Common Blogging Mistakes
Here is a quick checklist of typical mistakes most bloggers make and therefore experience missed opportunities and may not even know it. If you are taking the time to create valuable content, ensure that you are reaching your target audience as well as maximizing your potential reach.
No Blog At All: If you are a business with a website, trying to rank for your industry, creating and maintaining a blog is a great way to gain valuable web traffic and search engine rank. Studies show that sites with blogs get 55% more web visitors than non-bloggers, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages. Constantly posting fresh content is an easy, yet powerful SEO tool.
Your Blog Is Not Maintained on the Main Company Website: This is senseless because any link juice that your blog is creating could also be helping your main site. Plus, when web traffic is forced to leave your site to read your blog, it doesn’t give them a sense of continuity and consistent branding. Each blog post you create is one more page to be indexed for your site, host the blog on your site, it’s a win-win!
Publishing Sporadically/Off-Topic Content: You want a theme/goal in mind so your blog attracts an audience that is interested in your company and its products, services, advice, etc. Most blogs want their community of readership to eventually turn into customers and if you aren’t posting often and useful information, those readers will leave. This doesn’t mean you can only publish posts that promote your product (haha all those p’s just happened to fall into place.) Using various media such as photos, videos, infographics, and cartoons can be a great way to keep your blog interesting yet still focused. Plus, blogs that publish atleast 20 times/month generate 5 times more traffic than those that publish less than 4 times/month. Get writing!
No Engagement: Encourage your readers to participate in the sharing of information, opinions, comments, questions and ideas. Monitor the comments and respond when necessary. Blogs offer a great opportunity to teach and also learn from your audience and gain loyalty through conversation and shared ideas. Include share icons for all your social media sites so your readers can easily suggest and share your information and follow you.
No Creative Titles: This may seem like an unimportant tip but bloggers frequently write the blog post and slap a generic title on the post. This is the first text your readers see and often the deciding factor determining if they will read on. Use creativity, humor, and even shocking post titles!
Bad Design: Use a blog design that is engaging, easy-to-navigate and search engine friendly. Place your social media share buttons in a prominent place. Ensure your site has fast load times and prominent headline formatting. Nothing is worse than trying to find where one post ends and the next begins ,or waiting 3 minutes to read an article. Most won’t do it and it will hurt your readership.
Analytics? What’s That? Do not ignore blog analytics, the statistics that let you know how many times your posts have been shared, on which social sites they’ve been shared, number of blog views in a given time period, which blog topics are the most engaging to your readers, etc. Analytics allow you to see what it working and what is not. If you are not getting any comments, views or shares on a certain topic, obviously your readers are not finding that content valuable. Focus your efforts on what’s working !
