Running a business online often means that you have to have a blog ready on your website. However, not every blog will be able to do its job properly if you’re making a number of blogging mistakes. These mistakes range from the minor mistakes that can take a few hours or minutes to fix, to major ones that could take months or even years to fix. So you need to be aware of these mistakes and what to do in case you’ve already made them.
Avoiding The Worst Blogging Mistakes You Could Be Making
Making mistakes will always be part of running a business. However, some mistakes can be very detrimental to your future success. This is especially true when it comes to your blog as a single major mistake could take ages to fix.
1. Prioritizing Sales Rather Than Interaction with Clients or Customers
Sales are always important when it comes to running a business. However, your blog should never be treated as a secondary sales page. People that visit your blog will not be interested in seeing or reading about your products. Instead they will be more interested in hearing your thoughts on a given topic. Possibly even to interact with you and other users in the comments. So you need to make sure that your content accommodates that rather than trying to make sales.
2. Forgetting to Use Email Lists to Your Advantage
This might come as a surprise for many website owners, but email is a very powerful tool to extend the reach of your blogs. Blogs need to be able to reach as many people as possible in order to stay relevant. Email is a great way to let your readers know that you have a new blog available, or you need their opinion regarding a topic. Without the help of email, your reach will be heavily limited.
3. Rarely Uploading and Having an Inconsistent Schedule
One of the biggest mistakes that many blogs will be guilty of is the fact that they will rarely upload. Uploading once a month means that your customers and clients will lose interest in your blog. Once customers lose interest, they will likely look for other similar blogs with a more frequent upload schedule, better content or both. So you need to ensure that you set a schedule for yourself when it comes to uploading your blog posts.
4. Forgetting to Advertise Your Blog
Forgetting to advertise your blog is a more common mistake among smaller blogs that haven’t picked up steam yet. You have to remember that smaller blogs, or blogs that have just started out will not have a regular following yet. This means that you can’t just rely on clients or customers just randomly stumbling into your blog. You need to make sure that you advertise your blog on popular channels to get that first wave of readers into your blog, and to continue to generate interest.
5. Not Using SEO in Your Blog and Website
Forgetting about SEO is one of the worst blogging mistakes you could possibly make while running a blog. The main reason for this is because of how SEO can heavily influence the visibility of your blog on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Not having SEO means that you will often be stuck at the bottom of most searches. This is a big problem as most page visits only happen on the first page, with 95% of all visits going to the result at the top of the list. So you need professional level SEO to be able to compete with everyone else sharing the same topics as you are.
6. Not Using The Help of Other Businesses Where Necessary
When you run a business online, you have to know that you’re never alone. Whether it be your competition sharing the same space, or other businesses that you can help your blog increase in popularity. Most businesses don’t use the second part of that statement to their advantage.
You need to be open to working with other businesses when it comes to increasing the popularity of your blogs. This is because doing so will allow you to tap into the audience that they have, as they tap into yours. Cooperation with another business often leads to both of you benefiting.
7. The Lack of Links in Your Blog Posts
A common issue that many blogs will have is the lack of links or connections within each post. These links are invaluable, as they connect your blog to the blog of other, more successful websites. These connections increase the credibility of your blog posts as well as improve the SEO value of the blog itself. In addition to this, internal linking lets you divert readers from one part of your blog to another, which increases the amount of time your readers will spend on your blog.
8. Tackling Too Many Topics at Once
Tackling too many topics at once is a blogging mistake that is an issue for most websites, unless they’re a site that provides guest posting services. This is a mistake because of how search engines categorize websites.
Search engines will often look at the topic of your website in general in order to present it to possible clients. However, being far too broad and tackling too many topics at once means that it confuses the search engine indexing your site. For example, if your business is relevant in the beauty product industry, try to stay within the boundaries of that industry.
9. The Lack of Specific Keywords Relating to Your Niche
Whenever you add content to your blog, you often have to be creative in the writing process. This is to appeal to the readers that will be going over your blog. However, you should never forget to utilize very specific keywords that relate to your specific niche. This is because keywords appeal to the search engine part of blogging .
Search engines will often look for these specific keywords to properly categorize your blog amongst the millions of others. As we’ve said earlier, proper categorization means that you will be able to attract the right type of reader to your blog and not just someone who will immediately leave.
10. Having Terrible Blog Design
Website design should always be a top priority for any self respecting business that wants to succeed on the internet. The better your design, the easier it is to keep the attention of visitors. The same could be said of your blog. If your blog is difficult to navigate or read, then readers will leave to look for more appealing blogs elsewhere. Your blog should have an easy to approach design that lets readers easily navigate from one article to the next.
Final Thoughts
Blogs are a gateway between you and your website visitors and avoiding any big mistakes will help you keep that gateway open. Just remember to keep an eye on your blog and ensure that any mistakes are quickly corrected in case you’ve already made them.