For many people, they may think starting a blog is all about writing about what they love, traveling the world, or even making 5 figures a month.
It may look like the ultimate dream.
But the reality can be quite different.
Being an amateur blogger is not as easy as it might seem, and certainly not an overnight thing.
But don't worry, here's everything you'll need to know to get started on your blogging journey and avoid any costly amateur blogging mistakes.
Top Amateur Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
1. Going Free
If you don't have the budget or simply want to try out a new idea, you may think about using a free blogging platform, like WordPress, or Blogger.
This is one of the biggest mistakes a beginner blogger can make. There are at least two problems here:
1) The domain name on a free platform like yourblog.wordpress.com, does not come across as professional at all. It's much better to use a self-hosted blog with your own custom domain name, so it better identifies your unique brand.
2) You have no control of a free platform. If they decide your content or site is inappropriate, they can remove it.
3) Bad hosting: The ideal website load time should be less than a few seconds. If a visitor lands on your blog, but it has a slow page loading speed, they will just bounce off your blog.
Choose the Right Blogging Platform
The first step is finding the right platform for your amature blog.
If you already have an existing website and a hosting plan, then that's a bonus.
In most cases, the best long term blogging platform for amateur blogs is your website. By including links in your posts to useful, relevant information, readers don't have to leave your site.
Adding a blog to an established or new website can be as simple as installing WordPress at your hosting provider.
WordPress is one of the most common blogging platforms. It has over 57,000 plugins to extend your website's functionality. For example, you can add an ecom store, forums, galleries, contact form, mailing lists, post editor, and more.
You could also use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Medium, especially if you have a large following, to increase exposure to your content quicker than on your new blog.
2. Not Niching Down
What's a niche? A niche is the main topic for your blog.
One of the most common mistakes amateur bloggers make is not choosing a blog niche or choosing the wrong type of niche.
For instance, if you are passionate about fashion, and want to write about fashion outfits, brands, shows, news, trends, etc. Obviously, it follows that your niche is fashion. And your target audience loves fashion too.
Although there's no right or wrong approach, trying to tackle a huge topic like fashion would take a long time. So, you may even want to consider niching down into a sub niche, like a specific type of fashion, e.g., women's eye makeup.
The advantage of niching down into one main topic is it's less competitive and easier to get traffic, especially to a new amateur blog. Also, the search engines like Google, will know what type of content to expect from your blog - and so will your readers. Eventually your site will be seen as a trustworthy source on that topic, and people will keep coming back for more.
So how do you find the right or wrong niche? Well, start by finding what kind of blogging experience your target audience wants.
Create Buyer Personas
The first step in driving your content creation is to have a deep understanding of exactly who your target audience are.You can do this by making at least one buyer persona. These are 'virtual' representations of your ideal audience, based on a combination of (your current and past visitor) data and thorough market research (visitor interviews and surveys, as well as market data, etc.).
This is important for tailoring your content, messaging, based on the specific needs, and concerns of your ideal buyer. For example, different segments of your site visitors may need the right content for a new product or service. Which is why creating more than one buyer persona will allow you to plan and create highly targeted messaging (on the right platform) will boost your visitor acquisition and retention.
Some examples of the data you want to gather, include, typical age, gender, education, profession, challenges or pain points, family, hobbies/interests. e.g., your lifestyle blog may have an audience of 30- to 35-year-old female homemakers who are mostly active on Facebook and Pinterest. So, it makes sense to publish most content on these channels.
One of the best ways to develop a persona is to discover trends from your visitors. Obviously, surveying or interviewing them is slightly difficult (unless you meet them in person or have an established site with Google Analytics data).
The concept of creating a buyer persona may be challenging to some. But there's no need to fear. Two options are:
- Making an educated guess, based on your competitor's websites.
- HubSpot has helpfully created a 'Make My Persona' generator you can use.
Simply enter your customer research data and the step-by-step tool will guide you through persona creation.
By understanding the needs of your ideal audience, you can start creating content that is tailored to their specific problems or interests. This helps you build trust, and authority with your readers and (potential) customers.
3. Getting Too Personal
Your family and friends may want to read about your daughter's latest sporting success on your blog, that may not be what your potential readers want to see on their screens.Amateur bloggers often make this newbie mistake of writing about their own personal lives on the blog.
Instead, you should focus on stories, guides and helpful posts that your target audience actually want to read.
4. Not Following a People First Approach
It's the people's side of blogging that can make the biggest difference to being a successful blogger. For its people who will read, comment, share and link to your content.Stop selling a product in every post. Instead, focus on giving your target market with useful and relevant content.
Turn yourself into a great listener. By really understanding your audience's burning desires and needs, you will have a never-ending supply of blogging ideas.Then publish content that answers their questions, find solutions to their deepest problems and help them carry out their goals.
How?
Start by empowering readers to share their ideas. Encouraging them to read and interact (in the comments) with your blog posts. This is also a fantastic way to grow your blog's engagement.
Email Marketing: Build a Loyal Email List
To gain audience trust, build a list of emails. This is a whole blog post on its own, so check out this useful video:
Next, send out a survey to your readers. Find out what blog content they would find most useful. For instance, email your list, Tweet on Twitter or post on Facebook. Once you have an engaged audience, you can get feedback on good and bad topic ideas, for your blogger content.
You will gain valuable insights into what your target market finds useful and promote your content.
Think about what topics that will be of greatest value to your readers. Whether that's helpful information, guides, industry facts or product reviews.Your main goal here is to offer the content your readers are looking for, while addressing their major pain points and answering their key questions. Without the hard sell. Don't forget to send content via email marketing too.
5. Not Being Consistent
So, you've picked a niche, got a brand-new domain name, and created your blog.Then you write like crazy and manage to publish a handful of posts. Then wait for the traffic to come.Except, it doesn't.
When starting out your amateur blog, there will be little traffic, until Google trusts your site.
Many newbie bloggers give up too soon because they don't see any progress and lose their motivation to write.
But for a successful blog, you need to remember that content is king (and queen, for that matter). So, keep on writing because it's a long-term game.
How?
Create a Content Calendar
One random blog post will not drive the targeted traffic you want, especially for a newly established blog. A consistent posting schedule plays a vital role in your blogging business. There are many benefits of blogging regularly. Regardless of whether you are trying to grow your blog's visitors, boost your YouTube channel's subscribers, or increase your Facebook post likes, you must "post consistently".
There are simply no shortcuts to it.
Setting up an editorial content calendar will help to organize an ongoing content publishing schedule. For instance, marking out important dates for your target market, like festive seasons, special holidays, launches or key events that will affect sales.A calendar will create a visual workflow to help you to manage the scheduling of prompt and relevant content. This means you can easily track your key KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), like publishing frequency (for example, daily or weekly), schedules for specific writers, content types (for example, seasonal posts, series or themes, photos, videos, infographics, case studies), promotional channels (for example, Facebook, LinkedIn), stage (for example, creating, reviewing, approved) and publish dates (expected and actual).
Some of the amazing blogging tools for managing content calendars include Microsoft Excel, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Trello or WordPress.
Here's an example Editorial Calendar from HubSpot.
6. Not Researching your Competitors
If you don't even know which other websites dominate your niche, you're guilty - it's one of the commonest beginner blogging mistakes you can make.
Become aware of your blogging rivals. Find out what the top blogs in your industry are writing about. Are there any common themes or popular types of content?
What type of marketing strategy do they have? How do they make money? How many streams of income do they have? Do they do affiliate marketing? Do they do email list building? Is their blog filled with quality articles? Do they cover broad topics, undeserved topics or something else? What about quality backlinks? What social media channels do they use the most? Do they have an amazing blog design?
The idea here is not to imitate, but to model the best in class. Find what's missing from their blog, which reader questions they aren't answering and what content gaps that your site can fill. Get those creative juices going for some awesome new blog post ideas.
7. Not Optimizing for the Search Engines
Another amatuer blogging mistake is to think you just create high-quality content, and quality traffic will automatically come. If only it were that simple.To get quality organic traffic from Google, it's not only about creating some awesome content, but also about search engine optimization (SEO).
Tools for Keyword Research and Link Building
One of the best SEO tools for beginners is ahrefs, which can help in competitor research. You can see a competitor's most popular pages (by traffic) and compare any content gaps between your site and multiple competitor's. You can see what topics the majority of articles are about, giving you some great blog post ideas.
You can also see the types of backlinks the competitors have built. Do they have tons of backlinks? Are they do-follow backlinks? Are they mainly guest postings? Could you use a white hat link building service to emulate their links? This will give you an idea how to improve your search rankings.
Before you even start writing, you need to target the right search terms that have search volume. The difficulty of keywords really does matter here. For beginner blogs, instead of targeting a competitive keyword, it's much better to go for long-tail keywords. You'll have much quicker success in gaining organic search engine traffic. You can start by using the proper keyword research tools:
If you don't have a budget for SEO tools, you can always use Google Search Console and Google Analytics. The data might be limited but can be just as good. For keyword research use Uber Suggest (the free plan).
Content Writing Tools
To optimize your content, you can use SEO tools like Surfer SEO and Frase.io.
It may seem like a time-consuming task but learning and implementing SEO is one of the best investments you can make.
How to Write Better Amateur Blog Posts
1. Your Blog's 'Look and Feel' Matters
It's one thing writing blog posts and even creating killer content, but you also need to look at the bigger picture in the blogging game.
Think about how your blog's visitors can most easily find and consume the information they're looking for.
That epic blog post you just wrote won't matter if your readers can't see it. If it takes more than 3 clicks to reach your post or it's hidden away in a remote corner of your blog, people simply won't find it. Or worse, won't even care to look for it, and your blogging efforts will be for nothing.
And if (or when) they do find your blog post, they're faced with a massive block of text or a bland design, odds are they will bounce off your site (never to return and) to find something else easier to read. Blog designs and user experience play a huge role in blog success.
To make your content more visible and visually appealing, organize it by:
- Having a clean layout (try reviewing your favorite premium blog themes)
- Using clear navigation menus, visible headers, tags and categories
- Writing in short, concise paragraphs (3-4 sentences)
- Breaking up the text using the right images (themed, branded)
- Using the right styling and punctuation (bullet lists, bold or italic text)
- Make a featured section to curate your best posts
2. Quality Beats Quantity. Every Time
Focus on quality content, not quantity. You don't always have to write 2000+ word long form posts to rank.
You can improve the quality and credibility of your blog by:
- ALWAYS proofreading before publication
- Having proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a must have (you can use content writing tools like Grammarly to check for duplicate content too)
- Re-read your post, asking yourself:
- Have you created the best possible content of its kind on the Internet?
- Have you answered all the questions your readers are ever likely to ask about the topic?
- Have you linked out to trusted and authoritative sources of information?
- Is it complete and concise?
- Can any sections be removed?
- Double checking your facts
- This approach to only publish honest, accurate and valuable content should align with your brand's messaging.
- Using a dedicated tone of voice (also used in the rest of your brand's marketing)
- Using neutral, simple and intelligent language (avoiding jargon)
3. Be Unconventional
Lower attention span of your blog's readers and more competition means it's more important than ever to differentiate yourself with fresh content ideas and avoid overdone approaches.
Write about what matters most to your audience, without following the herd. Push the boundaries for blog ideas and get inspiration from day-to-day life. Sometimes the best and most original sources of content come when you are least expecting it.For instance, you can take a quick master class in headline writing, by heading to your local supermarket with a notepad and pen. Look no further than the magazine shelves to see the covers of Hello, Cosmopolitan or Men's Health. These writers are experts in crafting compelling headlines that draw their readers in. Note down the best headlines and keep them in a swipe file for future use.
4. Create Your Own Multimedia Content
People learn in different ways. Some learn better visually by seeing, others learn better by reading or listening.
Regardless of whether you use images, diagrams, videos, text or audio, they can all help to illustrate your blog posts main points - as well as appeal to a wider range of readers.So, creating your own high-quality images and video for your blog means you're more likely to engage your readers.
Think about "How to" (use your products or services) guides, or in-depth coverage of certain topics.
Visual content can more easily be promoted on your other platforms (like YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn). Additionally, there may be SEO benefits. For example, if your content is authoritative enough, some may link to your article, or your images are embedded (and linked to) on other blogs.Also, if your images are more relevant and optimized than typical stock photos, it will increase your blog's SEO as well as provide a great user experience for your readers.
You can optimize your media by incorporating your target keywords into the captions, descriptions and the image file names. For example, instead of the image file name "DSCphoto93817.jpg", rename it to bestslrcamera.jpg. To give more visibility to your brand and help protect the images, you could watermark them with your amateur blogs name or website URL.
5. Only Publish GREAT Content
If you consistently create content that's 10x better than your competition, your readers will see you as the "go-to" authority in your space.
Why is this important?
When your competition is still struggling to get new visitors to their websites, your blog will be driving more blog traffic than you can handle.
Your content should be to the kind that your readers would willingly pay to read.
Don't be afraid of giving away the absolute best insider tips and advice or revealing knowledge that you would normally sell for a living.
Contrary to what many may think, giving away 'free' advice that you would typically charge for, will not take away your business.In reality, people don't 'steal' your content. Potential readers use it to qualify you. They simply want to make sure you're the expert they need.
When you research topic ideas for incredible articles, ask yourself, "Would anyone pay to read it?", or "How could this provide so much value someone might pay for it".Making your content actionable is just one way of offering excellent value to readers. Think about how you can give advice so readers can apply the lessons you're teaching straight away?
For example, for an awesome example of actionable content, look no further than Unbounce's Noob Guide to Online Marketing
6. Engage with Your Readers
Blogging gives you the ability to engage with your readers. Think about it.
The reader has already shown they're interested enough to read your post. Right to the very end.Therefore, the end of your post is the ideal opportunity for you to convince them with a Call to Action (CTA).Think about what the next logical step is in the reader (or prospect's) journey. Are they in:
a) The Awareness Stage: The prospect is just looking for information, or;
b) The Consideration Stage: The prospect is researching various solutions to a specific problem they have, or;
c) The Decision Stage: The prospect is looking for a specific named solution (and are ready to buy).
For example, if the prospect is in a) The Awareness Stage, your CTA could invite readers to comment, while the subject is still fresh in their minds. You can then respond to any comments professionally and quickly.
If the prospect is in b) The Consideration Stage, your CTA could be an email opt-in that offers them a free PDF guide, that reviews the best solutions to their specific problem, in return for their email address.
Regularly creating quality content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. But consistently showing up and engaging with your audience on your blog posts and on social platforms (or wherever they hang out), is the key to increasing your organic reach. Don't forget to ask them for their opinion in the blog comments of your posts. More eyeballs will see your posts. People will want to know more about your brand. You can make genuine connections with your target audience and increase your conversion rates and sales.
With careful planning and being consistent, amateur blogging can be a valuable tool in your overall marketing strategy and help you grow your business.
7. Analyze your Post Data
Taking a business approach to your blogging activity is important.Assuming you have tracking set up using something like Google Analytics, then it's always useful to check your blogs analytics and search rankings.
Take some time out every month to check Google Analytics. See which posts are performing the best, which need a little more marketing, which sites readers are using to find your posts and more insightful data.By tracking each data set, you can easily compare monthly metrics for popular posts, then create similar posts in the future.
Final Piece of Blogging Advice
Finally, when you start a blog, remember that it's a commitment.
You can't start your amateur blogging career by simply publishing a few posts. Then abandon it.
To make your blog successful and hopefully build a profitable business with passive income, first you need a loyal audience.
The search engines don't give credit to blogs that aren't updated regularly. So, you need to keep posting informative articles. Get into that amateur blogging habit! Some of the best amateur blogs online have regular updates of great content. You should too.
Happy blogging!