It is said that to learn something, you need to make mistakes, but there is an easy way, learn from the mistakes by the others.
This post is exactly about this, I have made some mistakes myself and I’ll try to put them below so that you can avoid them. These are not the only mistakes in blogging you can make, but these are the ones you should never make.
Never Write About Things You Don’t Know or Have Never Done.
Readers love experiences, they read your blog because they want to love from your mistakes, don’t fill up your blog space with random opinions you have made by read a couple of articles. I just deleted a couple of articles I wrote years ago when I was starting and wrote them just because others were writing and wanted to be a part of it, my posts did not teach anything new or something that is not available on other blogs, and they did not come from my own experience.
A quick look up in the Google Analytic and Google Search made me realize that they did not bring any traffic to my blog because they were not valuable.
Never Cover Topics that Has Nothing To Do with Your Blog
I was having a conversation with my friend about this. He owns a blog that covers a wide topic, he writes everything from Apple iPhone tips to Blogging Tips to Funny Infographics. He does have a good number of visitors, but the bounce rate of his blog is quite high, and the subscriber rate is also low in comparison to my tech blog which has less traffic than his but only covers technology related articles, no news, no hacking stuff, just simple tips to make others’Â live easy. People know what the blog offers and what kind of posts they are going to see in future, anything that comes off the topic from me will result in repelling my readers from the blog.
Never Underestimate the Power of Headlines
This is something I learned the hard way. After listening to bloggers about the importance of headlines, I went back to my blog and changed the headlines accordingly six month ago, and now, all I can say IT REALLY WORKS. The posts have been performing better than before.
So, the next time you are going to write a post, spend some time thinking about the proper headline that is simple yet explains the purpose, creates curiosity, so appealing that people cannot help but click on the link to read it. Here is an excellent write up about creating great headlines.
Never Write Articles in One Sitting
Imagine you are reading something about your favorite topic in a broken English and poor grammar , how would you feel about the blog and it’s author. Now, what if YOU are the author of that blog?. You may be perfect at your language and grammar but you tend to make a bit of typos here and there. I used to write my posts in one go and publish them only to find comments like go learn English, Your English sucks, I have learned my mistake I now try to proofread each and every post before it goes live on the blog.
Never Blog Without an Editorial Calender
There was a time when I used to write 5 posts a day and then there used to be no post for 5 days in a row, this happened because I did not plan the content for my blog and had this inconsistency in publishing posts on the blog. I was never able to build readership on that blog, but the most damaging thing was that there was no motivation to keep blogging. 5 Days with no posts on the blog used to build a pressure of writing a post just for the heck of it and it resulted in less valuable posts that were of no use, ultimately my blog died.
I learned to keep an editorial calender to keep the content rolling, I now write down all the ideas, and then produce content accordingly and it goes on the blog on a regular basis. For Example, I try to publish at least one post everyday, even if there are too many posts ready to be published, they are scheduled for the next day and so on.
I have written about some of my blogging mistakes a few months ago. You can read them here.
This is not it, there may be too many of them, you may have learned from your mistakes as well, please share them in comment section below.
