6 Easily Correctable Mistakes That New Bloggers Make
Failing at blogging is so easy today. There are more than a few mistakes you can make which can be disastrous for your blog.
With so much riding on your blogging, whether that be traffic or money from things like affiliate programs or Google Adsense, many times a bloggers dreams are crushed so badly that they stop blogging after only a few months, or even less than that. So why is that?
Well, it’s simple. Newbie bloggers are far more likely to make mistakes that make achieving their dream (traffic, money from Adsense, etc) impossible.
And so it is the goal of this article to inform new bloggers of some of the most idiotic mistakes that cause new bloggers to fail at achieving success.
Recommended Reading: 25 common WordPress mistakes to avoid making
No time to blog
Being a productive blogger is already hard enough even without a full time job, now imagine trying to juggle your blogging with your job and social activities.
It’s not just enough to post a few hundred word article and hope for the best. For the most part, you need to dedicate time into your blogging, time you may not have enough of to spare.
If time is already that limited then it is probably best you wait until you have more free time before you start blogging. Why? Because there is nothing worse than using your precious and limited free time to blog only with half a heart. Blogging half-heartedly will ensure that you get nowhere with your blog since you didn’t put as much time into your blog as you needed to.
Best thing to do when it comes to time is to make a schedule, be strict about following it and turn yourself into a productive blogger.
Wanting quick or immediate results
This is probably the number one reason why many bloggers stop blogging – they expect extremely quick results for their efforts. Unfortunately this is not how blogging, or search engines for that matter, work.
Putting lots of time into your blog through a variety of methods, not just posting content, is what makes blogs take off. You can’t just post low or medium quality content and hope for the best. You need to post great content and get backlinks to that content, only then will you start to see your traffic start to uptick.
Even if you do everything right it still takes quite a bit of time depending on how much competition you have. The average amount of time for a blog to start taking off seems to be around 1 year or so and that’s assuming you are doing everything right and not doing anything that could hurt your blog in down the road (more on that later).
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are very impatient and want immediate success then blogging probably is not for you.
Recommended Reading: 50 WordPress plugins no blog should be without
Copy and pasting or ‘spinning’ content
It’s easy enough to take something you find on a reputable blog and paste it on your own blog or “spin” the content. The problem, well main problem, is that spinning or copying and pasting content is a great way to get Google to hate your blog.
Not only will it ensure your website never gets to the traffic level you want to get it to, it may also open you up to legal action.
Newbie bloggers don’t know any better though. They don’t know the rules of the SEO world and so don’t understand that spinning or pasting content from other blogs isn’t going to help their own blog.
Buying “SEO packages”
Which brings us to this little nugget. Buying an “SEO package” (as blackhat SEOers love to call them) is a great way to make sure Google never indexes your site high in the search engines…or de-indexes your site altogether.
Full disclosure, I’ve actually done this before when I was a new blogger several years ago. I, like many other newbie bloggers, made the mistake in thinking that buying a bunch of low quality spam links pointing toward my website would grant me higher search engine listings, thus much more traffic.
I’ve learned from that mistake…but only after losing my first blog. In other words, that blackhat/spam crap that blackhat SEOers love to advertise cost me a blog, countless hours and hundreds of wasted dollars.
Bottom line, do not make the same mistake. Instead of buying links from someone who really does not care if your blog succeeds or not (blackhat SEOer), build your blog up the natural way. The way I do on this website.
Building backlinks the natural way usually involves guest posting and/or finding broken link building opportunities. Guest blogging is easy enough but broken link building simply means finding broken links on other bloggers websites, posting content related to those links and then suggesting a link back to your content to replace their broken link. Infographics are also a great way to build your backlink profile.
I’ve used all of these methods and others with pretty decent success. Best of all, those types of techniques don’t hurt your blog when it comes to Google and the other search engines.
Not posting enough
This really shouldn’t need to be said but posting an article every month, or even every other week, isn’t going to cut it. Sure, if you want to just blog casually then this ‘rule’ won’t matter, but if you’re trying to get loads of traffic and money from that traffic then posting two or three times a month isn’t going to be enough.
Posting quickly thrown together articles
This is the last point of this post but one of the most important. Typing up a slapped together, few hundred word article and praying for the best is not a great idea if you want your blog to succeed. Not only do shorter articles, for the most part, not cover whatever subject you are writing about very well, they also don’t help you all that much when it comes to sharing and SEO.
For example, did you know that the average top ten search results on Google are 2000 words or more? Ouch. Not only that but the longer your articles are the more social sharing they inspire. Check out the below image to get what I’m talking about (image credit okdork).
Did you make any similar mistakes? Any mistake that we’ve missed? Let me know in the comments below.
