10 Most Common Blogging Mistakes That Are Holding You Back

10 Most Common Blogging Mistakes That Are Holding You Back

You’ve heard it before. Content is King. As a modern business of any kind, you can’t afford to have an ineffective content strategy.

Still, many bloggers and web publishers fail to create and execute marketing campaigns that generate leads, grow audience, and build reputation.

In this post, we’ve listed the 10 most common blogging mistakes so that you can identify where you’re going wrong and fix it.

1. You’re Overly Self-Promotional

Talking only about yourself, your products, and your services quickly turns into noise. Find out what your readers truly want to consume and then write it.

This will increase the time they spend on your website and ultimately lead to higher micro- and macro-conversions.

Key Takeaway: Create content to inform, educate, entertain, and add value. Nobody loves reading a marketing pitch.

2. You’re Aiming Low

You know there’s some truth to the old adage, “Aim for the stars, if you fail, you’ll land on the moon.” If you set low targets for yourself from the get go, you will almost certainly achieve even less than what you expected.

Whatever metric you choose to track your blog’s performance, make sure you set a goal that’s neither too low nor downright unachievable if you want to see sustained growth.

Key takeaway: Set a higher benchmark for performance.

3. You’re Too Afraid of Failure

The path to success is never smooth. You have to confront your fears, experience failure, take risks, and approach things with a trial and error mindset, only then will you get the chance to write your own success story.

Key takeaway: Don’t be afraid of failure. Always be experimenting.

4. You Don’t Have a Sourcing Plan

One of the things you will soon realize as a blogger is how difficult it is to source good quality content. Most bloggers either don’t know how to source it or they just don’t try hard enough. Mediocre content will not help your blog. And you can’t do everything on your own. Have a guest posting policy and form syndication agreements with other blogs and publications.

Key takeaway: Try your best to source good quality content.

5. Your Efforts Are Lopsided

The two major steps involved in marketing content, i.e., creation and distribution, should be given an equal amount of planning and effort.

Doesn’t matter if you’re creating great content if you don’t know how to distribute and promote it well, similarly, badly produced content doesn’t stand a chance, no matter how good your promotional skills.

Key Takeaway: Make a proper blueprint for creating and distributing content and follow it.

6. Your CTA is Not Clear

A proper call-to-action is necessary to get readers to take action. With a clear call-to-action, you can get your visitors to sign up for newsletters and webinars or download an e-book and, in turn, capture their email address and contact details.

You can also direct them to a product page for conversion. Once a visitor shows interest in your site, it is imperative to target and retain that visitor through a proper call to action strategy.

Key takeaway: If there is no CTA, your content is not going to benefit you.

7. You’re Trying to Do Too Much

So you have a blog, you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat (?), and what have you. But you’re going nowhere on either one of them. Does this sound like you?

You need to simplify your content strategy and focus on one channel until you master it first. Once you do, you can move on to the other ones.

Key takeaway: Pick one medium and gain mastery over it first.

8. You’re Not Targeting a Niche

To reach any level of success with content marketing these days, you have to identify and dominate a niche.

Being a fitness blogger won’t cut it anymore. Be the fitness blogger who exclusively talks about exercises that can be performed quickly at the office.

Your content should be informative and should contain solutions for the issues that people usually confront within your identified niche.

Key Takeaway: While creating content, keep your niche in mind.

9. You’re Not Publishing Consistently

Consistency is the most important factor in attracting new as well as retaining existing audience. People usually only follow and read active blogs. Your blog should not be dead for two weeks right after a publishing spree.

A study conducted by Hubspot found that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts. This applies equally well for independent publishers and bloggers too.

Key takeaway: Have a content calendar and publish consistently.

10. You Don’t Have an SEO Plan

SEO is not dead and will not be as long as people use search engines to navigate the internet. Recent Google algorithm updates have changed the nature of SEO significantly, but it still has relevance.

You should focus on setting proper meta data, social optimization, image optimization, generating quality backlinks, and optimizing load times to improve your rankings.

Key Takeaway: Don’t ignore SEO.

Remember, all plans and strategies are in vain if you don’t maintain discipline while implementing them. Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

If you pay attention to the recommendations given above, you will be able to frame and implement a proper content strategy.

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Nashaat Quadri is a content marketing manager at Techmagnate, a leading SEO agency in New Delhi, India. He has helped many startups increase their online traffic and visibility. Public speaking is his passion and he regularly conducts workshops for peak performance and content marketing.

Source of article:  http://www.adpushup.com/blog/10-most-common-blogging-mistakes-that-are-holding-you-back/