Blogging for beginners: 5 Blogging mistakes you should avoid

You have started your blog for a purpose, right? And if you have just started your blog, you are a beginner blogger (duh!).

The “beginner blogger” status is a very crucial stage in your blogging journey because the initial steps and decisions you take at this stage will decide the course of your blogging business. And blogging in the beginning stage is quite a challenge.

And its usually normal to make a lot of mistakes while starting out. But that need not be the case with blogging, especially these days.

A while back bloggers had no clue about what blogging is and how it could help their businesses. So they did lots of mistakes through their journey and learned things by experience.

Of course a lot of time, energy and probably money is wasted while you make mistakes. Even though you learn lots of stuff via the experience, making mistakes is no joke, especially when your time and money are involved.

But these days are different. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel because there are lots of blogging advice on the internet. Even if all of them are not helpful, you can still find genuine advice of established bloggers who share tips with you on a day today basis.

You could leverage on that information these days.

Yet, I find that most bloggers keep doing the following mistakes. Let me open up my mind!

Don’t start a blog without a clear plan

If you have been following my writing you can find me saying this often. Why? Because in my opinion this is one of the most deadly mistakes a blogger could do.

I did that and I wasted about 2 years of my blogging time without any meaningful progress. The time, money and efforts invested on those 2 years were merely wasted.

This is no joke! And this is why I urge newbie bloggers to wake up and identify their blogging purpose and get clarity.

If you can’t see what’s ahead you won’t be able to continue your journey and certainly, you won’t be able to succeed.

That might be a negative, discouraging statement but it is plain truth. I don’t want to give you a fake sugar coated encouragement saying that it will be OK. It won’t be.

If you start a blog without a clear purpose, you will lose big time. And these days, you cannot afford to lose years in experimentation because the competition is pretty high and the online world is moving forward pretty fast.

Beginner bloggers! Don’t quit your day job, yet

If you have just started a blog and if you are still on your day job, don’t quit it just yet. In my case I waited for about 3 years into blogging before I gave this a thought.

I understand that it will be pretty hard for you to manage your time across the various blogging tasks while at the same time working on your day job.

Your regular job will take out the major portion of your day and if you blog alongside, your blogging-related tasks will be taken towards the side.

Your main focus would be your day job as it will demand so.

Especially in the last 6 months of my part-time blogging period I found it extremely challenging to keep up with both my day job and my (substantially increased) blogging activities.

However I waited until I found the time to be right in order to make that decision.

I see many newbie bloggers jump into making a bold decision of quitting their day job. Of course quitting your day job and becoming a full time blogger makes you an entrepreneur where you run a real business in a dedicated manner.

But initial times are rough and the tide is usually high and unpredictable.

You could have earned $1000 a month in client services or product sales, and the next month it could be $100 or even nothing.

As a newbie blogger, you have not yet established a stable online business that will bring you a stable income. It is a phase where almost everything fluctuates erratically.

And if you make a decision to quit your day job just by getting excited by seeing your 2 months’ income, you are making a mistake.

As I said, I waited 2 years before I made the decision to quit the job (and the additional one year was because I could not officially leave as my then project was running and my boss was not happy with the idea of me leaving research for business – even now he is not happy :))

Serious advice for beginner bloggers – Don’t ignore SEO

Newbie bloggers often think SEO is scary. I can relate to that, given that there are numerous, unexpected search engine algo updates that are released quite often. Things have changed a lot and they continue to change.

But with SEO, the basics are always the same. And it is never this easier to please people and search engines at the same time without having to learn shady techniques or having to invest in software that cost you a leg and an arm.

All the search algo updates have made it easier for the genuine bloggers. Now, if you create high quality, useful content, you will be good to go.

But that doesn’t stop you from ignoring SEO totally.

You should be aware of the on-page SEO techniques, keyword research, and stuff like that.

Invest time to learn the basics and implement them in your business.

Do not ignore SEO just because you are a newbie and do not convince yourself that you will learn SEO at a later time.

Stop creating value-less content

Newbie bloggers are very excited. It is because they have started something new.

While I understand the urge to publish as many blog posts as you can, it is really important that you make sure the content you publish is of very high quality and that it provides value.

Every value-less content you publish is like garbage you add-on to your site. And you will come back later to delete it or update it. That is waste of time.

And think about how people will react to your useless content when they land on your site!

When you are building your blog, especially in the “newbie” stage, you need to be very cautious about keeping a high quality standard throughout your blog – across all of your content.

For this you need to be able to create high quality content on a regular basis on your blog. I highly recommend you to pick up my content creation course “How to create killer content for your business?”

Even your static pages should be of value to the readers. They should be useful to them somehow.

If there is a page or a blog post on your blog that is of sub-par quality ditch it or update it.

And, if you are about to hit that “Publish” button, analyze the content carefully to verify its quality.

If it does not keep up with your standards (and I hope you have your bar set quite high enough) don’t publish it.

Take your time to improve its quality before publishing.

Don’t ignore networking

This is yet another crucial thing newbie bloggers ignore. They think that they can start building a network after they become established. They think that the most important thing right now is to add content to their site.

While it is true that you should be focusing a lot on building your blog, you cannot succeed without a community.

With blogging it never is a one man/woman show. You need people. Coz as I often say you are building your blog for people and real people are the ones who will be doing business with you.

If you neglect to make contacts you are missing out big. And the earlier you start connecting with people, the faster will be your blog’s growth.

You could join blogging communities like Bizsugar, DoSplash (owned by yours truly), Klinkk and the like. You could actively participate in discussions in social media.

You could do blog commenting to make connections with the blogger and his/her audience.

Guest blogging is another smart way to make new connections.

Online world is a wonderful place to connect to a lot of like-minded people – you will never run out of options.

But the point here is to NOT ignore networking and you should start doing it right from the beginning.

Blogging for beginners: Are you making these mistakes?

As I said, making mistakes is an unavoidable thing with anything, and blogging is no exception. But times have changed a lot and you have enormous (even, overwhelming) advice on the matter.

Since you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, you can avoid a lot of these mistakes.

Making these mistakes will not only slow down your progress but will also ruin your investments (your time, money, efforts etc.).

I hope I have covered the most common mistakes. Let me know what I missed. And let me know if you are doing any of these mistakes right now!