Blogging is great for readers, businesses and anybody who wants to read and share amazing content. What’s more – anybody can blog! In fact, if you’re not sure why you should blog, perhaps you should read our earlier blog post first – Why Blog?
Otherwise, if you’ve already started on your blogging journey, then we’ve got 9 things you might be doing to jeopardize your blogging efforts.
1. Your Blog is Separate from your Website
When blogging, you should make sure that your blog is an extension of your website.
For example: digitux.com.au/blog
If your blog is not an extension of your website, this might mean that you are:
a) Using a sub domain – example: blog.digitux.com.au
b) Using a free blogging platform such as WordPress or Blogger – example: company.wordpress.com
While there are many different ways to blog and setup your blog, you are most likely to see the best results if you use the URL extension of your website – abc.com.au/blog
If you need help setting up your blog? Simple – just contact us.
2. Your Blog is Sales or Product Oriented
With the goal of any business being to essentially make a profit, it’s important to sideline this factor if you want to make a success out of your blog.
Blogs exist to provide useful, relevant content to the reader, and if you’re not providing anything useful to your readers, they won’t hang around very long. Needless to say, if they don’t bother reading your blog, they are very unlikely to go ahead and make a purchase or enquiry with you. Plus, Google knows all, and if users aren’t spending long on your blog, they won’t be placing it very highly in the SERPs.
Remember, tying in a call to action or relevant product link within your blog post is fine, but if it screams ‘buy from us!’ then it’s probably not worth your time writing the post.
3. Infrequent Blog Posts
Blogging is a BIG commitment! Once you make the decision to start a blog, it is very important to keep that blog updated on a regular basis. A great way to stay on top of this is to create a schedule and stick to it.
For example: 2 blog posts per week – every Tuesday and Thursday. This way, you are kept accountable and your readers will grow to expect that post from you and be ready waiting to read it.
4. Publishing Off Topic Content
Blogging is not always an easy task but if it’s not relevant to your targeted user, or you are struggling to come up with posts – hold off posting until you have the best quality content. Blogging is much more about quality than quantity.
Remember to make your blogs relevant to your industry so that you appear as a credible, trustworthy source for readers.
5. No Room for Content Engagement
The best way to keep readers and grow your reader base further, is to engage them. The more engaged a user is, the more likely they are to post comments, ask or answer questions or create a following on social media.
You can help this process along by asking your reader questions, inserting comment boxes, or including social share buttons on your blog posts.
6. Use SEO
SEO can help give your blog posts that extra boost, so be sure to always use SEO best practices when writing each blog post. This will enable Google to easily index your content (i.e. all your hard work) and give you the opportunity to increase readership. Easy on-page SEO wins for your blog post might include:
- H1 Tag
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Content optimisation
7. Poor Blog Design
There’s nothing worse than clicking onto a blog only to find that it’s a scrambled mess! Even if the content is the best content anyone has ever written, if it’s not well laid out for readers – it won’t get read!
What’s more, you should always have the option for readers to easily subscribe, get in contact with you or follow or share your content on social media.
8. Ignoring Blog Analytics
It might be easy to ignore your blog analytics and assume there’s nothing important in there, but it can actually prove very insightful. For instance, a quick check of your analytics may just reveal your:
- most engaging posts or topics
- least engaging posts or topics
- time spent on a post
- clicks on a post
9. Expecting Overnight Success
Like anything worthwhile, blogging success does not happen overnight. It takes consistent, engaging and relevant content to be provided, read and shared in order to gain success in the long term. When you’re just starting out, it might seem like Everest awaits you, but give it time and you’ll see how quickly things can start to move up.
