So you have been blogging for some time but have noticed that your readers are not as engaged as they used to be and the numbers are stagnant? You could also be starting out this year and you want to take off with as few mistakes as possible; well here are some you should avoid at all costs.
- To publish later
You have been working on a blog post for hours or days (for the long reads) and you think it is not perfect yet so you postpone and for procrastinators, we are known to take just one more day, how about three more days and so it goes until the story becomes stale. There goes another chance to make an impact in the blogosphere with a good story and who knows whose eye it would have caught?
Granted, sometimes people keep a good post for perfection …what if it could be juicier, with more details, better jokes, or flashier images, or what if it was longer and so it goes. Perfect can get in the way of a good post so if it is accurate, devoid of grammatical errors please publish it and you can keep updating as new developments come up.
- Please don’t plagiarise
A certain writer is getting all the glory and the traffic; areas where you are really struggling and you so you just opt to steal their work in broad daylight.
Well, it is good work, so you may have some of the traffic only that you do not have the monopoly of the internet and it will not be long, before some of the people trooping to your site recognize the plagiarised work and call you out for it. Remember what they say about trust and once you lose it? Maintain your credibility despite the number of followers being small; you will still be growing organically.
Alternatively, you can get that content and cite the person who wrote it first and that will be a win-win situation as you will both benefit. Some search engines like Google take plagiarism very seriously and you may find yourself penalized which will affect your growth and subsequent earnings.
- The audience is king?
Remember the old adage the customer is always right? In this regard, we can argue the audience is your customer. The audience was drawn to you in the first place because of a reason and over time you have lost your persona and now they just can’t relate. Most people end their blog posts with a call to action and that is good but once you have lost your persona your audience will not be compelled to take any action.
You should take your time to understand what matters to your audience and take it upon yourself to bridge it with your content and its persona. Some bloggers write for themselves and the rest of you do not matter to them in any way and this ultimately never works for them. As you put pen to paper, you should also consider the challenges, points of pain, deliverables, and the quest for opportunities that come with your audience.
- Your writing is too formal
Ever read a post that takes away all of you and by the time you are one you are so tired and would never want to put your friends and relatives through the pain of also reading it? So you don’t share it at all and this is if you get to the end of the post. Granted, some topics can be quite serious but that is no reason to write them like your last thesis.
Make your writing compelling so that the reader does not have a choice but to follow it to the end. These days you can include so many things apart from just a single photo in the writing. You can include cartoons, memes, anecdotes, and so on. Most people will fill up their writing with so much jargon and the reader often gets tired of that because they have to drop off for the meaning and you can do this so many times.
- Remember not to digress too much
When writing we can sometimes go and on and on about ourselves and leave very little, if anything, to the point that we originally wanted to make. It is very important to state the point earlier on and as you digress in and an out of the article. Keep reminding the reader in different ways about the topic at hand; if you digress too much an away from the point you could very easily lose your reader.
- Being too broad about the working topic
When starting out, most people will go for broad topics which entail so many nuances and details and you have to really put in some hard work to tackle the topic to the satisfaction of the reader. If you want to get smaller but better quality audiences you should work with more specific topics. Remember it is easier to convert quality, targeted audiences into customers.
If you are unable to come up with the best and catchy titles you can always turn to software that is specifically created for that purpose. As you know, working titles are not the last title; they just exist to guide you and once you are done writing you can come up with the best title yet.