The internet has pushed the boundaries of information well within the reaches of the common people. Just fire up your browser, and search for an idea. Fair to say that you can get your hands on more articles, news, blogs, and ideas than you can digest.
A few decades ago, you couldn’t even think of having such a free and unlimited access. While there might be an almost infinite amount of information online, what is finite is the readers’ time.
You need to respect that time and publish content that makes their investment worth it.
Adding that value has long-term benefits for your blog or brand by giving you a dedicated reader base that trusts your content.
Think of the internet as a collection of free pixels. You incur no costs to posting on social media, sending emails, or even creating blog posts. Regardless of what you post, the pixels take up space anyway. As a writer, you occupy a significant amount of pixel space, which means that you would be engaging your readers for a longer time. Now you could either waste that pixel space with useless information or add value to it. The decision is entirely up to you.
But how does one waste the reader’s time?
Here are 5 blogging mistakes that you should avoid if you do not want your readership to decline.
1. Daily Blogging
The hype created by self-proclaimed “blogging evangelists” is that if you fail to blog daily, your number of unique visitors would decrease.
We would like to point out first and foremost that this is simply not true.
Researching a given topic is a process that requires patience. When you combine researching and writing on a daily basis, you have a recipe for disaster that has the title of “Blogger Burnout”.
A blog is where you speak to the world and when you are writing daily, it becomes more of a chore than a personal interest. Eventually, you will start to cut corners in your research, which is not favorable in writing, or for that matter, anything else either.
What you should do is to blog once every 2 or 3 days. That way, you can organize your researching, writing, and optimization of processes very easily, without having to face burnout. However, the key here is consistency so avoid creating lag in your process.
2. Going Overboard with SEO
When you try to add too many keywords and links during your writing process just to rank higher on the search engine, you are writing for the search engine, not the user.
Do not believe any of the nonsense about “keyword stuffing” still being relevant in 2019. There is no perfect formula for getting to the top of search engines.
Try this instead. Focus on the user experience instead of the search engine. To focus on the user, try to mix up your content with natural wit and well-researched information. While SEO should be kept in mind, it should not be your first concern.
3. The Readership will Come Naturally
While this might have been relevant in 2005 or 2006, it is not today. Even successful bloggers put a lot of time and effort in marketing their blog or article, regardless of the readership they are getting.
Simply writing a good blog post and waiting for readers to come to you is a dangerous fantasy. You have to make them come to you. Social media platforms are very useful in this regard. Utilize Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even Quora to gain a readership.
If you are writing on a niche that does not focus on current events, you can always share older articles. However, sharing is a delicate art. Similar to step number two, you should not overdo it.
4. It is Easy Money
Perhaps the biggest mistake that bloggers make is to think that making money from a blog is easy.
In reality, it is very hard. There is no logic behind the belief that simply buying a good host, creating a website, and then publishing a few blog posts will make you rich overnight.
A quality blog requires a significant amount of research, optimization, and marketing. Only when you have finished all of those tasks can you expect to gain some money. So it is not impossible.
There are various outlets for gaining money.
You can set up Google AdSense account or use any other online advertising agency, try your hand with affiliate marketing, or set up a business with the help of a blog.
The business could be anything you want. it could be an E-commerce store or a digital marketing services company, it all depends on you.
5. Writing Short Posts is Better
Bloggers believe that people do not have the time to read through an entire long form article. This is the most fallacious argument that we have ever heard of.
If short posts were indeed better, we wouldn’t see Brian Dean or Neil Patel publishing long-form articles. Similarly, the long-form journalism website Longreads would also cease to exist.
However, there is no compulsion between the two writing forms. You can always mix them up. For more advanced topics, stick to the long form, and for easier topics stay with the short form.
Conclusion
Now that you have reached the end of this article, it is important to state that this article is just a short guide. There are a lot more mistakes that bloggers make. There is that whole issue about using too many images without optimizing them, not using email lists, and that writing is the only thing that matters (though we have covered this point, there is still a lot more to it).
In the context of this article, there are a lot more things you can do by just staying clear of these five mistakes. You can use optimized images, give line breaks (breathing room) to text, write shorter paragraphs, write an engaging social media hook that compels the viewer to read the content, using plugins like Yoast to automatically ensure that you are not making any SEO mistakes, building connections within the blogosphere, and many more. But at this point, it is good to start off small and build on the basics first.
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