Avoid These Common Blogging Mistakes and You’ll Soon Hit Your Stride

Everyone makes mistakes when first starting out with a new endeavor in life, and bloggers are no different.

As you come down from your initial high of rolling out your new blog it is important to take stock of your situation and to understand best practices as you move forward.

Avoiding the most common blogging mistakes during the initial stages of your new online platform will be crucial in setting yourself up for sustained growth and success.

Let’s discuss some of the major blogging mistakes early bloggers make, and some of your options to avoid the mess to begin with.

You Post Too Often

This can be a tricky one as it relates to your overall strategy. Yes, you want to feed your audience quality content regularly. But, you need to be cognizant of your personal situation to understand if your model is one that can be sustained over the long haul.

As douchy as it sounds, blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.

Don’t approach your content creation as a sprint and then fizzle out within a couple of weeks. There are real dangers to posting too much content too early.

You may become burned out. You may run out of ideas. You may oversaturate your audience with too much content.

If you are fortunate enough to have a backlog of content ideas, bank them and save them for future posts. Determine what your ideal (sustainable) posting schedule will look like and then start to schedule all of your content ideas within that framework.

That may be once a week, twice a week, or more. Just make sure you understand your future ability to keep up with the blog so you can set your schedule from the beginning.

This will not only help you control the flow of information but will also help your audience become familiar with your publishing schedule so they know what to expect.

You Don’t Set Up Your Baseline Environment

There are core components to every blog that need to be established as your baseline. This is your environment that you will be living in for the foreseeable future so it needs to be clean and prepped for use.

Do you have all of your widgets and plugins set, updated, and optimized?

Do you have your blog backup established and scheduled routinely?

Do you have your publishing calendar created and configured?

Do you have your opt-in setup, configured, tested, and working?

It’s important to set up your baseline platform so you can move forward without distractions and with confidence in your overall blog ecosystem.

You Act Promiscuous

As a new blogger, one of your first tasks is to make a name for yourself and to grow your audience. In fact, that is probably your biggest, and most difficult, task ahead of you.

But, don’t simply jump from platform to platform signing up for accounts thinking you’ll come back and nurture that environment to grow your blog.

Contrary to popular guru teachings, you can’t be everywhere.

I know, I know. It’s really hard not to jump over to blab, Anchor, Snapchat, etc and start to engage with folks. You think this is the best way to grow your platform but in reality, it may be setting you back.

Do some core analysis of the potential that platform may have for your business and then maybe get engaged on it.

What typically happens is the new blogger jumps out into the social media fray, signs up for everything, engages a little bit, then completely loses track of where and what they signed up for.

When you do decide to exercise your option of engaging on a social media platform, write it down and track the fact that it is now part of your online platform.

You Become Defeated Too Soon

You have to have a stomach for the fight ahead of you. Blogging is hard as hell. Don’t let anyone fool you and tell you it’s easy to grow your list and to pull 5-figures after 6 months. That’s bullshit.

You need to understand that it is going to take some time, significant time sometimes, for you to make a dent and to gain some traction.

Too many bloggers become discouraged and defeated within the first year because they don’t see the growth they have put in their own minds.

Understand that you are partaking on a journey that may be years before it bears fruit. That’s why it is so important that you truly love what you are doing. If you feel it’s a task or just something else you “need to do”, then you’ll never be successful. But, if you love the process, the writing, the community, and the journey – strap on your seatbelt and enjoy the ride!

Your Takeaways

Yes, blogging is difficult and you are going to make mistakes. But, there is no true personal growth without experiencing some level of setback.

Understand some of the common mistakes new bloggers make so hopefully you can side-step them when they jump out in front of you. Press forward with the passion you have and ultimately you’ll hit your stride and find the joy you are looking for with your blog or online business.