7 Mistakes to Avoid When Blogging

Blogging has become a crucial activity for businesses wishing to achieve success online. It’s a great way to increase exposure, reach out to new audiences and drive traffic to a website. With quality content becoming more and more necessary to help you stand out from the competition, you need to be careful to do it right, not just for the sake of it.

Are you effectively grabbing your reader’s attention and keeping hold of it? Will they want to come back and read more in future? Maybe you’re guilty of making one of the following mistakes. To help you get the most out of your blogging endeavours, we’ve set out 7 things you should try and avoid in your posts.

1 – Irrelevant Articles

People and companies blog predominantly as a means of connecting and relating to their audience and markets. By writing and passing comment on specific interests, industries or services a particular set of readers or audience are targeted. It may sound obvious, but it is important to ensure that all posts are relevant to this target audience.

A blog about hair and make-up for example, should remain dedicated to writing posts that relate to hairstyles or make-up tips etc. and not suddenly post an article about gardening inspirations. This post would not be relevant to the audience and make them think twice about coming back in future.

2 – Blocks of Plain Text

Research has shown that the majority of people won’t actually read whole blog posts, instead scanning through content for information that’s of interest to them. The inclusion of big chunks of text can be off-putting for these ‘scanners’, causing them to leave without reading. To help make content more digestible:

• Use Headings and subheadings to break up text into sections
• Use bullet lists and numbers
• Write in shorter paragraphs where possible

3 – Posts That Are Too Long or Too Short

Although approximately 1,500 words are recommended for shareability potential, there is no right or wrong length set in stone for blog posts. It is entirely dependent on what your audience wants and what it is you’re trying to put across.

If you are able to write your message clearly using only a hundred words or so then don’t try and beef up word count by waffling on needlessly. Similarly, if you are writing a more detailed post, be sure not to try and keep the article length short for the sake of it, potentially impacting on an audience’s understanding or value taken from the post.

Think carefully about the correct length for both you and your readers.

4 – No Visual Content

Visual content is extremely important in capturing an audience’s attention online amongst a sea of articles and text. Just some of the reasons you should be using such content are:

• Blog posts with images gain more views than those without
• Consumers find images more important than text when purchasing a product
• Engagement with social media posts is higher if an image is included

These show the value that an audience place in visually engaging content and certainly should be taken advantage of in your blogging.

5 – Talking Politics

Getting political in your blog posts can stir up emotions and potentially offend your audience. Unless your blog is dedicated to this area then we strongly recommend you don’t get involved.

Your readers haven’t come to your blog to read a heated discussion or opinions on the latest political happenings, so stick to what they want and don’t risk losing readers or customers, however strongly you feel the need to air your views on an issue.

6 – Irritating Advertisements

The majority of web users will tell you that they find online advertising annoying. Although many bloggers or companies make their money from this marketing, it is important to keep it to a minimum. These ads could prevent your blog getting read, however great its content. So stay clear of:

• Distracting adverts
• Invasive pop-up adverts
• Video adverts playing automatically

7 – Over-doing it

It is important to get a good balance of blogging activity in place. Although it is not advised to post too infrequently as readers will not check back so often, it is also essential not to bombard your audience with content.

Think carefully before posting, consider the nature of your blog, your audience and how often they are going to want to see new content.

Although some of these may sound fairly obvious, you’d be surprised at how many companies simply blog without giving much thought to it. Take note of these common blogging mistakes and you could avoid falling into the same trap as many of your competitors. Use your blog to your advantage, provide readers with great quality and engaging content that’ll make them come back for more.