In life, there are two approaches to learning new skills. One, where you engage in activity and learn how to reach optimal performance. And the cautious approach where you stand by the sidelines and hope to amass enough knowledge to take the plunge.
In the blogging realm, the former student has more to gain as they test and fine-tune their skills, adopting proper blogging techniques. However, this course has its fair share of shortcomings.
With the vast number of elements that constitute a quality blog, there are many chances of error. With an inadequate approach, each component can cause lethal effects on the prosperity of a blog.
To ensure that you have an easier time starting your blog and realizing your full potential, we discussed the five most common blogging mistakes for writers. Thesis writing assistance should come in handy to sustain consistent posting of content without compromising on quality and within an affordable range.
Poor scheduling and insufficient editing
When starting as a blogger, you are enthused and focused on dispelling a ton content the shortest possible duration.
By succumbing to the urge for speedy articles creation, you risk compromising quality, limiting your profit margins and exposing your brain to burnout, which may result in a logjam.
A schedule should come in handy to prevent halting your routine of article creation. With a program at your service, you readily recall topics you should be working on thus preventing harsh effects of bloggers block.
While at it, ensure that you don’t fall victim to five-minute editing, as it may give your site an unprofessional tone.
By limiting the time for editing, you risk leaving a vast area of your topics unaddressed and posting content with a ton of errors. As a result, you post jejune articles that bore your audience, therefore, setting your entire investment to failure.
Solution
Apart from assuring your mental wellness, a schedule helps you sustain the rate of publishing content. Also, it familiarizes your audience with your patterns for updating content, therefore, making it easy to access content more often.
To avoid the frenzy of updating content, breaking tasks into milestones, and incorporating the milestones with your schedule is crucial.
When creating your schedule, consider your daily obligations, and set the amount of content required weekly. When you have time to spare, you may opt to create content to publish on the days you can’t meaningfully commit to the creation of content.
Since it is easier to commit when there are set deadlines, have an early time-limit a late target date for completion of projects. This makes your schedule flexible, hence accommodate changes in your daily life without undermining consistent posting of content.
Tips:
- Within your schedule, set aside time for analytics and social media marketing, therefore, balancing the sales and creation wings of your blogs. Alternatively, you can delegate various activities of your blog to freelancers, thus saving some time and focusing on pertinent blog issues.
- Start with a smaller number of articles per week and up the amount over time to muster your writing skills and prevent burnout.
- After analytics, discuss the elements that bore fruit and those that dealt crippling blows to the blog, thus bettering content delivery.
How to edit blog articles
In an ideal world, the first draft would be adequate to knock socks off your reader’s feet and send tons of accolades your way. In the real world, however, it takes a lot of editing and fine-tuning to mold your content into pieces that are worth sharing.
Since we don’t all have the means to pay kingly ransoms for top-of-the-bar editors, mastering the art of self-editing is critical. Below are some tips to help you hone your self-editing skills.
Avoid editing as you write or diving into editing straight after writing
Among the common mistakes made by bloggers, insufficient editing not only ranks top on the list but is also the most lethal. After writing your content, it is advisable to take a break before editing the content.
By doing this, you relax mind, therefore mustering enough energy to read through and spot the smallest of errors. Although there is no ideal duration of time to take between the two sessions, you could take a night, or even a coffee break to reboot the brain and consider possible changes.
Invest a substantial amount of time in buffing the introduction
Unlike other parts of an article, the introduction should be the most engaging as it is responsible for arresting a reader’s attention. Here, you should appeal to the curiosity of your audience and show how your content curbs a particular problem.
In your intro, you may infuse the art of storytelling or start off with a hook that casts a spell on the audience to delve deeper. Before settling on an introduction, read it aloud time and again checking whether it serves your intended purpose.
Don’t delegate all your editing to online grammar checkers
The freelancing niche is among those that have witnessed a technological quantum leap with bots and algorithms that help reduce the burden in cumbersome processes. In the early days, one either had to know a wordsmith or editing wizard to compete with seasoned writers.
Thanks to editing tools, you can quickly rid your work of grammar errors and overly used words. However, there are instances where an algorithm may change the meaning of a sentence in a bid to make it grammatically correct.
After passing your content through grammar editors, take time to revise the article, ensuring that you convey the intended message.
Nobody is perfect
A single typo will not be the downfall of your blog. After spending the allocated time for editing, move along to the next task to avoid wasting time on one job. If you feel the need to edit your article further, consult a proofreading expert as there is so much you can do.
Among the common blogging mistakes that consume time and money is succumbing to the illusory sense of perfection. Owing to the pressure, we put ourselves under to outdo competitors, many ends up wear themselves out, trying to present a flawless blog.
Inadequate research
No good thing comes easy. An aphorism that every successful blogger should apply for content creation. With a surplus of information online, you have to delve deeper into topics and provide better solutions to rank higher than your counterparts.
Besides writing longer articles, you have to invest more time exploring details and researching on perspectives that have not been addressed.
As a result of quality research, you increase both the credibility and readership of your content hence earning authority in your niche over time. Among the elements you should include in your study are:
- Keywords with a huge Search volume
- The interests of the audience
- Visual aids required to deliver your ideas better
Solution
For keyword and information research, analytics tools should come in handy. While at this, consider the keywords used by your better-performing counterparts as they are likelier to bear fruit.
To determine the content your audience is in search of, engage them on social media platforms like Quora; therefore, finding frequently asked topics with little coverage. When comparing with your counterparts, go for the first five top-ranking sites and incorporate various elements that have borne fruit on these sites.
However, ensure that you don’t copy their work instead pick ideas you consider fit and express them in your own way. Here, you can select topics they have tackled shallowly and dive deeper to give the audience a better idea of a concept.
By so doing, you convert your blog into a one-stop shop for niche-related problems, thus gaining more organic traffic.
Poor navigation structuring
You have just offered a witty, information-packed article that left clients craving for more. However, you don’t direct them on subsequent topic-related articles to further their know-how on the topic.
By doing this, you lose your leverage on clients as they proceed to seek further information from your counterparts. As a result, you limit the growth of your site, forcing you to invest more in marketing.
Solution
Similar to apps and online stores, maximizing usability has excellent benefits for both users and product dealers. Thanks to inbound links and recent post tabs, guiding your audience on the right places to look for additional information is a straightforward procedure.
When designing your website, place a strategic float in a manner that you don’t limit access to information. On this float, offer excerpts of related content linked to their respective landing pages.
By so doing, you can funnel users through your content, solving their woes to the letter and retaining traffic. To maximize the click-through rate; however, you must create compelling call-to-action buttons.
By using well-phrased CTA’s, you avoid the most common blogging mistake of “click here” links.
Tips for creating a call to action buttons
- Making links descriptive- a great link should not only include the content of the landing page but also intrigue the audience to click on them.
For this, you can use well-coiled phrases as opposed to two-word non-descriptive text.
- Embedding content keywords into the document- aside from aiding users at determining the essence of a link, keywords are used by search engines to determine the relevance of links.
- Assign your call to action buttons a different color from your text as clients tend to notice them better when they stand out. When selecting the color, to ensure that it does not clash with other elements on the page, thus avoiding conflict on where to click.
SEO-oriented writing
Like it or not, you must hone your optimization skills for your blog to rank. However, SEO-oriented writing ruins readability, therefore, ranks top of common blogging mistakes.
In a bid to make content rank better, most bloggers neglect the tone of content and invest on keywords, links and other elements that result in better ranking. By joining the SEO-oriented writing bandwagon, you ditch creativity, thus delivering stale content, which makes a negative impact on readers.
It is essential to balance optimization and readability to avert the trap that cost many SEO-addled writers a substantial amount of their audience. As such, you make your content easier to locate and enthrall readers with content that leaves them craving for more.
Solution
Among the methods to tackle SEO optimization, writing first then strategically placing keywords when editing works best. By focusing on the article as opposed to its SEO, you unleash creativity hence writing readable and exciting pieces.
Also, avoid stuffing your content with keywords in the hope of better ranking. This is because algorithms to web crawlers were updated to filter stuffed websites.
When going about keyword usage, stick to a 2% to 3% threshold. For better results, shuffle niche-related keywords, therefore, making your article accessible to a broader range of searchers.
Also, you can replace words in key phrases with relevant synonyms ensuring that your content retains its readability and tone.
There are potential areas you could work on to reduce the burden of keyword placement in the text:
- Image attributes- when uploading images in your content, assign them a relevant keyword. As such, you provide access to users that use google image search and avoid the obnoxious clutter of keywords.
- Word count- the longer your content is, the more material you tackle. By delving deep into content, you earn authority in your niche, therefore, making even more inbound links. However, do not elongate content by adding unnecessary information instead expound on areas that your counterparts tackle with lesser clarity.
- Title and headings- aside from bettering your SEO, embedding keywords in your title helps clarify the nature of the content you offer and hint the overall concept.
By using sub-headings, you make it easier for readers to scan and locate critical information. This allows readers to determine the relevance of content before reading through.
- Meta-description- although this does not directly constitute to keywords density, meta descriptions inform your audience’s decision on whether or not to click your link. Here, you ought to showcase maximum creativity and a broad understanding of the topic.
- URL’s- to optimize your page, URL’s must be descriptive, therefore giving readers and google an idea of what a page entails. Similar to content, wade off from keyword stuffing in URL’s as they may prove a significant turn off to the audience.
Jargon
A major blogging mistake many fall victim to is giving in to the urge of imposing your prowess in a field to your audience. As such, you present your innocent audience with jargon and bombast content that sends them to multiple resources to deduce the meaning.
Although this may seem amusing in one’s mind, it is a major turn off and waste of time for the user who wanted to know how to boost their internet speed.
When writing an article, make it as easy to understand for the layman, sparing the necessary technical terms. To avoid turning your content into drivel, write your articles as if it were to be read by a twelve-year-old.
How to make your content more readable
Having tackled some of the common mistakes made when writing a blog, the crux remains to present information in a way that is easy for all to read. Although many expect futuristic solutions, it is often the small things that make your content more appealing.
Dividing your content into short paragraphs
Nothing turns off readers more than a block of seemingly unending text. To provide for easier reading, break your content into sections, each containing one idea.
Similarly, limit the number of sentences in your paragraphs to three total to not more than seventy words.
Subheadings
Similar to articles, each argument should be preceded with a subtitle. To better SEO performance, include relevant keywords in your subheadings.
By incorporating sub-headings in your article, you allow readers to scan through content and make their decisions whether or not to invest their time reading your content.
Bulleting your points
Bullets are another effective way of creating content readable. These make it easy to convey messages to the audience as opposed to writing in prose form.
Among the times you can use bullets include:
- When discussing the pros and cons of a product/service
- When enlisting the items needed for an activity
- Listing down factors, facts within a topic.
It only after you dip your feet into the blogging rivers that you realize the tides were not as subtle as you expected. To avert the numerous issues that may come your way, these tips should come in handy.
Despite how tough challenges get, however, ensure that you remain committed to the course as success was never associated with quitters. To handle overwhelming writing tasks, consider hiring writing assistance, therefore, managing the massive demand for content without suffering a mental breakdown.
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