When it comes to blogging, everyone makes mistakes. Maintaining a blog full of quality content isn’t easy and even the most popular blogs around have suffered from a slip-up at one point or another. But the good news is that mistakes aren’t the end of the world – you can always turn them into a learning experience so you know what to do better in the future. But if you have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others so you can avoid them, why not do it?
Here are 4 common mistakes nearly every blogger makes and how you should avoid them.
Trying to please everyone
Too many bloggers end up writing content for a large audience hoping that it will get results and new followers. But blogging success all comes down to knowing your target audience and creating content that will connect with them. When you try to please everyone, you spread yourself too thin and your content won’t actually appeal to the right people. But when you focus on your target audience and write content that will give them value, you’ll create a loyal group of followers who will share that content with the wider community and help grow your audience organically.
Writing boring headlines
When you’re writing a blog, you need to hook people before they even read the first few lines of your post by getting them to the page in the first place. One of the best ways to do that is by writing titles that intrigue an audience enough to make them click through to your content. So spend some time focusing on your titles and make sure they’ll make people stop and pay attention to what you’ve written.
Know Techie’s headlines not only describe the subject of the content but include information that makes people want to find out more.
Not having a CTA
If your blog doesn’t have a CTA, you’re missing out on an opportunity to tell your readers what you want them to do next. You should never assume that people who visit your blog will go out of their way to follow up and take action without instruction. So whether you’re trying to build an email list, promote a free trial, or get more traffic to a particular page, always prompt the visitors to do so. But be sure you aren’t overwhelming visitors with too many pop-ups or prompts – they’ll just get annoyed and leave the site.
The travel blog Off Assignment does a great job encouraging visitors to subscribe to the weekly newsletter with this simple opt-in form.
Ignoring multimedia
Many bloggers view their blog as a place to write. They aren’t wrong – blogs are an excellent place to share long-form content that appeals to your audience. But if your blog consists only of text posts, there’s a good chance it will fail to hold the viewer’s attention for very long. People tend to get tired of scrolling through long blocks of text in consecutive posts.
So break up text posts with multimedia content. You might include infographics or other images within your posts, or even dedicate an entire post to a video with a few supporting sentences. The more diverse your content is, the more likely viewers are to spend more time on your blog and engage with your content. Pinch of Yum uses vibrant visuals with every post to break up text and keep viewers engaged.
No matter where you are on your blogging journey, you’re bound to make a few mistakes. But knowing what to look out for and how to avoid the most common ones can put you well ahead of your competitors who may still be making them.
