with people. Find relevant blogs in your niche and leave some meaningful comments in them. Don’t leave a comment like “great post”, but try to add some value to the post. Don’t be afraid to leave your link as well.
- Not focusing on SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of ranking higher in Google and optimizing your posts for search engine. You should always write for people but by doing simple things like adding keywords in post title, adding tags, using SEO plug-in you can considerably improve your traffic.
- Handling social media – Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are great sources of traffic but you should learn to use them effectively as well. Just tweeting a link or posting a link in Facebook won’t get you much traffic. Here also you should spend some time building connections so you can get maximum value for your Tweets.
- Too much advertising – If you are looking to make money from your blog you shouldn’t rush to add advertising in your blog. You won’t earn much without traffic anyway, so wait until your blog becomes stable and get steady traffic. Most top affiliate marketers wait until they reach a certain traffic level to add Adsense or any other sort of advertisement in there blogs.
- Not outsourcing – If you are a new blogger you might be a bit reluctant to outsource your work because it costs money. But outsourcing helps you focus on your core qualities and get the tedious tasks done for you.
- Information Overload – There is so much information available in the Internet that it can be a bit overwhelming for a new blogger. As soon as you learn a new method to get traffic you will read about another method. Make sure to analyze information carefully and also to act upon what you read.
- Poor or No Planning – It is very hard to build a successful blog without proper planning. It would be great if you can stick to a time table, a specific time to write posts, another time slot of social media interaction etc. This way you can get more work done without adding extra pressure to yourself.
If you try to avoid these as a new blogger, you will turn out to become very successful and you will achieve your objective for blogging be it to make money, get traffic or to simply make a difference! What you may not know is that some of the ten points above are the reasons bloggers stop blogging. You may think ‘if I do what this article says, I will be able to become more successful’ but you should also think ‘and if I do what this article says, I will not fail as a blogger too’. You won’t believe the amount of new bloggers that give up because that hit ‘the wall of blogging’: if you get over it, you will become successful. If not, you will simply ‘give-up’ from blogging. If you can stop yourself from picking up the fatal flaws of a new blogger, you will be able to move around or jump over ‘the wall of blogging’ and continue into the future as a more experienced, motivated blogger.
Nishadha Silva is a Software Engineer and Internet Marketer who lives in Sri Lanka. He advises business about SEO in Sri Lanka and conducts workshops about social media marketing in Sri Lanka.
Very nice! Following your inputs and suggestions will definitely make great bloggers out of your readers.
White Label SEO
Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad this article proved useful to you.
I recently started doing my blog. Thank you for sharing this tips.
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Your very welcome. I hope you don't do any of the flaws mentioned above!
As pointed out earlier, blogging does not stop within your content. Among the number of factors that affect the success of your blog, the navigability of your site is an important one. Readers must be able to quickly get what they want without having to take a second look. The more they wander around, the lesser is their chances of reading your article.
As a blogger, this is something you should never attempt. A lot of new bloggers use proxy names of popular bloggers. This is never going to be a long time beneficial activity. Be yourself and bring out the best in you.
Some bloggers tend to attack other people or bloggers to increase their traffic. However this is only going to be a short-time success story. On the other hand, it could create enmity and have negative effects on your growth in future.
This is important. The more you think from a reader’s prospective, the better will be your write-ups. Avoid too much of personalized comments or bringing out ideas from one’s own life. Remember by the end of the day, the article is all for the reader.
I can attest to the quality of this writing. Many of the information are proven with evidences that it made me easy to relate many of my works, as well. I suppose you have already helped a lot of individuals of the same need.