What are top blogging mistakes to avoid to prevent large amount of time and effort of many new bloggers?

This was the question my friend asked me a couple of days ago, I answered him this and that yet he was not satisfied with either me or with the other blogs on the internet related to that topic.

Since then I made up my mind to write an ultimate guide on blogging mistakes covering all the mistakes people most commonly do which they should not and this is the result.

In this ultimate guide to blogging mistakes you are going to learn 31 blogging mistakes to avoid divided in 3 sections.

Before starting a blog.
While starting a blog.
After starting a blog.

I have done many of such mistakes infact doing some still,

I have given appropriate solutions for each mistake so it will be easy for you to correct it.

All those who are blogging for beginners or starting a blog recently make sure you are not doing any of these mistakes which i am about to share with you.

This is ultimate guide for blogging mistakes to avoid for beginners with solutions along with new blogger mistakes, blogging tips or tips for starting a blog in 2020.

Without further ado lets get started.

Here’s is a 30000 foot view of the blog.

6 new blogger mistakes you do before starting a blog.

In this part, we will discuss 6 mistakes people most commonly do before even starting or launching their blog.

It is the phase of time where you spend your time thinking of starting a blog.

Please make sure that you are not committing any one of these mistakes which might cost you a lot later.

Here is a quick overview of 6 blogging mistakes people do while thinking of starting a blog.

With facts and solutions waiting for you to be read,

Let’s dive right in.

Not selecting the right niche.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to select the right niche.

It is the primary thing you need to do before doing anything.

Most people fail here,

Most people get influenced by others and blog on those niches thinking of the monetary value of it only.

Your niche determines whether you will be successful or fail or quit blogging like most do, it all starts from your niche itself.

A lot of things depend on your niche.

But why is the question?

Let’s look at it with the current status of blogging.

Blogging is not a one day task.

There are a lot of things involved in the success of blogging such as,

Keyword research.
Writing blogs.
Building backlinks.
Taking care of your website technical aspect.
Managing other social media platforms.

Even if you perform all these tasks you still will not be able to achieve what you actually want to achieve, ORGANIC TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG.

Especially for new blogs, it takes a lot of time, in most cases a year.

Google’s algorithm is designed in such a way that it actually fluctuates the blog ranking in google to different positions from time to time.

It does not actually stay in one position for long.

Read, Google fluctuates new blogs ranking.

From another case study by Ahrefs, they found that the average age of the top 10th ranking page on google for any keyword is 650 days.

Image of Neil Patel Ahrefs.

Source: ahrefs

Meanwhile, if you are in a niche that you are not interested in, the chances are you will most likely QUIT like most other people do.

The best possible evens of you getting success in these massive odds are:

Selecting the niche which matches these 3 factors.

Interest.
Value.
Future.

Remember, it is not always about interest.

What’s the solution:

Select the niche that you have interest in which makes your blogging journey much easier.

Read our guide on, how to select the best topic for blogging for beginners with an infographic.

Thinking blogging is getting rich quick scheme:

No, it is not.

Of course, you can get rich blogging but not QUICK.

I have explained how google’s algorithm is designed which fluctuates new blog ranking.

The reason google fluctuate new blogs is because,

It doesn’t know whether the blog is legit and trustable or not.

You think of earning money in blogging through either google Adsense in most of the cases and affiliate marketing if you build some authority and getting some targetted traffic.

But in most cases, google AdSense is preferred.

Even though for earning through Adsense you need traffic in large numbers.

For most blogs, Organic traffic is the best way of getting traffic to your website.

Organic traffic is both consistent and targetted.

What’s the solution:

2 choices.

Change the mindset
Don’t blog.

This is the solution for this mistake that people on large scale do, I am not saying dreaming is bad, but it has to be practical at the same time.

Not knowing and analyzing the competition of your niche.

Look.

This is the second most important aspect of blogging after selecting the niche.

If you do not know who is your competition and who you are up against you will fail most likely.

This is another mistake most people commonly do you should avoid doing to succeed in blogging.

Why on earth you should look after your competition and your competitors.

Because

To get to know what’s working, they have been there and been successful in the field.
Get an idea of their strategy which is driving results to them.
Get an idea of their business plan, techniques, strengths, and weaknesses so you can capitalize on them.

If you do not know who you are up against and aiming you arrow in any direction you get you will end up reaching nowhere.

What’s the solution:

Study and analyze your competitors in the industry in detail.

Here is an example,

If your niche is related to blogging and digital marketing, your ideal competition would be shoutmeloud, master blogging blogs, etc.

Knowing who you are up against, their techniques, their best practices, their strengths, and weakness will help you succeed better and faster than them.

Don’t enter the battlefield blindfolded, have your weapons ready, your assets in place.

Not building the strategy and business plan to tackle the competition.

Now as you got the idea of your competition and their best practices.

You build your own business plan and strategy.

Many bloggers or people who start blogging never actually spend time thinking about this part.

Most people actually skip it.

You do not be among the most people who skip business plan and who quit blogging later.

This is one of the serious blogging mistakes people commit.

You need to have your business plan ready.

If you blog without direction and planning most likely your blogs will end up being submerged in millions of blogs that get published every day.

4.4 million blog posts are published every day on the internet.

What’s the solution:

You must create your own business plan which must contain all your strategies and techniques, your vision statement, and longterm goals.

Here are 5 quick points you need to cover in your business plan.

What’s the strategy you are going to use to outrank your existing competitors and get more traffic.
How can you make your blog more valuable, unique, interesting, and different than your competitors?
Where do you see your blog in the next 6 months and 1 year?
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
What do you want your blog to be branded and promoted as?
How are you going to monetize your blog?
How many members are there in your team and who will take care of what in the blog?

A business plan gives you a direction to go ahead.

There are high chances of success aiming your arrow to your goal in one direction than that of any direction.

Thinking blogging is a piece of cake.

If you are one of those many people who feel running a blog is a piece of cake, then you either have a team or haven’t started a blog yet.

In case if you have a team or group of people working on your blog, the work gets easy but if you are a solopreneur like most bloggers you would not think in that way.

If you are a solopreneur and thinking that running a blog and blogging, in general, is a piece of cake and it does not cost much hard work and effort, you should change your mindset.

Blogging is purely a business.

Like any business and startup, you need to work very hard for its growth a lot and more in the initial days of it.

As I mentioned earlier, blogging is not an easy task.

You need to do keyword research.
You need to research thoroughly before writing blogs.
You need to build backlinks additionally to get traffic.
You need to manage your other social media profiles.
You need to look after and analyze your analytics and growth.
You need to keep an eye on your competitors.
You need to learn and practice SEO and constantly strive for improvement.

All alone is a really hardworking task.

What’s the solution:

If you have been thinking for a while that blogging is a piece of cake and it does not cost much hard work and if you are not willing to put your time and energy in blogging and learning you should probably either change your mindset or quit.

Blogging is not meant for those who don’t want to work hard and learn new things.

Thinking blogging is dead.

No, it is not, absolutely not.

If you think blogging is dead, you are wrong.

Blogging can never die, if you think blogging is dead, let’s look at the facts then,

77% of internet users read blogs.
60% of people who actually buy products online, do it after reading blogs.
57% of online marketers have said that they have actually gained customers through blogging.
Blogging increases the credibility of business.
Businesses that blog get 97% of more traffic than those which don’t.

Source: optimonster

I am not saying bogging is incredible now but is an important thing in online growth.

Videos and podcasts have increased in the content consumption formats but nonetheless, they will not kill text.

7 blogging mistakes to avoid while starting a blog.

In this part, we will discuss mistakes 7 mistakes people do most commonly while starting a blog because most people do, you should avoid it and get success in blogging.

This is the phase where you actually begin your journey of blogging, in this phase you need to avoid these most common mistakes those who start a blog and have a perfect start for your blogging journey.

Here is a quick overview of whats in this section.

With facts and solutions waiting for you to be read,

Lets dive right in.

Going after a blogger or any other free blogging platform.

No doubt you can choose blogger or Wix or Weebly whichever free blogging platform unless you are taking blogging as a joke or hobby or just experimenting out.

There are many people who don’t want to invest money in blogging but aim to earn millions

It does not work that way.

If you want to take blogging as your career, want to take blogging seriously, and earn a living out of blogging you definitely need to invest some money initially.

You invest a lot of money like lakhs in education from nursery to your graduation to get a few thousand rupees salary at the end whereas you do not want to invest money in the place where it is mostly required and expect to earn more.

There are some serious cons you need to look after if you choose Blogger, Wix, Weebly, or Tumblr, whichever free blogging platform you choose.

You do not have a professional domain name.
You always have limitations and restrictions.
You always have the uncertainty of the safety of your blog, because you do not own the blog.
Your growth is limited and you can’t monetize well.
You are not actually serious and fully committed to blogging.

There are some serious cons of free blogging platform like you do not own the blog, the hosting company where you hosted your blog owns it like google in case if you are using blogger.

They can delete your blog at any time if you in the case without your awareness if you violate their terms and conditions of using the blog.
You cannot think of a monetization plan other than placing ads and AdSense is the smallest thing you can do to monetize your blog

Read, 11 huge reasons to avoid blogger in 2020.

What’s the solution:

Just invest money, don’t go after free blogging platform if you seriously want to build a career in blogging and earn a living out of it.

You will regret later if you do not invest in hosting and domain for WordPress in the future.

If you have the aim of earning millions in blogging, investment is inevitable.

Investing in a lousy host.

Talking about blogging, the most important aspect of blogging is hosting.

Many people invest their money in cheap hosting servers, as though they want to save their hard-earned money ignoring the longterm losses of it.
Your hosting matters more than anything, here are 5 important things to remember about hosting.

Your hosting helps you keep your blog safe and secure.
Your hosting helps you keep your blog load fast.
Your hosting helps you by updating your WordPress themes and plugins regularly.
Your hosting is responsible for the uptime of your website.
Your hosting is responsible for letting you manage your blog smoothly.

Among these factors loading speed and uptime of the website is the most critical part of blogging.

Even google publicly accepted and admitted that loading speed is their most important ranking factor like backlinks.Even if you have good loading speed if people cant visit your site, it is wasted, this is what is called uptime.

If your blog is not active, you would have serious problems in blogging, if people cant visit your site, how can you succeed in blogging.
This is why investing in a good hosting company is very important.

What’s the solution:

Invest in a good hosting company, you can choose the following shared hosting companies.

Bluehost.
Siteground.
Hostinger.

You can choose Bluehost and Hostinger which offers free domain and SSL certificate along with other services at reasonable prices.

Not investing and setting up important tools.

Most people ignore keyword research tools and setting up other important tools that are very important in SEO and blogging as a whole.
The fact is that

Approximately, 5% of bloggers do not have access to analytics tools.

Source: Optmonster.

Tools to perform keyword research which is the most important thing when you start blogging.

Other than keyword research tools you should also set up other important tools such as,

Google analytics.
Google search console.

These 2 tools are very important to succeed in blogging.

Yet they are free and from google.

Google analytics help you to know different aspects of your website, like,

From which country you are getting traffic.
What is your blog’s bounce rate?
What is your blog’s dwell time?
Which page on your site is performing well on google.
Which page is performing badly on google.

Google console helps you in these things, like,

What are the technical errors of your blog?
Which post is ranking for what keyword in what position.
What are the impressions and ctr of your blog?
Are your blogs and posts indexed on Google or not?
Is your site mobile friendly or not?

What’s the solution:

The solution is pretty straight forward.

Just set up these essential tools.

It takes a few minutes to set up these tools.

What’s interesting is they are free.

Invest in a keyword research tool or you can use ubersuggest as you are a beginner to find metrics of keywords and google keyword planner to get keyword ideas.

Read, how to set up google analytics and console within minutes.

Not finding your mentor and having guidance.

Most people think SEO is all about keyword placement and writing quality content but are unaware of new strategies and techniques that could skyrocket their traffic and success in blogging.

Having a mentor is crucial for blogging and for living in general.

Once a wise person said that you should learn from mistakes of others, you can’t live long enough to learn lessons of all mistakes by yourself. – chanakya.

A mentor helps you give life lessons and advice in that sense to help you grow faster. In case if you are new to SEO and blogging, you should expand your knowledge, learn the latest strategies and techniques which are working great to get ahead in blogging.

Many people still follow those old techniques and outdated advice which makes SEO boring.

I highly recommend you visit backlinko, the founder is brian dean the SEO genius.

He actually gives powerful tips and strategies that work great, are new, and awesome for free through his youtube videos.

Brian dean video on the latest one.

You need to have your mentor who could be anyone where you can learn things from.

You should better approach an expert who has been there in the field for a couple of years than those who just started in like you for advice.

This will make your SEO much easier and get results much quicker than usual.

What’s the solution:

Find and get your mentor for SEO and related to your industry.

You can find them through blogs or youtube videos as I found or through interviews and podcasts.

Follow their advice and strategies that are working great, learn from their mistakes, don’t repeat them, and accelerate your growth in blogging.

The domain name does not have value.

The domain name is the name of the site/ address of your site.

Many people actually buy a totally new domain and start things from scratch and that’s what they know.

But,

If you are serious about growth in blogging, you should consider what most people are not considering, buying expired domains.

Instead of buying a totally new domain, with no market value, no authority, and no backlinks pointing to it, you can choose to buy a domain that was already bought by someone who actually worked on that domain but did not renew the domain and left it.

Here are some quick benefits of buying expired domains for your blog.

Use its existing authority rather than starting from scratch.
Use its ranking and backlinks for faster growth.
Use its domain age for better and after rankings in google[first mistake people do before starting a blog remember].

What’s the solution:

If you already have your new domain and you are working on it, you should ignore it but those who haven’t bought the domain yet should consider buying the expired domains for their authority and domain age to grow faster than other domains meanwhile.

Get more information about buying expired domains.

Not having a presence on different social media platforms.

Many bloggers do not actually care about their social media presence and networking with their fellow bloggers on the internet and increase their connections.

Because many do, you shouldn’t write.

You should leverage other social media platforms like Facebook and Linkedin to increase your connections with other fellow bloggers similar minded like you, increase network and team up or guest post and grow the brand faster than usual.

What’s the solution:

Leverage other social media platforms like Facebook and Linkedin to increase your connections and network with other bloggers in your industry and grow your opportunities of success and do the promotion of your blog’s brand.

Not deciding logo and tagline of your blog for branding.

This is another important thing you need to consider that most people don’t while starting a blog.

You should decide your logo, tagline of your blog which must depict what the blog is about in easy words to start promoting your blog and increasing the brand value of it on different platforms.

Most people when they start a blog don’t actually care about these small things like

Logo.
Color pallete.
Font size and design.
Tagline.

These things play the most important role in helping your blog become a brand than a blog.

What’s the solution:

Hire a designer or design yourself the logo of your blog and decide the exact attractive matching color palette and font size with easy to understand tagline which influences a lot in creating a good first impression to users when they visit your site.

You can use canva to create beautiful logos for your blog for free.

18 blogging mistakes to avoid after starting a blog.

In this phase, people start blogging.

This is the phase when you start writing blogs and promoting your blogs, this is the starting of your real journey in blogging.

Here is a quick overview of what you will learn in this section.

With facts and solutions waiting for you to be read,

let’s dive right in,

Bad content design and structure.

which one would you choose to read.

No one really likes to read, mainly if the blog or content is giant blocks, people bounce back immediately.

Would you prefer reading any blog with large blocks of text, with no divisions of blogs, no sub headers and no bullet points.

Even though your blog be of high quality if it is not in a easy to read design, no one cares of it.

According to a study, people first look at design before starting reading blogs.

The problem is that most people of this generation have shorter attention span and patience levels, and if you want them to read content in a big block with no headings and pictures and bold lines but just big block of paragraphs which you may think is great content but you will not have a good first impression which may lead to increase in bounce rate of your site and downfall of your blog.

What is the solution:

The takeaway from this which most bloggers do in the beginning is not to write big paragraphs.

You should include the following things quite frequently in your blogs,

Bullet points.
Lists.
Quotes.
Short paras.
Sub headers.
Lots of multimedia like images,videos, Gifs, screenshots and Infographics.
Inject stories and examples to make your point understood easily.

Ignoring SEO.

Search engine optimization which sounds like a lot difficult. but if you ignore this thing then you have to ignore the blogging.

Many people actually ignore seo which will take away a lot of their time and effort in vain while after starting a blog.

You need to obey the rules of SEO and have a good knowledge of stuff like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO which are very important factors for blogging success.

Having a lack of knowledge and not following the rules and techniques and doing the black hat SEO can be a mistake that would cost wastage of a lot of time and effort or yours.

Whats the solution:

You need to have install and activate RANK MATH plugin if you are using WordPress to make your on page SEO easier.

In case if you are on blogger or any other free blogging platform other than WordPress, sorry you don’t have the advantage of using this plugin, you need to manually learn and implement SEO all by yourself.

Learn on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Not writing consistently.

If you are not blogging on a consistent basis then you would not achieve what you want to achieve.

More traffic and authority.

It’s simply that the more quality long content you publish which is equivalent to the more value you will be delivering and the more value you deliver eventually you will attract more traffic and leads.

There is no fixed date that you should be publishing blogs on these specific dates but you need to publish blogs in a schedule not like when you feel like it, do not publish on random dates if you are publishing blogs once a week, fix it and publish accordingly but publishing on a consistent basis in regular intervals of time is another key to success in blogging.

This doesnot mean that ou just need to publish a blog everyday, that wont screw up quality of post and add no value rather create more liabilities to your blog.

Here is an example of blog called, backlinko, brain dean is the founder of it who i have talked about as seo genius.

He only publishes blogs once a month but he is consistent on it yet still he gets 4 Lakh plus traffic a month and majority of it from google.

His blogging strategy is solely on quality than quantity, he only publishes blogs if it is world-class stuff, if it is super awesome and helpful yet different than existing blogs in the industry.

There are many examples like Mark manson, who publishes blog once a week yet he manages getting millions of traffic every month from google.

What’s the solution:

Blog consistently in a schedule of dates.

Focus more on quality than quantity but that doesnot mean you should just blog once a while when you feel like it.

You need to maintain a rhythm and a schedule of publishing blogs at particular time.

In case if you are running out of content ideas then you can use the Hubspot idea generator

It works like, visit the site.

Search any keyword like blogging or anything you want to blog about.

click on get blog ideas and you will be presented with a list of blog ideas.

Besides that there is an option of 250 blog ideas about blogging, click on the unlock and fill the details and you will get list of 250 ideas about online business keyword.

In order to unlock the remaining 250 ideas click on the unlock option.

Fill the details given which are.

Fill the details and get all 250 ideas related to keyword blogging.

Not using data to persuade readers.

Don’t talk things in the air, don’t claim or argue with someone uselessly if it is not worth it.

If you want others to listen to what you are speaking of, believe in you, and take immediate action on it, the only way is using stats and facts to let it happen.

Facts and stats are not biased.

The best way to convenience readers about something and make your blog more detailed and interesting is by leveraging facts and data.

Data-driven content always exceeds far better than content talking in air and just opinions and fluff.

What’s the solution:

Leverage all facts, statistics, and case studies on the topic to back your point, influence others to take some action immediately, because you as a content writer is not just about informing readers about something rather if you want to take your blog to next level you need to persuade your audience to take some action after reading your blog.

That’s the essential job of content marketers which is not just to educate and convince readers and audience rather persuade them to take some action immediately.

According to a study, the content which is more actionable tends to perform better than content which talks in air.

How can you make your content more actionable?

It is by leveraging different forms of data in your blog.

Bad writing.

If your writing is not clear, engaging, easy to understand and readible you got many problems then.

If no body understands what you are saying in your blog, no body gives a damn about your site and immediately bounce back to other sites.

This has serious affect on your Seo and blog, it increases bounce rate which is Negitive thing to seo and rankings.

Think about it this way after finishing a blog on any topic you may like but before publishing it make sure to read it by yourself a couple of times to know whether what you have written obeys a couple of rules like easy to understand format with no grammar mistakes and writing in a conversational way.

What is the solution:

Make your blog easy to understand and read.

Use hemingway editor to edit your blog for easy readability .

Write blogs to a 8th grade student.

Write blogging as a way of speaking to your friend online or explaining to him about something. Don’t make it formal writing as though you are writing to some government officials.

Add Grammarly extension to your chrome which will largely reduce the spelling mistakes and help you choose the right words.

Not linking to relevant resources properly.

Many people who start blogging initially make this mistake of not linking to resources which you have used.

There is no need to emphasize why linking to the right resources is an important thing in blogging.

Internal linking is the most important aspect in linking to relevant resources in blogging.

The internal linking helps you achieve the following things pretty quickly, they are:

Increases dwell time.
Passes authority and link juice.
Increase authority and engagement.
Improve ranking.
Improve navigation to your website.
Establish your site as an authority in the niche and you as an expert in google.

Most people do internal linking properly but do not link to other websites’ content.

This is called external linking.

Many bloggers think that external linking takes the traffic from their website to other websites which is bad thing as it is not.

Here are some quick benefits of external linking on your blog.

It creates authority in your niche.
If you are using other data as evidence, linking back to them does not come under plagiarism.
It builds trust among readers with you.
It improves ranking in google and helps you be seen as an expert in the niche for google.
It increases the odds of getting a link back to your site if you link to others and letting them know about it or get your blog being shared on their social media platforms which help you get more traffic.

What’s the solution:

Simple and straight forward.

Wherever you see if linking to other resources is relevant you must do it.

If you are using other’s ideas or data to back your point, you should cite them to not get penalized by google under plagiarism and copyright.

Linking to other resources along in your blog where it is relevant improves your rankings.

You cannot blog about all that in a single article and if the reader gets a query related to some of the concepts which you did not write then they would immediately bounce back to the search engine for that query but if you linked to any other website in your article or within the same website then the reader would find you to be expert in that field and remember your site to be a great source of that query for a long time.

Not updating blogs frequently.

Google strives for fresh and new content.

Many bloggers once publish the blogs they wont look back rather to their previous blogs at all.

You need to update blogs to check the following things,

Is the content or practices and techniques outdated.
Are there any new facts and researches took place that your readers are missing on.
Have not you get the results you expected to get from the blog like more user engagement and increase in dwell time.

No one likes to consumer old and outdated information which does not work today anymore, everyone wants new and what’s working today not 2 years back, but if you cannot update your existing blogs with changes in the industry, you would eventually fail.

Whats the solution:

Go and update your previous old blogs, remove outdated information, add more new content, strategies, make it better, actionable, more reader engaging, and attractive, this practice will help you get more traffic and authority in your niche.

It’s not just about how many blogs you post but how frequently you update your blogs matters more.

Bad headlines of your blog posts.

Titles are important because it meets the need of two important places

1. The people will know about the article’s content.

2. The search engines will know what the article is about.

There is no option of going wrong here but most people mess up with this thing.

Even though you have written the great and awesome content in the market if you do not promote it with a proper title and have a good first impression you will not proceed to the next level of blogging.

Whats the solution:

Titles or headlines are very important factor in Seo.

Having catchy titles helps you increase ctr and gain more traffic and rankings of your blog.

Include emotional words, brackets, in your title tags which increase click through rate than other titles.

Read the article about tips for writing a brilliant title.

Choosing topics/keywords that are broad.

Take for example :

1. Earn money online.

2. how to start digital marketing.

When you write a blog about these topics which appear as broad ones but as you continue writing you will come to know that you need to cover every minute detail related to that topic to get the content diluted and that’s really difficult if you are the only one on this pursuit.

What is the solution:

Choose specific ones in the beginning and you can choose broad ones when you get a team that manages your blogs but to grab attention quite faster you have to blog on a specific thing.

Not writing long form of content.

Look.

Back in 2010, blogging was all about writing 500 words stuffing with keywords, getting a couple of backlinks, and call it a day.

Fast forward to now, Times have changed.

Writing a short form of content with 500 words won’t work anymore.

Yet, still, the majority of people do this.

Writing thin content which adds zero value.

Here is a graphic image on how word count has increased.

There are several benefits of writing a long-form of content, here are a few quick benefits of writing a long-form of content.

They get more traffic and social shares.
They represent your expertise in the topic.
They help you build authority in the niche.
They get more backlinks and often helpful.
They get higher rankings because of changes in google’s algorithm like a rank brain.
They increase engagement and dwell time of users on blogs.

Among these rank brains is one of the recently introduced algorithm changes in google which basically works identifying and ranking blogs on the quality of content.

You can see its effect on rankings of sites nowadays often.

Many say backlinks are huge for rankings in google.

No doubt about it but are they only things that matter?

Absolutely not, backlinks are only 1 among 200 factors Google uses to rank sites.

Rankbrain is one of its algorithm which affects SEO.

You might have seen many blogs actually outranking other blogs in top 10 positions of google with lesser backlinks than other blogs ranking.

If backlinks are super important than whichever blog has the most backlinks must rank first but it is not that way anymore now.
Because of the rank of brain and ctr.

What is the solution:

Publish blogs with higher word count like at least 2k words on average because as per the study, the average word count of most top 10 ranking pages of different keywords was 1890 words, make sure your blog is at least 2k words long.

Here are some quick tips to publish long-form of content,

Add LSI keywords in your blog.
Add the faqs section in your blog where it is relevant.
Focus on covering the whole topic gathering than a single keyword in the blog.
Get more ideas of the keyword through answer the public.
Make your blog actionable.

In most cases, the higher the word count of the blogs the better the quality, the higher the chances of ranking and higher user engagement on the blog.

Avoid publishing short content anymore now.

Not focusing on email list building.

Email list building is the most important thing in blogging.

Most people don’t give a damn about this most important thing.

Here are 6 quick benefits of email list building and email marketing as a whole to understand why it is important to have.

Every dollar you spend on email marketing you can expect 42 dollars as return of investment because it is more targeted to the right people and increase the percentage of sales.
91% of people check their emails daily.
Having email list building increases authority and revenue of your blog.
Unlike social media marketing, email marketing is more targetted.
73% of marketers have actually said that emails are an important part of their strategy.
9 out of 10 marketers actually prefer emails for content distribution.

Source: Oberle.

Still, most people do not know about it or even if they know, ignore or neglect or procrastinate it.

You can promote your blog on all social media platforms and buy paid ads and still you won’t have leads from the traffic you get to the blog because it is not targetted.

What is the solution:

Focus on email list-building.

But how is the question?

You can create any digital course or any ebook or any pdf file which might add additional value to your audience and ask them if they want to access it, submit their email addresses to have it landed in their inbox.

This is how all bloggers start their email list building process.

When you give something adding additional value to your audience related to your niche for free, the chances of getting emails of those who are really interested in that topic would submit emails to access the product.

Read, how to start an email list building from scratch.

Don’t ignore this thing at any cost because it brings traffic to your site where the subscribers of are mostly hungry for the information that you want to provide in your targetted audience and they are the ones who are most active on your blog and would also do the social sharing as well.

Targeting the wrong keywords.

In this part which is related to keyword research most bloggers who are new to blogging screw up here.

You will learn 3 important metrics of keyword research, they are,

Volume.
Difficulty.
CPC.

Most bloggers actually target keywords with high volume and high cpc, which is wrong strategy.

Because your blog is entirely new, you lack the following things,

Domain age.
Authority.
Backlinks.
Value.

These 4 things grew with time but if you target keywords which demand these things you should probably choose other way around.

The other mistake bloggers do is targeting keywords with different intent.

Ask yourself a series of quesitons before writing blogs and targeting keywords in blogs,

What is the user looking for, blog post, any product, any place to go to?
What is the problem of the user?
What is the solution they want?
What type of posts are ranking in top 10 for that keyword in google?

This is the most important thing.

You can write blog with 10000 words content but it does not match with search intent, all the effort goes vain.

There are some keywords like buy iPhone or Facebook login.

These are just basic examples, but.

The examples I said are quite basic but you understand.

There are 4 type of search intent, they are

Navigational.
Commercial.
Transactional.
Informational.

Make sure your keyword matches with the right intent.

Here is table of search intents with examples.

What is the solution:

Just ask yourself the questions i mentioned earlier and analyse what type of posts are ranking in top 10 of google for that keyword, if majority of posts are blogs and articles, you should create article then and match the search intent of the keyword.

Don’t get preoccupied with the numbers of the volume and CPC and difficulty you should also check the search intention of that keyword.

One more example, best mobiles in 20000 INR is a keyword, then the intent of this keyword is that user wants to know what are the best mobile phones that are there in the market with their specifications and pricing within the range of 20k INR.

Another thing is to focus on keyword difficulty first and target low volume and low competition keywords initially to get some traffic and authority before going after high CPC terms.

Once you rank the keywords creating few backlinks on low competition keywords you will get traffic and you will be motivated with that then slowly start targeting and focusing on high CPC ones later.

Writing bad intros and conclusions of your blog.

Look introduction and conclusions are actually super important sections in blogs.

It does not matter how good the content of the blog be but if you mess up the intro you would fail meserably.

Having a good intro is very important thing in blogging.

A fact is that 80% of people read the headlines and 20% click it, if it is in that case, you need to makesure that those 20% of people who actually read blogs must read entire blog, the best way to get the reader stick to blog is through interesting introductions.

Another thing is that having good conclusions is also important because people when they visit the blog actually read conclusions first if they like it they scroll up and read the blog.

Many bloggers mess up both here, they write boring introductions and conclusions which has no direction and call to action.

Whats the solution:

Write intros and conclusions that make the users stick to the blogs till the end.

Use PPT formula to write interesting introductions, The PPT stands for Preview, Proof, Transistion.

Here is it how it works actually,

This is an introduction part of my blog of this one, where i clearly stated what the reader will read through the blog.

First agree to users problem and let them know what to expect in the blog.

Secondly, Proof is about why your readers should listen to you.

I have used alot of facts and personal results to convince readers through the blog.

Transition is to get your readers to move along with you to discover whats in the blog.

Other things you can do is adding quotes and using stories in your blog intros to make it more interesting

Similarly you need to add call to actions in your conclusions.

Here is the process of writing perfect conclusions.

Use TAC process,. by the way it stands for Transition, Ask and Call to action.

Transition is about letting your readers know your job is done now.

Ask is about asking your readers to let you know what do they think about eht bog and which strategy they will be using from the blog.

Call to action is about asking your readers to do some action like sharing the blog or sign up in the blog for notifications.

Keyword cannibalization.

Before knowing what is the mistake lets understand what this thing is.

Keyword cannibalization is when you write blogs on similar keywords or similar topics which rank on ony 1 search query on google.

For a specific query google shows not more than 2 results in search engine from each domain.

If you are writing multiple blogs targeting similar keyword intent or search query, none of the blogs will rank in google, because google gets confused which one to rank in your domain, your SEO and ctr will get diluted as well.

What is the solution:

Use only different search queries and keywords for every blog you publish, don’t write similar blogs like you have written what is SEO today and types of SEO tomorrow, both keywords and queries are similar that creates a problem for Google and it will downrank you.

If you already did something like this before, you should run a site audit and see if there is some issue regarding that and remove the blogs if it gets serious.

Read, how to identify keyword cannibalization in your blog.

Not repurposing content in other formats.

Blog posts are not the only things you should be focusing on to rank on google.

Google ranks youtube videos as well in search results page.

screenshot.

The fact is that video content are,

It drives 50x times more traffic than text.
80% of all internet traffic comes from videos by 2021.

Hence you should repurpose your blog posts content to videos as well.

What is the solution:

Create videos and repurpose your blog posts to videos.

Embed the videos in your blog posts which increases engagement and dwell time of yout blog.

You can acquire traffic which would not be possible doing with blog posts.

Not building a community.

Dont just create a blog when you are blogging build a community.

Most bloggers who start blogging do the mistake of not building a community rather foucing on just blogs.

What are the benefits of building a community around the blog?

Well, there are many benefits of building a community, here are 5 of them,

Gets you targeted traffic and lesser dependence on google.
It gives personality to your brand.
It helps in the growth of your blog with increase engagement on the blog.
You can build authority in the niche.
It increases revenue with sales.

What is the solution:

Build a community of people around your blog.

How can you build a community,

There are many ways of building community, here are few,

Asking your visitors to join your groups on social media.
Asking your visitors to subscribe to your blog to get notifications of posts.
Collecting emails from your visitors.
Consult random visitors of your blog and solve their queries for free.
Replying to comments of your readers on posts.
Frequently conducting polls, quizzes, and giveaways.

Focus on building a community of like minded people around your blog.

Not building a sales funnel.

Having a monetizatino plan is the most important aspect of starting a blog.

A sales funnel is a process of turning your visitors into leads and sales on your blog and increase your revenue.

If you think placing ads and earning a few hundreds of dollars a month is enough for your blog then you are missing out large amount of money you can earn.

Adsense or placing ads in general is the least thing you can do and most people are doing whenever they talk about monetizing the blog.

There are many other ways of earning money through blogging which most bloggers are not aware of, such as,

Affiliate marketing as we all know.
Consultation.
Selling course or Ebook.
Giving access to premium and exclusive content for monthly subscriptions.
Sponsored posts.

There is a lot of money to be made through these things.

In order to increases sales from your blog you need to setup a funnel.

Why sales funnel is important?

Sales funnel is more organized and helps you grow your business giving you the advantage of more sales and upper hand over other entrepreneurs or marketers in your industry who are not aware of monetizing techniques and strategies.

What is the solution:

Focus on building sales funnel.

Building a sales funnel is huge but definitely worth it.

There are many ways of earning money through blogs and you cannot earn good sum of money unless you build a sales funnel to your blog.

Here is a detailed guide on how to build sales funnel.

Not caring about users’ attention.

Average attention span of people now is 8 seconds that is less than goldfish which is 9 seconds.

In that case, when users visit your site for some specific search query, you must respect their effort of visiting your site and answer their query as quickly as possible.

Many new bloggers mess up things here,

Adding irrelevant and excessive popups.
Lots of irrelevant ads placement.
Unnecessary usage of things in the sidebar.
Smaller font size.
The higher loading speed of your site.
Ugly content design and structure.
Bad navigation of the site.

All these things really hurt your website performance and users will bounce back to other site immediately.

You need to respect and answer the query of your users immediately without letting them take much effort to do.

What is the solution:

Reduce the distractions on your blog.

Show the reader what they want on your blog as soon as possible.

Put the content above the fold, don’t let users to scroll down to bottom to get answered.

Don’t use Clickbaits or black hat SEO practices anymore.

Respect users attention and remove distractions from your blog.

7 quick tips for starting a blog/blogging tips.

Here are quick 7 tips for starting a blog in 2020.

Lets dive in.

Go for WordPress.

You need to invest in WordPress to start blogging not in any free blogging platform in 2020.

You cannot afford to do continue with bloggers or Wix if you are serious about blogging and don’t want to waste your time.

Why WordPress only?

WordPress gives you wings, here are 5 quick benefits of using WordPress.

Make SEO easy with plugins.
30% of all websites are on WordPress because it is flexible and easy to use.
It has plugins to help you with blogging better.
It is easy to manage.
Many free themes that are mobile and SEO friendly.

Buy good hosting.

I explained earlier how important good hosting is,

let me state the reasons again here

Hosting manages the safety and security of your site.
Hosting is responsible for the loading speed of your site.
Hosting is responsible for regular WordPress updates.
Hosting is important for the uptime of the website.
Hosting is important to run your blog on WordPress smoothly.

Because of all these reasons you need to have good hosting for your site.

Don’t go in search of cheap hosting, go for quality hosting like Bluehost and siteground which are a little expensive but worth it in the long run.

Take regular backups.

Take regular backups of your site using free plugins like updraft and the backup WordPress plugin to avoid any loss of content and data in case of sudden changes and updates on WordPress.

Look, prevention is always better than cure.

Email listing is crucial.

Start email listing as soon as possible because it is worth it in the long run.

Here are 5 quick benefits of email list building.

Better return to investment.
More targeted.
Direct traffic to your site.
More sales and revenue.
Increase in authority and user engagement on the blog.

Use skyscraper technique 2.0.

This is an advanced content strategy invented by brian dean founder of backlinko.

Select the keyword which matches with search intent you are looking for and finds the best content of it, create something even better and different adding 10x more value than it, and promote it.

This strategy works brilliantly if implemented correctly.

Improve titles for the ctr.

Click-through rate is the ratio of how man people look at your site on search engines and how many actually click it.

Here are some quick ways to boost ctr of your site.

Add guide word.
Include a number.
Include brackets in your title.
Include the year in your title.
Include some words like best, top, etc words in the title.

The higher your ctr is the more traffic you are attracting and the higher your positions in google get.

Conduct giveaways / network with other bloggers and build community.

Approach other bloggers in your industry and ask for guest posting opportunities to get traffic and authority.

Conduct giveaways, quizzes, and polls to increase user engagement on your site.

Focus on building a community around your blog.

Ending remarks!

There you go, my job is done I have answered all the common blogging mistakes people do for beginners you should be avoiding in 2020 to save time and effort and not have regret later.

Please do let me know which mistake you have been doing in your blogging life, share your views in comments section below.

If you are interested in other similar guides,

Do checkout

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How is the Future of blogging.
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I will catch you next time with amazing content like this one, till then, Peace out.