The majority of blog traffic comes from organic traffic, or consumers searching for something in search engines and clicking on your blog when it matches their intended topic. To make your blog stand out among the competition, you should avoid making common blog mistakes.
Here are some of the most common blog post mistakes (and their solutions), based on my experience.
1) Develop blog posts that reflect your broader market interests
Mistake: You’re worried about thoughts that just concern you.
You’re not the only reader, or the intended reader, as long as you can read and re-read the blog posts after you write them.
Ideas will come to you at odd moments when you start blogging — in the bathroom, on a hike, while with your mom on the phone. While thoughts can come at unexpected times, the thoughts themselves can never be random. Only because it’s usually a good idea—or something that concerns you personally—doesn’t mean that your business is a good idea.
Solution: Align your blog posts with priorities for business growth.
Your goal is to help your audience resolve problems and, in the long run, to develop your business by blogging. So, all of the ideas for your blog post should better serve certain development objectives. They should have natural link-ins to your business challenges and answer unique issues and complaints that your prospects have.
2) Identify what the audience resonates with.
Mistake: You’re forgetting your persona.
It must connect with your readers and push them to take action if you want your blog content to do well (i.e. drive views, leads, and sales). One of the greatest mistakes is thinking that if you have not really considered your audience or the behavior you expect them to take, the material will succeed.
Solution: Consider the pains of your persona and repair them with them.
You will fill the divide in your content by identifying your user identity and the topics that matter to them.
3) Write as though you’re talking.
Mistake: You write too stiffly.
Writing a blog is really different than writing a term paper. Yet bloggers typically have only experiences with the above when they first start. What is the issue? The way a term paper publishes is not the way people like to read.
Let’s be honest: most people seeing your post won’t read it all. You cannot force them to continue reading by writing in a manner that is easy to understand if you want to keep them involved.
Solution: Make sure your blogs come across as personable.
It’s alright to be more talkative when you write — we support it really. The more approachable your article is, the more people would want to read it. People like to feel like they are doing business, not machines, with real people.
So let your writing go loosened. Throw on a squeeze. Free yourself from jargon. Do a joke or two. Make a pun or two. That’s what people really talk about — and what people just want to read about.
4) Show who you are, not tell who you are.
Mistake: As a writer, you think others care about you.
If you think people will get interested in your stories and interests when you start blogging first, you are wrong. This is not the case, though. As a guy, it’s no knock—just it’s that no one is interested in you and your background when you’re fresh. What you will show others is far more important.
Solution: Infuse your personality into your text without detracting from the topic.
While you don’t really need to mention that you’re the one who wrote this post, you can make sure they know about you by incorporating some parts of your personality into your writing to make them feel more comfortable with you. It’s up to you if you do that. Some people tend to crack jokes, others like to make references to pop culture and some find a way to explain them beautifully.
To bring personality to your writing, strive to find ways of communicating with your readers with the subject on which you write – and then write in person first as if you are talking with them. Much as you would in a face-by-face talk, make your tone intimate, open, and engaging.
5) Be sure to reiterate your point.
Mistake: You go off-topic.
It’s okay to allow your own personality to show in your writing, but don’t exploit the privilege. It’s one thing to be open and honest about the subject, but it’s another thing to share too many personal stories that obscure the point you’re attempting to make.
Don’t digress too much with those particular anecdotes and analogies—the readers don’t sit in front of you, so you can’t promise your undivided focus. If readers lose patience, they will bounce off your post.
Solution: Frequently reiterate your argument.
Maintain your point throughout the article. This will prevent your writing from losing its audience. The best blog posts have a single message and then deliver it in small ways, beginning with one idea and ending with another.
For starters, if you write about how much water a potted plant needs, do not waste three paragraphs sharing a story about how after a two-week holiday you came home to a dead fern. This story is proof of your point, but what is your point? For more than 14 days, certain plants cannot go without water. This is a potential argument and it should be mentioned at an early level.
6) Make sure to leave your audience with something.
Mistake: You’re relying on conceptual reasoning instead of concrete reasoning.
Researching how other publications are writing about a topic is the first step in your blog research. Nevertheless, you will notice that almost all of the results on the first page of Google are about abstract concepts. How do you make your blog stand out? It can be done by including specific, actionable steps to succeed.
Solution: Steps to success should be actionable.
One of the most important tenets of content creation is that it should be useful, and then people should walk away having learned something from it.
