When you’re just starting off as a blogger, you might be making mistakes without even realizing it.
What are some of the top blogging mistakes that newbies make? New bloggers don’t invest in learning, don’t write posts that are searchable, create flimsy content that’s too short, give up too early when they don’t see results, use bad security protocols, and many more common mistakes.
In this article, I’ll explain some of the top errors that new bloggers make, and how you can avoid them.
Overthinking It
It can really hurt your progress if you get stuck or constantly overthink things.
Instead, when you’re ready to start blogging, JUST START. Your first blog posts will never be perfect, and you’ll improve with time. In fact, most of your improvements as a writer will come with experience. So the more that you just start writing, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
Sure, there’s a place for research when you’re just getting started. What niche will you pick to blog about, and what keywords should you target with your first articles? These are important decisions to consider. But once you make the choice, it’s time to get to work!
Producing content is what will drive the success of your blog. Not spending hours trying to decide between themes, or customize minor details on your pages. So focus most of your attention on actually writing new blog posts, especially in the early days.
Not Making Your Writing Searchable
It can be tempting to write rant or opinion pieces as a beginner blogger. These types of posts come easy and the words just seem to flow out when you’re writing from the heart.
The big downside of this is that nobody is searching for those kinds of blog posts. When people use search engines like Google, they’re looking for answers to specific questions.
Once you’ve established yourself and have an audience of returning visitors, then you can branch into writing about more opinion topics. But when you’re just starting off, you want every blog post to help bring in new traffic to your site.
Read my article How To Format A Blog Post to make sure your posts are readable!
Not Investing In Learning
You certainly don’t need a degree to become a blogger. But I think that not investing in your learning upfront is a mistake.
Take some time to learn how to write. Research what SEO is and how to implement it to increase search traffic to your blog.
Lots of this information is available for free online if you just search for it. Both in written format and also as Youtube videos. But you may even consider taking paid courses to really accelerate your learning.
Even today I still pay for courses to improve my writing and various other aspects of my business, and it almost always pays huge dividends. So I’m more than willing to spend $200 for a paid course that will save me dozens of hours of time to research a topic myself. Plus paid resources often contain unique information that isn’t shared publicly.
Not Focusing On One Niche
As a freelance writer, I don’t feel that it’s necessary to specialize into a single niche.
But when you’re running a blog, that’s a totally different story.
People usually come to specific websites to learn about specific things. If a stock market blog you followed suddenly started sharing tips about attracting chipmunks to your yard, or sharing photos of their latest fishing trip, you’d probably be a bit confused. If this happened regularly, you might stop reading that blog entirely.
Unless people just like you for your personality, you can’t just write about anything that you want. Especially in the early days, people are likely coming to your blog to get a specific solution to a problem that they have. They care less about lifestyle stuff and you as a person, as sad as that may be to hear.
Writing Too Formally
This isn’t a school essay, it’s a blog!
You want your writing to seem relatable and casual. Like you’re talking to a friend.
If you try to write your blog in an overly formal way, it can come across weird. That’s not how people expect to see written content on the internet.
Having Flimsy Content
If your content is too short, it’s likely to not add much value.
You won’t be able to convey enough important to readers, and they won’t stay on the page for very long.
Google may even penalize you in the search results if your posts are too short. So if you’re writing blogs that are only a couple hundred words long, you may find yourself unfindable on the web.
Quality is better than quantity, so don’t be afraid to go deep. Even if that means that you can only put out one really good blog each week instead of two or three shoddy ones.
Learn the ideal length for your posts in my article How Long Should A Blog Post Be?
Not Having A .Com Domain
It doesn’t come off very professional if you’re using a free blogging platform. People won’t take your blog seriously if you’ve got a .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com on the end of it.
If you’re going to give blogging a serious go, then invest the $100 or so per year that it will take to get started. For that price, you should be able to get your domain and hosting for the first year.
Not Having A Posting Schedule
You can’t just put up one new post every three months and expect your blog to see any serious growth.
Following a rigid posting schedule for your blog isn’t as important as Youtube, where it’s rather critical that you put out content at the same times and days each week. But it’s still important to have a constant flow of new blog posts.
Figure out what’s reasonable for you. Even if you’ve only got time to write one blog post every week, or even every other week. But once you make a schedule for yourself, do everything that you can to stick to it.
Read my article How Many Blog Posts Should You Write Per Week or Month? for some more guidelines on what to aim for.
Not Making Your Writing Readable
If your blog post just looks like a huge wall of text, it’s going to be too intimidating and nobody is going to bother reading it.
People on the internet have a short attention span. They don’t necessarily commit to read your entire post. They’ll just skim it, or may read until they get bored and then click away. So keeping them engaged is key.
Use headers and images to break up your text into smaller bite-sized segments.
Writing About Things You’re Not Passionate About
There are definitely a list of topics out there which are more profitable than others. But a lot of the profitable topics might also be things that you find boring or uninteresting.
Do you really want to devote hundreds of hours writing about something you don’t care about, just because of the money? Personally I’d rather pick a topic that I’m interested in.
You’ll go through phases in your blogging career where it really becomes a grind. You may be constantly putting out new posts, but not seeing the fruits of your efforts. Even if you’re writing about something you enjoy, it might be tempting to quit. But you’re far less likely to throw in the towel if it’s something you like, as opposed to writing about something that you hate.
Not Keeping Track of Income and Expenses
If you’re running your blog with a reasonable expectation of making money, instead of just as a hobby, then you need to keep track of your finances associated with it.
When you’re starting off, you can most likely write off your payments for your domain and web hosting as business expenses on your taxes.
Of course, you might also start making money from your blog. It could be from advertisements you put on your website, affiliate links, or any number of other things. You’ll also need to keep track of any income you earn from your blog and report this on your taxes as well.
Giving Up Too Early
You’re not going to get an audience after you post 5 or 10 blog posts.
It’s going to take a while before your blog really starts to bring in visitors. It’ll take a good number of blog posts, as well as just some time.
Google will gradually test out your blog in the search results with more and more people. If it seems like people are finding it useful, it will go higher and higher up the search results. But this process can take 6 months or more before your blog post will start to approach the peak of where it can rank. Especially if you’ve written about a really competitive topic.
If you’re committed to starting a blog, I would recommend giving yourself at least 6 months where you just write and don’t worry about how many visitors or pageviews you’re getting.
If you just write great content, people will start to come eventually. But it’s all too easy to become obsessed with your analytics and spend more time each day checking on how many views you’re getting, instead of spending that time actually writing new content.
Using Too Many Plugins
As a beginner blogger, it can be really tempting to add all the bells and whistles to your website. There are plugins that do all kinds of cool things for your website. But many of these plugins can also conflict with each other and cause problems, or just slow down your website overall.
I would avoid using more than a dozen plugins on any blog. If you can manage with five or less, that would be even better.
You can use Google Pagespeed Insights to see how fast your pages are loading. If your number seems low (lower than 50 should be a concern,) then you can start turning plugins off one by one and seeing which is really slowing you down.
Not Setting The Correct Permalink Settings
By default, I think WordPress uses a URL structure that just assigns a number after the URL, like ?p=123. This can be harmful for SEO, so you want to select your permalinks to use post name instead.
Not Backing Up Your Site
Once your blog has dozens of blog posts on it, you should really think about backing it up.
Your host likely does some form of backups. So if something terrible happens, you aren’t likely to lose everything. But to avoid the risk of losing weeks of work, you should do your own backup as well.
There are free and premium backup plugins you can use for your site. Many of them will automatically save backup copies of your site to a Google Drive or Dropbox account for you.
Bad Security Practices
You want to at least have a good password for your admin account, if not two-factor authentication or some other form of security. For your password, I recommend using the random one that WordPress generates and using a password manager to remember it.
That will be more secure than most user-generated passwords you could think of, since they’ll be highly random and contain a wide mix of small and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols.
I use a plugin called Limit Login Attempts that will automatically lock people out if they try to log in too many times unsuccessfully. I will often see Russian or Chinese IP addresses trying to guess my password and getting locked out of my site.
Nowadays it doesn’t matter if your blog is big or small, hackers will find it and try to exploit any vulnerabilities that you may have.
I also recommend using a plugin called WPS Hide Login which allows you to hide the login page for your WordPress account, or make it a different URL than the default /wp-admin.
If you’re just starting off your site, you’re probably best off making your admin username something other than just admin as well.
The last piece of the puzzle to stop hackers trying to break into my site was adding a plugin called Disable XML-RPC. Apparently without this, my understanding is that there is an RSS feed vulnerability that hackers can use to try to get into your site. So even after I hid my login page, I was finding hackers were still regularly getting locked out of my site before I added this extra plugin.
Conclusion
There are a lot of mistakes that you can make while blogging.
Some of them will be minor and just result in your blog being harder to read or find for users. Others are more serious and could open your website up to hackers or losing your data.
The journey to becoming an experienced blogger is a long one. But hopefully these tips will help shorten your learning curve at least a little bit!