10 Extremely Common Blogging Mistakes, Are You Still Making Them?

Guest post by Harrison Li
Oh well… blogging mistakes, it’s not like the most unique-est thing you can ever hear from the blogosphere, like, seriously, everyone knows about them but are you still repeatedly making the same old mistakes? Time for a little self-check.

1. Not Updating Your Blog Enough

The right blogging frequency had always been a question that cannot be answered, well the answer is it’s industry specific, meaning it depends on what niche you are in. Blogs that post less than 5 times a month don’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it’s just the matter of how detailed and valuable each one is. Time to ask yourself whether you produce enough content.

2. Not Proof-Reading Posts

This is a goner. If you never re-read your posts for at least one time, then you’re considered as a content rusher. One little mistake can ruin your image and impression for a lifetime. If you see anything that needs to be reworded, just do it, don’t be lazy. A word of advice: don’t proof read your content again on the same day, read it the next day and I guarantee you can spot new and obvious errors you accidentally made.

3. Writing For Stephen Hawking

The main difference between a blog and a website is the writing style. A website is of pure information but a blog needs to be written with a friendly conversational voice. The advice you will hear a million times, write like you were talking to a friend. So make sure your writing style fits your audience and that it makes them feel like they are actually reading from a blog and not Wikipedia. Plus, this encourages more comments.

4. Copying Someone Else

You have also probably heard this a million times, but it may not be fully clear in your mind. Copying is always bad and it doesn’t only apply to content, as they all say don’t duplicate content. Copying applies to everything you find both offline and online, whether it’s a picture, an audio podcast or just a simple concept. If someone introduced it first, it’s theirs, don’t try to copy someone else’s stuff, you will result in having very poor credibility, reputation and impression.

5. Doing Heavy SEO

Search engine optimization is obviously a great thing to do for your blog, just because it gets you organic traffic and authority, but there are side effects if you produce content solely for search engines. SEO’ing means you’re writing for bots, and that is against the law of blogs: writing for readers. Of course, I’m not saying you should stop doing any more SEO, but you need to watch out for how many keywords you are stuffing into your information as well as developing poor content.

6. Not Replying To Comments

This is to be honest the worst thing you can ever do to a blog, if someone left a comment, there must be something you can talk back, even if it was for feedback like “nice info thanks for sharing”, well, act professional and reply nicely like “Hey X, thanks for stopping by I’m glad you liked the post.”, just act professional and you will keep your brand image safe. Not to mention comments is key to what differentiate blogs from websites! Here are 8 tricks to use if you don’t know what to comment.

7. No External Promotion

Whatever you do to your blog, how much time or efforts you dedicate to it, without promotion, there will be no results, no traffic, no one is going to know about them, you are just going to be as dead as [insertnegativecreature]. A good way to counter this rule is by following a time schedule, in your early stages of blogging, you will have to spend 3 times as much time externally for promotion than for your own blog. Promotion could be in many forms, ideas: social networking, commenting or most effectively, writing guest posts!

8. Not Writing Quality Content

I’ll repeat the “content is king” saying again, if you don’t provide value in your content to your readers, there’s, to be honest, no point in publishing it on to the web, it will be the same junky spammy stuff that already exists. A wise thing you could is, after each time you have written a piece, you ask yourself a question “what will this post teach my audience?”, “do my audience know this already?”, and so on, use a checklist.

9. Not Tracking Statistics

Use Google Analytics today. If you haven’t, you’re losing out plenty of potential readers, you could have acquired more loyal readers, used smarter SEO, generated more sales, improved any particular content to the highest extent. Analytics allows you to see what has been read the most, what pages got the most views and where the traffic came from, if from search engines, what keywords (and much more). By using the tool effectively, you can make little tweaks that will greatly improve your overall blog performance.

10. Not Reading From Authoritative Sources

Don’t tell me you’re the best blogger in the world, that you know every single thing happening around the blogosphere, every latest trend. No matter who you are, you’ve got to keep up with the latest news and technology around the web, don’t stay behind, you need to advance when it’s time to. For me, I read from many blogging blogs almost everyday, if there is important news, chances are that they write about them before I do.

So far, so good, ask yourself these questions, are you or your blog making these classic mistakes? If not, you’ve just become a better than average blogger, you’ve still got more work to do. Here’s a little summary.

Self Checklist

1. Are you posting regularly?
2. Do you proof-read your posts?
3. Are you writing like Wikipedia?
4. Did you copy someone else’s ideas?
5. Are you keyword stuffing?
6. Do you reply to every single comment?
7. Do you promote your content/blog?
8. Are you writing valuable content?
9. Are you tracking your website’s stats?
10. Do you read other blogs?

For a detailed blog post checklist visit here.

Mind sharing with me any special experiences you have had with these mistakes? Let me know something I’ve missed, in the comments below and I’ll be sure to talk back!

Harrison Li is a 14 year old blogger who shares in-depth blogging advice and marketing strategies you’ll find no where else, don’t believe it? Meet him at Blog Lectures and start reading his newsletter..