I’ve been doing this for long enough to see some of the most common mistakes bloggers make, and it seems to be the same culprits over and over. Even though there’s plenty of videos and tutorials out there telling you how to do everything, some things you just have to learn the hard way. By making mistakes and learning from them. For me, that may be the best way to learn.
In this article we’re going to look at 11 of these common blogging mistakes and hopefully prevent someone that reads this from making it themselves.
Let’s have a look.
10 most common mistakes bloggers make
At some point, I’ve made all of the mistakes below. Each time I made a mistake, I discovered the correct way of doing something. Over time I made enough mistakes and learned enough about blogging and SEO that I was able was able to quit my job and become a full-time blogger.
1. Choosing a bad niche
This is pretty much where you start, so it’s possible to mess up your blogging career from the get go. If you choose a bad niche then you may start out fighting an uphill, or even impossible, battle. Take your time when choosing a niche and make sure that it fits you and your goals. Choosing a niche isn’t difficult, there are thousands of viable niches for blogs right in front of your eyes every day.
Unfortunately though, this is one of the steps where many new bloggers freeze up. Either that or they jump in to a niche too fast and for the wrong reasons. Like trying to build an entire niche site around one type of product simply because they’re $500 each and you like the sound of a $40 commission. That’s a recipe for failure.
For some tips on choosing a niche for your blog, check out this article.
2. Bad domain name
After you’ve chosen your niche you’ll typically secure a domain name. To Google, it really doesn’t matter what your domain name is. They’ll rank your posts all the same. But you can choose a domain name that is too niche and box yourself in. I’ve done it.
If you do this and realize after 3 months that you chose a bad domain, you have a few options.
- Buy a new domain and move the content to the new site, redirecting all content to the new site.
- Stop publishing to the new site altogether and chalk it up to experience, you’ll do things better on the next go.
- Keep the original site but also start a new site that allows you to expand. Still a great learning experience.
Check out this article for some tips on choosing a domain name for a niche website.
3. Poor topic selection
Even if you nail the first 2 and choose a good niche with a nice brandable domain, you can still bungle things up here. As I’ve heard others in my position say, this is the one part of the business I’ll never outsource. It’s too important and this is what makes or breaks you.
To be honest, topic research is not hard at all. In fact it’s easy, you just have to know what’s probably going to get traffic and what’s not. You’ll also learn things like what types of articles will actually make you money so that you can make as many of them as your resources allow.
If you don’t know how to select the right topics you’re going to fail as a blogger, plain and simple. That’s why keyword research is so important. Everybody can have a different method, there’s not 1 correct way to do keyword research. The result needs to be the same though, organic traffic from Google.
4. Not publishing enough
I see this one so often. People will publish 7 articles in 6 months and just be so confused as to why their blog gets no traffic. It’s because you only published 7 articles! Not only that, but they probably all sucked.
As a new blogger, it’s probably going to take more than 7 articles to learn how to write a proper article. You really need to give yourself a ton of practice, write hundreds of articles if you can. In the beginning, aim for 1 a day if you can. In about 4 months you’ll have over 100 articles, now you have some experience under your belt.
You may still be a terrible writer and not understand SEO, but you probably aren’t as bad. At least some of those 100 articles are going to be getting some Google action. Now you can dive into Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your Ezoic Big Data Analytics, or other ad network reports, and pour over some data. Discover what you did correctly, which article did well, and why. Ideally you write another 100 articles, all of them being similar to the handful out of the first 100 that did well.
You keep doing this until your content gets more and more refined. that’s how you win at blogging. You can’t do this if you barely publish to your blog.
5. Bad titles
This is a fairly serious mistake that many new bloggers make. As long as everything else is good and you’re properly targeting a solid topic, having a bland title isn’t going to stop you in your tracks. But, having a good title can be the difference between you being number 9 or number 1 on Google.
Many people will scan the 10 results on page 1, so any URL on page 1 is getting good impressions. What you want to do is make your title tell the reader that your content has exactly what they’re looking for.
Get inside the mind of this particular searcher, and understand what they are looking for with this query. Then craft an eye-catching title that would make them want to click on it over the other results on page one. It’s really that simple, but it takes practice and some trial and error.
You can see some more tips for titles in this article from AHREFS.
6. Poor formatting
Not formatting articles in way that makes readers stay on the page is a big mistake I see bloggers make. Often the posts will just be walls of texts or have paragraphs that are 20 lines long. Or there will be almost no subheadings and overall structure to an article. People want to scan over an article, and identify each section in the article so that they can go straight to the information they’re looking for. You need to make this easy for them or they’ll go to a blog that does.
Good formatting includes things like:
- Proper use of subheadings
- Short sentences
- Short paragraphs
- Use of bulleted lists
- Engaging images
7. Bad SEO overall
Poor formatting doesn’t necessarily mean bad SEO, but it’s a strong indicator that the page isn’t optimized. Not spending that extra time to polish a piece of content before sending it out in the world can be detrimental to the growth and progress of a blog. It’s really not that hard, but you can’t take a garbage article and slap some SEO on it and off you go. It doesn’t work like that.
You need to do every other step correctly along the way and it will end up as a raw SEO article. Then you can just put some finishing touches on it like a snazzy title.
8. Bad host
In the beginning a host is not going to be as important, the main thing in the early days is that someone actually starts and publishes. It’s like the hand crank generator analogy that I use in this article, you have to start priming that machine. All you really need is the bare minimum in web hosting. Something that can host a website and isn’t garbage.
Having said that, if you stick with blogging you will eventually reach a place where your host is very important. So you might as well start off on the right foot with your host and get a good one, maybe just not the highest priced host out there.
I am currently using all of the following WordPress hosts for various sites in my portfolio. I like to keep them diversified. That way if a server goes down all of my sites don’t go down.
My top picks for WP hosts:
- Rocket.net – Just moved one of my larger sites here, so far so good. Great support.
- WPX Hosting – I’ve had another one of my larger sites here for well over a year now with no issues.
- Siteground – This site and another case study site I have are hosted here, good host for new sites.
- Knownhost – I’ve had a managed VPS here for years where all of my new niche sites begin.
9. Poorly monetized
If you got into blogging and niche websites purely as a hobby and aren’t trying to build passive income, then this doesn’t apply to you. For most of us though, we want to be paid for our hard work. That’s really the deal isn’t it? Bloggers publish tons of helpful content to the internet for people to use freely, in exchange we put ads in front of them or recommend products.
As a blogger, if you’re unable to monetize content well in some way then all that hard work is for nothing. A poorly monetized blog may never reach its potential. I recently wrote about a blog I purchased. I was able to fix some monetization issues and instantly increase the ad revenue. I’m also adding this site to Adthrive which will likely end up tripling the income of when I bought it.
10. Giving up too early
New bloggers need realistic expectations from day one. Even if someone does everything right when starting a new blog, the mental part can defeat them. For the entire first year a new blogger should look at it as more of a learning experience. Yes, you may be making a little bit of money after several months, but it won’t be life changing money.
When you go to college you don’t make any money while you’re studying and taking tests, that part comes after you graduate. Many bloggers give up after just a few months because they were told false information that they would see results quickly. Plan to work a part-time job that doesn’t pay anything for a year or longer. If you stick it out though, it can certainly be worth it.
Summary
I’m sure there are plenty more mistakes that bloggers make that I’m missing, but I think these are some of the main ones. Like any other job, mistakes will be made along the way, and in the end we benefit from them as long as we persevere. I hope you can learn from some of my mistakes and when you make your own you learn from those as well.
Thanks for reading!