When I tell most of the people that I first meet that I write on a blog for a living I can see the skepticism in their eyes and the way they look down on me. “That’s not a real job. What do you actually do for money?” And shockingly my answer is the same one as initially.
Thing is, people believe that writing comes naturally, you just sit in front of a laptop all day, with a tequila next to you and your favorite cookies and just let the nonsense flow form your keyboard.
However, in reality things are sliiightly different. So many things can go wrong when writing for a blog that I could not even begin to enumerate them. Just writing, without a plan, an idea or a clear path for the long run is a failure to begin with.
So let’s tackle the worst blogging mistakes you could make:
1. Not having a plan
And by plan I mean literally everything. You need to have a plan for the topics you are going to tackle. At first when you get down to writing all sort of crazy ideas are going to pop into your head and you will want to write it all down and you will end up creating a big beautiful chaotic nothing. You need to have a strategy, your topics are to communicate essential things to your audience.
Also, when it comes to publishing you have to be realistic about your timing. At first you might think that publishing an article a day is totally fine and normal. Give it a few weeks/ months as things settle down and brilliant ideas don’t come as planned. Be realistic and able to deliver what you promise both to yourself and to your visitors.
2. You can’t connect with your audience
So just bear this in mind. When you write for a blog, it’s like sharing ideas with your best friends who are interested in the same topic that you take pleasure in. so instead of writing for the most important exam in your life, try to relax, loosen up, be more informal and create a connection with your readers. Unless you establish a connection, give them something that makes you special, be it your sarcasm or your attention to details, they have no reason for coming back to you.
3. You are getting too personal
Now the opposite of the above bullet point is to go too personal in your writing. You might think that people take interest in your personal stories and your personal beliefs. Sorry to say this buddy but it’s not the case. People care about the topic you might tackle and as I said above, you can always leave your fingerprint in your writing, your special something that people will find in all of your stories. But it has to stop there and not cross the line.
4. You are talking in general terms
It’s not a matter of the topics you choose but rather the way you treat your topics. For instance imagine the title for this article being “Blogging mistakes”. I mean yes, that is what we tackle but we tackle the worst of them. We are being a bit more specific which makes the title a bit more intriguing.
5. You don’t back up your info
Meaning, maybe the things you say are true but if you have specific data, or some official site where you got the info form, don’t be afraid to use it. Include every official source in your article/ content.
6. You basically copy-paste info
So here you can do a couple of things in order to avoid plagiarism. For instance, try to be original. I am joking. The first thing you can do is learn how to cite others. Everyone uses sources. The point is not to copy paste something someone else wrote. You can cite them. Also, you can try to rephrase 100% what you found.
7. You don’t write often enough
Meaning, you get your users used with your stories and you post and post until one day you disappear. You come back three weeks later and post again. If you do this, people will forget about you by the time you get back and will consider that you are not serious about writing. Try to use the calendar and write on a constant basis, keep track of your posts and writings.
As a conclusion, as you can see, writing is not such a piece of cake as it seems at first sight and there are quite a bunch of things that can go wrong. Most of the rules are just based on simple common sense logic, however regarding some of them you need to document yourself a bit before jumping straight into blogging.
Let us know if you experienced any negative stories yourself and share them with us so we can all learn from each other’s mistakes!