Starting a blog may seem somewhat old-fashioned to some, and many question its relevance or its usefulness when it comes to marketing. In the Tik-Tok era, after all, who has time to read a full blog post? The fact is that this perception is simply not correct. Blogs remain as relevant as ever, and in fact a staggering 77% of internet users read blogs. There are also huge marketing benefits to companies that maintain a blog, including many more websites linking to your website, more visitors to your website, and increased sales.
That said, it’s very easy to get blogging wrong. There are many beginner pitfalls and errors that can be made when starting a blog, and it’s important to avoid these common mistakes when starting a blog.
Table of Contents
The Nine Most Common Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A Blog
In order to avoid such mistakes when starting a blog, it’s first necessary to identify what those mistakes are. Once we know that, it’s much easier to know how we can avoid them.
Let’s take a look at the nine biggest blogging mistakes made when starting out.
Indulging In ‘Clickbait’
The phrase ‘clickbait’ has become ubiquitous in the past decade, and generally applies to blogs or articles that deliberately mislead readers with titillating article titles that are not representative of the actual content of the article itself.
Such articles are generally good at garnering initial attention, and you may see a spike in activity on your blog after posting clickbait articles. However, this interest is temporary; once readers figure out that you’re not actually offering any quality content (and they will – quickly) then they will lose interest and move on. Worse yet, your blog will acquire a reputation for being dishonest and misleading, and people will quickly learn to avoid it.
How To Avoid This
Ensure that all of your content is relevant and interesting, and that the titles are accurate and correctly describe the content of the articles. If readers find that they can trust your content – and rely upon it to impart accurate and valuable information – then they’ll be more likely to return, and more likely to share your articles with friends and family.
Inconsistent Or Infrequent Publishing
Nothing tanks a blog faster than long periods of inactivity, or an infrequent publishing schedule. It doesn’t matter how interested or engaged your readers are, or even if you have a huge archive of articles to keep the average visitor on your site for a while. Even if this is not the most obvious of mistakes, it can turn your efforts into garbage when starting a blog. Blogs thrive on new content, and if you’re failing to offer such content, you’re immediately putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Additionally, if you fail to regularly offer fresh content, you’re not establishing yourself as a leader in your field – and you should always be striving toward this. The more of an authority you’re perceived as, the more people will look to your blog for advice.
How To Avoid This
Establish a publishing schedule – and stick to it. You should ideally be putting out new blogs once every two weeks at a bare minimum. Unlike with social media shares, you can afford to oversaturate your blog with articles, since you won’t be forcing them on anybody. This also helps to create a bank of shareable blogs for your social media accounts.
However, don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. There’s no point in putting out 8 blog posts in a month if 7 of those are low-effort and poor quality.
Writing Your Blogs For You – Not For Your Readers
Many newer bloggers make the mistake of writing from their own perspective about things that interest them, rather than approaching their articles from their reader’s point of view.
If a blogger is unable to anticipate their reader’s needs and what they’d like to read about, they often find themselves writing rambling, self-indulgent tracts that do little to answer the questions that readers might have, and veer off into irrelevancy. Such writings ultimately lead to readers switching off and drifting away.
How To Avoid This
Luckily, there is an easy way to avoid such mistakes when starting a blog. The purpose of your blog should ultimately be to anticipate the questions that your readers need answering – and answer them. It’s therefore important to put yourself in their shoes and think about the problems they might be having in relation to your area of expertise. It’s also instructive to take a look at the sort of blogs your competitors are writing, and why they’re writing them. Are you able to expand upon what they’ve said with your own blog? Have they left something unanswered that you can answer in yours?
By adopting a reader-first perspective – rather than approaching things from your own viewpoint – you stand a much better chance of connecting with your audience.
Not Having A Mailing List
Having a mailing list might seem completely irrelevant when it comes to having a blog. Shouldn’t your blog stand on its own two feet? And can’t you simply use popular social media channels to promote your blog and reach a larger audience of people than those who’ve signed up for your mailing list?
It’s actually a profound mistake not to have a mailing list when starting a blog. Mailing lists are, first and foremost, comprised of loyal readers who are genuinely interested in you and your blog’s output. By not cultivating a mailing list – and not routinely giving the option to sign up for it on your blog – you’re cheating yourself out of a lot of potential subscribers.
How To Avoid This
This one couldn’t be simpler: have a mailing list! From the very first blog post you publish, there should be an option to join your mailing list. If your company has a pre-existing mailing list, ensure that you give existing subscribers the chance to opt in to emails regarding your blog. By doing this, you’ll be ensuring a much larger reader base from the get-go.
Readers who are brought in via your mailing list are likely to be more engaged with your blogs, more likely to leave comments (and thus help drive up that blog’s perceived value to search engines), and more likely to share your blog posts with their friends and family.
We recommend HubSpot to set up your mailing list and manage your mail campaigns.
Having Too Much Of A Marketing Focus
Ultimately, your blog is a tool to bring in more sales. Every piece of content that you write should have that in mind, and should ultimately serve the needs of your company and its overarching goals.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should be writing dry, uninspiring marketing screeds that exist only to push your product/service. They may be promoting whatever you sell, but they’re certainly not promoting your brand, and they’re not leading people to like, comment and share. Ultimately, they’re coming across as naked attempts to manipulate your readers – and they will be dismissed as such.
By approaching blogs from this angle, you’re failing to do what we discussed earlier – approach things from the perspective of your readers. Nobody wants to see a long, tedious text trying to sell something. People read blogs because they’re interested in the content or they want answers. It’s therefore a huge mistake to treat them wholly as marketing materials.
How To Avoid This
Though every blog you write should have a CTA of some form, that doesn’t mean it has to overtly market anything. Simply by writing about a topic that’s within your knowledge range, you’re indirectly marketing anyway. You’re showing that you’re an authority and you’re building up trust and goodwill with your audience. This builds your brand and, ultimately, demonstrates that you’re someone worth doing business with.
Therefore, approach every blog from a content- and customer-first perspective. By forgetting about the marketing part, you’ll find that you market much better.
Having An Inconsistent Tone/Voice
Many business or marketing blogs – particularly those run and written by committee – struggle with finding a common, unified voice that’s consistent across all of their content. When starting a blog, it may be extremely obvious that there are a lot of different authors in the mix, each bringing in their own styles and making their own mistakes, or the blogs may vary wildly in tone.
This lack of unified direction or voice can really hurt a blog, as it makes it clear that it’s the product of a single mind (or vision). Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say, and in this case, it makes your blog feel focus-grouped, impersonal, and nothing more than a marketing tool.
How To Avoid This
Having multiple writers is completely fine for a blog, but they should be unified with a single style, voice and ultimate goal. Establish a ‘style guide’ that makes it clear what sort of tone your writers should be aiming for (casual, formal, humorous, etc.), whether or not they should be writing in British/American English, and any technical considerations (e.g. length of paragraphs/sentences, how long the articles should be, use of punctuation etc.).
You can also create profiles for each of your writers, too. They may be following the same guidelines, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have any trace of personality. In fact, being able to put faces to the names of your writers will actually make your blogs more engaging for your readers.
Undisciplined, Directionless Writing
Some blogs can enjoy great success with aimless, stream-of-consciousness musings. Some of the biggest blogs in the world, in fact, have enjoyed great success with this approach.
However, such blogs are few and far between – and, as marketing blogs go, it’s a very ineffective approach. You’re not trying to share anecdotes about your life or muse about your dog’s favorite chew toy (unless you’re selling chew toys). There is (or ought to be) a very specific purpose to your blogs, and the posts that you publish thereon.
How To Avoid This
Before you start publishing blogs, you need to formulate a game plan. What is the overall purpose of your blog? How can you achieve that purpose? What content will help you in this? And what questions are you looking to answer?
Once your overall strategy is in place, you can plan out the blog posts that you’re going to write – and, for each of those, write an outline of what needs covering in that blog post. Whether you’re working from that outline yourself or giving it to someone else, it should be clear and concise, with a brief breakdown of the structure and content of the final product.
This sort of direction doesn’t just give you and your writing team a sense of purpose – it also helps in ensuring that consistent tone and voice that we talked about earlier. When it comes to maintaining a readable and engaging blog, a game plan is an absolute necessity.
Writing From An SEO Perspective First
When it comes to getting seen on Google, the temptation is to optimize your blog output as much as possible. Stuffing an article with keywords (even at the expense of content) is a tactic that was extremely popular in the past, to the point where many of the articles you’d read on a topic were barely coherent nonsense packed with filler and repetitive phrases. In fact, you can still see such articles on many websites – despite the fact that it is no longer very effective.
Search engine algorithms are regularly updated, and they are sensitive to any such attempts to ‘game’ the system and take advantage of shortcuts or algorithm exploits to drive traffic. What worked years ago when starting a blog has now turned into potential mistakes. As a matter of fact, once such attempts are well documented enough, search engine algorithms will actively punish attempts to use them. It’s for this reason that many SEO tools will now caution you if your articles are oversaturated with keywords – a practice known as “keyword stuffing”.
In essence, any attempt to approach blogging from an “SEO-first” perspective is doomed to failure sooner or later. Gaming the system may get you to the top of the pile for a while, but readers will be fast to figure out that your content is worthless, your bounce rate will skyrocket, and the algorithms will send you packing to the bottom of the search results.
How To Avoid This
As with so many of these mistakes, avoiding it is simply a matter of adopting a content-first approach. Sure – you can (and should) try to optimize your content for search engines. But it’s not the be-all and end-all of blogging.
If your focus is on putting out high-quality content (while also accounting for SEO), you’ll have more engaged readers that stick around for longer, click on more links, read more content, and have low bounce rates. This, in turn, will assure the search algorithms that your content is indeed of a high quality – and that you deserve to be at the top of page one.
One of the best ways to ensure that your content is made for readers while also factoring in a healthy portion of search engine optimization is to use an SEO software. Our firm favorite is Semrush – the leading all-in one SEO solution on the market. It makes it incredibly easy to find the right topics and keywords, and write SEO-optimized content.
Writing Too Formally
A surefire way of coming across as a marketer – instead of a human being – is by using language that’s too formal and more suited for an essay (or a marketing brochure), rather than more natural writing.
For many people, this stems from how they’ve always been taught to write. You should avoid slang terms, be sure to use correct grammar and punctuation, and try to use more sophisticated vocabulary than you would in your daily speech. It looks more professional, after all.
The fact is, however, that such formal and stiff language might work for a high-school essay, but it’s completely off-putting when it comes to connecting with people who aren’t marking your essay. People don’t engage with essay-speak – they engage with people who write like they talk.
How To Avoid This
Dial back the formality and, wherever possible, try to write more like you speak. Don’t be afraid to use slang terms – they act to humanize you, rather than the cold and aloof language of the essayist, which simply serves to make you seem distant and stiff.
Note that this doesn’t mean that you should sacrifice grammar and punctuation, however. Some blogs can get away with playing fast and loose with linguistic conventions, sure, but in many cases it simply makes the writer seem sloppy, unintelligent, and in dire need of a proofreader. These are all things that you, as a business, would ideally like to avoid.
The most important thing is that your writing is smooth, flowing and readable. After all, you want people to actually read your blogs, right? With this in mind, make sure that your writing style supplements your content by being something that people want to read.
Conclusion
Though it can seem quite daunting to get to grips with a new blog at first, the fact is that once you’ve set a few ground rules for yourself and your writers, things will make a lot more sense.
You don’t have to be an amazing writer to produce a good blog. In fact, you don’t even have to be even remotely talented at writing. As long as you have a vision and a goal, and are aware of the key mistakes to avoid when starting a blog, then you’re ready to start one for yourself. You can always hire writers (or editors to polish your own writing) in order to help you smooth over the edges, after all.
The most important thing – as we pointed out with most of these mistakes – is that you approach a content-first perspective. By making things like SEO and marketing secondary considerations, and focusing on putting out high-quality content that grabs the reader, you’re setting yourself up for success.
