Blogs and bloggers are one of the big things in the Digital Marketing world. There are common myths about blogging, such as, “you can be rich by just writing a few pieces of content”. Such myths are useless when it comes to blogging. Blogging requires consistent hard work in the right direction.

If you are a blogger and striving to make your blog successful. This post is for you!

Let’s talk about the numbers first, according to DailyChanges.com there are around 130,000 domains registered every day. What does this say? You can be wiped away every day with 100,000 of blogs or sometimes even more if you don’t take the correct digital marketing approach for your blog or website.

Becoming a blogger is easy, but becoming a successful blogger is very hard. We will be discussing in-depth the common mistakes most of the bloggers commit and how you should avoid it.

Let’s get started.

9 Mistakes that Bloggers Commit in Digital Marketing

Not Identifying Goals of Your Blog

“Forget everything and start writing”, you must have heard this statement everywhere when you have entered into the digital marketing stream. That’s the biggest mistake new bloggers commit. The worst thing they do not recognize that they are taking the wrong approach! Though the line sounds good it will take you nowhere in the blogging world.

Every blog has its own goal. Every blogger writes for a reason. You need to find out what your goals are,

Here are few broader types of goals,

1. Building a Personal Brand.
2. Building an Income Source through Publisher and Affiliate Network.
3. Showcase expertise to drive more sales for products.

So here are the three broad types of goals. Almost all bloggers have their goals falling into above categories. Let’s take them one-by-one.

Personal Branding – If you are willing to build your personal brand on the internet, this should be your ideal goal. Personal Brand can help you in many ways. People do it for such common reasons. To gain leads before they actually start a business. People also blog to showcase their creativity in an aim to wrap up a good corporate job.

Building an Income Source – This is the reason why most of the people dive into the blogging stream. There’s nothing wrong in that. But when you get obsessed with greed to earn money with the blog, you start losing your passion. This hurts your creativity and your writing skills.

A blog can be a great source of income, but it takes time and hard work in the right direction to achieve this goal. This is the major reason most of the bloggers fail. They take blogging as a quick source of high income, fortunately, that’s not true. It requires a lot of dedication.

Bloggers build their blog as a source of income with these three common sources,

1. Publishing third party Ads on their blog.
2. Direct Selling of Products.
3. Affiliate Marketing.

You need to find out what your goals are when it comes to building income source for your blogs.

Showcase Expertise to Drive More Sales and Leads – This goal is pretty hot nowadays in the world of digital marketing. If you already have an online business, you can boost your sales with writing regular blog posts on your business niche. This is called content marketing.

Most of the small and established businesses have a blog section on their website. For example, if you have a small e-commerce website for women’s apparel, you can write content related to apparel and dressing sense in your blog section. If the content is really productive you will see significant growth in sales!

So these are the three broader goals explained. You need to figure out what goal you want to achieve with your blogging efforts. Note them on a paper and create content according to your goals.

Not having enough Education in Digital Marketing

Most of the people start a blog right away without having complete or proper info of digital marketing. Some of them know it, but still focus on only one or two channels and SEO is always one of them.

SEO alone cannot make you succeed with your blogging agendas. There are more channels worth considering. Such as Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Newsletter Marketing, paid sources, guest blogging etc.

I’m not saying SEO is bad. It is the hugest source of qualified traffic and that too for free. But SEO takes long time to show results. It requires the month of hard work and patience.

And you as a blogger cannot depend on organic search traffic. You need to pay equal attention to other channels that will benefit you.

You can read about Digital Marketing over here and also other blogs. Just remember one thing, it’s not about reading, it’s all about executing new and creative ideas.

Keyword Research Failure

The world of digital marketing revolves around the usage of keywords. Keywords are the whole key to your success and failure too!

While selecting keywords, many content writers just go onto Google Keyword Planner choose a keyword with medium or massive search volume and stuff those keywords within the content.

This is the biggest mistake you make as a blogger. The reason is, you need to choose a keyword related to your niche first. Then create content related to that keyword or search query that will provide extra value to your readers.

The other mistake that makes blog fail is hitting up either on seed keywords only or the long tail keywords only. Bloggers are just relying on one of them, which hurt blogs in the long run.

I agree as long tail keywords convert better, but you can’t just rely on them. Moreover the belief, long tail keywords are easier to rank is pretty old now. Most of the time long tails are equally hard to rank for. Long tails also have very low search volume.

You need decent traffic, right?

So publishing blog posts on long tails every time is not a good idea!

You need to create an ideal content marketing mix. Use keywords that will bring you decent search traffic, and along with also use long tails that will increase your conversion rate time to time.

A Decent search traffic will get you more eyeballs on your blog with added benefits like, email opt-ins, social shares etc. that will help you build a brand. While long tails will fill decent cash in your pocket!

The absence of Buyer Personas and Reader Personas.

Imagine you are selling pizzas in a medical store! Sounds weird right?

Same is the case with blogging and content marketing. Unless you are particular about who your ideal customers are, you cannot go further. Many of the bloggers avoid making reader personas of their viewers. There is only one problem with that, you don’t get engagement on your content.

Less engagement will give you more bounce sessions, fewer comments and less social shares. The absence of Reader Personas doesn’t show you effect immediately. It shows you its effect in the long run. When you have created lots of high-quality blog posts and there is no second chance to edit them.

You will gradually see a drop in your existing conversions and engagement rate or no increase in both of them. Both of them are harmful to your blog.

So how do you generate Reader Personas and the Buyer Personas?

Simple. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Who will like most to read my content?
2. What age group should they belong to?
3. Who will be interested in purchasing my product? Or what could be their possible interests?
4. What salary package must they have to buy this product?
5. What geographic locations should my customers or readers live in?
6. Which websites do they spend their most of the time?

This 6 questions will help you in generating good Reader and Buyer Personas. You can add more questions to the list according to your business.

Having good persona files help you plan an effective content marketing and social media marketing blueprint for future. This saves you from future hustles.

Choice of Wrong Social Channels

Everybody knows, promoting content on social media channels is important. But very few choose the appropriate ones!

Why choosing the correct platform is important?

Have a look here

It becomes obvious to include social media marketing in your marketing plan. So what three channels you would choose to promote your blog?

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google Plus

Right? I bet most of you chose these three networks first.

Why not,

Instagram

Pinterest

Tumblr

Reddit

The problem with the giant social networks is that they get crowded fast. Especially Facebook. Twitter is more real time, so it’s a must use channel. But Facebook is not that real-time. If you are expecting people come and like your Facebook page for free, it is getting harder day by day.

Moreover, you have a limited reach when you are just starting on Facebook. So instead of Facebook, focus on Pinterest. Create high-quality graphics for Pinterest it will give you more engagement. Once you get decent followership on Facebook, you can get more of it then.

If you have photography blog or a blog related o artwork, probably Instagram is more favorable to your blog.

The point is, you need to choose social networks the smart way. Not every channel is made for you and your blog!

Writing Boring Content

Many bloggers believe that writing super complex blog posts and the thesis will gain them personal brand and lot of viewership. They write big essays with complex English words with big paragraphs. Who are you trying impress here, you high school teachers?

If you write in this fashion no one will bother to read. How productive it may be, it won’t get engaged. Keep it simple and sweet. Use small lines. 4 lines max per paragraph. It should not look boring.

When it comes to blog posts, another mistake that makes bloggers fail in the long run is the lack of enough depth. Longer blog posts tend to receive good search rankings in the longer run. That does not mean write anything to increase the length of the article.

Cover all angles while writing. If you don’t do it, someone else will and snatch a big chunk of traffic from search engines. The copy should be around 1500 words minimum.

You can have a look at my blog. My in-depth guides cross 3500 words, sometimes even more.

Absence of consistency in publishing fresh content

Often on the internet, it is said that you need not publish multiple posts in a single week. This fact applies to established blogs. Blogs which have good domain authority. If you have a brand new blog and if you follow this rule, it will slow down your blog’s growth.

The reason behind this is a bit technical. As you know search bots crawl millions of websites every day. The websites that have backlinks from authority sites are always on the priority.

In this scenario when you are starting with a fresh blog and do not update your blog with fresh content search bots will decrease the crawl rate. I have experienced this with my own blog. When the crawl rate decreases, it’s real hard to pull it back to normal.

Publish at least 2 High-Quality blog posts every week to ensure your site gets crawled more often.

Moreover, if you publish consistently it sends a positive signal to your readers. This makes them return to your blog more often.

Neglecting off-page SEO

All of us know the importance of SEO. SEO being divided into two types, On-page, and Off-page. Everyone is good at On-page SEO. Optimizing keywords in important areas of blog pages. It’s easy to handle. But it is only the half part of the SEO.

You need to build a concrete off-page SEO plan too. Off-Page SEO consists of building backlinks to your website and blog posts. Promoting your content on social networks etc. The most important thing is building backlinks.

If you want massive search traffic you need to build high-quality backlinks to your website. To build high quality back links you need to partner with other bloggers in your niche. Guest Posting at authority sites will also help you in gaining high-quality backlinks.

The hardest part of SEO is building backlinks, but it pays off in the long run. Once you start hitting the top 5 results for keywords, you will earn natural backlinks because most of the people know that it’s hard to get in the top 5 results. If they see your page in the results it sends a positive indication that your post is highly productive. This makes them link to you every time.

Not Reacting To Analytics Data

Perfection is overrated. Nothing is perfect especially in the space of digital marketing, there will be some errors all the time. You need to iterate on it. One of the deadly mistakes that digital marketers make is not iterating on the content marketing plan.

No content marketing blueprint is perfect. You need to improve your plan along with marketing efforts. How to find the errors in content marketing? Simple. Google Analytics.

If you are a new blogger, you start publishing high-quality content on your blog. You will need at least one month from your website being indexed to see some useful data in google analytics dashboard.

Once you start getting data, start observing and pointing out the loopholes in your plan. You can find what type of content got shared the most. Likewise, you can also find what made people bounce back from your blog posts.

Observing those numbers can easily tell you what worked and what not. You need to craft your marketing plan on behalf of these numbers. This will ensure you and your blog progress in the right direction.

Conclusion

We have seen the top 9 Mistakes most of the bloggers commit which leads them deep into the failure! There are around 200,000 blog posts published every day. Some are highly useful and some are useless. To become a successful blogger you need to first identify your niche and then the target audience.

If you publish high quality and problem-solving content well aligned with your target audience’s mind. There is nothing that can stop you from being a successful blogger.