14 Blogging Mistakes You Might Be Making (And How To Fix Them)

Some blogging mistakes can seriously hinder your blog’s growth.

What’s worse is that a lot of them aren’t always obvious. Especially when you’re just getting started.

Knowing what they are and taking action to fix them is critical.

In this post, you’ll learn the most common blogging mistakes you might be making and how to fix them.

Let’s get into it.

Essential blogging mistakes to avoid

These are some of the most common blogging mistakes to avoid:

1. Using a blog name that doesn’t resonate with your audience.
2. Using a niche that’s too broad.
3. Having no knowledge of your audience’s biggest pain points.
4. Publishing blog posts without developing a content strategy.
5. No variety in the content types you use.
6. Choosing quantity over quality.
7. Only using a single stream of revenue.
8. Publishing content that does not align with your main revenue source.
9. Too much reliance on your host’s backups.
10.  Only using link posts on social media.
11.  Not using a social media scheduling tool.
12.  Having no strategy for social media management.
13.  Not repurposing content.
14.  Not using lead magnets.

1. Using a blog name that doesn’t resonate with your audience

If we’re being honest, brand names don’t matter all that much.

Take Amazon, for example. The name has very little to do with the brand’s original purpose: online bookstore.

Jeff Bezos chose the name because it also happened to be the name of one of the largest rivers in the world, and Bezos wanted to create the largest bookstore in the world.

He also liked how a brand name that started with “A” would be alphabetized first in listings.

However, you likely won’t have the luxury of being a pioneer in your niche, so you’re better off taking the opportunity to choose a name that resonates with your audience from the start.

Blogging Wizard, for example, accurately represents our niche, is easy to spell and pronounce, and is quite memorable.

Pin

Check out our guide on choosing a blog name for more tips.

2. Using a broad niche

When you learn about blogging, you’ll come across one piece of advice over and over again, and that’s how important it is to find your niche.

A niche is the main topic a business or blog targets. Some niches act as an umbrella for numerous sub niches. They’re known as broad niches.

Targeting a broad niche is not recommended for new bloggers. This is because broad niches are oversaturated with content and are far too competitive for new blogs to gain any traction in.

Even so, some bloggers somehow miss this piece of advice or outright ignore it and wind up writing blog posts that target keywords that are far too competitive or target a lot of different topics that kind of relate to one another but also sort of don’t.

You’re much better off breaking that broad niche down and targeting a sub niche within it instead. You may even be able to break that sub niche down into additional sub niches.

For example, the broad niche “fishing” can be broken down into the following sub niches:

• Lake fishing
• River fishing
• Deep sea fishing
• Commercial fishing
• Fly fishing
• Ice fishing

Those sub niches can then be broken down into additional sub niches. For example, “lake fishing” can be broken down into the following sub niches:

• Great Lakes fishing
• Muskie fishing
• Bass fishing
• Walleye fishing

Bloggers who don’t make this distinction are now left with the task of not only deciding on a niche but also realigning their content strategy to match it.

If this describes the situation you’re in, read our guide on choosing a niche, then follow these guidelines:

• Use an analytics tool to see what your best blog posts are.
• Use a search engine optimization (SEO) tool to determine what keywords you rank for. Google Search Console is a good free option.
• Consider this data as you decide on a niche. If you’re already ranking for specific keywords within a sub niche of your niche, you’re better off going all in on that sub niche.
• Go through your own blog post by post, and determine if each one directly relates to the sub niche you choose. Delete those that do not, especially if they’re low traffic and do not rank for any keywords.
  • You can also try to see if you can rewrite content so it better aligns with your chosen sub niche.
• Try to only create content for topics that directly relate to your chosen sub niche going forward.

3. Having very little knowledge of the problems your audience faces

One benefit of defining your niche is that it brings you closer to defining your target audience.

Your target audience is made up of individuals who are most likely to visit your website, read your content and purchase any products you offer.

Knowing who these individuals are allows you to do a bit of research on what their biggest struggles are within your chosen sub niche.

Those struggles should then define your content and any products you create. By providing solutions for your target audience, you position yourself as an authority in your niche, one they should consider listening to and buying from.

Determining what value proposition you offer within your niche can help you define this even more.

Use these strategies to conduct research on your target audience:

• Visit forums they frequent, and see what complaints they often make.
• Research your niche on social media to see what your target audience complains about there.
• Do the same for the following sources:
  • Reviews for products related to your niche.
  • The comment section for YouTube videos related to your niche.
  • Reviews for online courses related to your niche.
• Get in touch with members of your target audience, and ask them about their struggles one on one.
• Ask your own audience, either in a broadcast email or a blog post.

4. Publishing blog posts without a definitive content strategy

Starting a blog can be exciting. A new blog has so many different topics they can tackle. You may find yourself publishing blog post after blog post as quickly as the ideas enter your head.

While that may be an exaggeration, it describes a mistake many new bloggers make without even realizing it, and that’s publishing blog posts without properly developing an overarching strategy for them.

A defined content strategy can help you determine what topics to cover and how to cover them.

More importantly, it’ll make your blogging efforts much more effective by increasing the number of leads you generate, improving your traffic and expanding your reach on social media.

Pin

Follow these guidelines to develop a content strategy for your blog:

• Establish primary goals for your blog.
• Research your target audience, and segment them based on their interests and key struggles.
• Audit your existing content to see what type of content/topics worked in the past and what didn’t.
• Examine the current process you use to publish new content, and see if there’s anything you can improve on as well as if there are any processes you can add or remove.
• Examine the current editorial schedule you use to determine if you need to ramp up content production or scale it back to improve the quality of your content.
• Come up with new blog post topics that align with the goals you established and the audience segments you identified.
• Include internal and external links in your content strategy, and add them in optimized places throughout your website.

5. Having very little variety in the types of blog posts you publish

Many new bloggers get in the habit of creating one type of content and sticking with it. Blogs take quite a while to generate revenue, so you’ll mostly be running it on the side of your main job.

Sticking to one content type you’re familiar with is an easy way to keep up with your editorial schedule while you also focus on your main job and any other responsibilities you have in life.

Unfortunately, your biggest competitors are likely putting out much more content than you and have blogs filled with content that would take you years to publish on your own.

Creating different content types gives you the edge you need to stay competitive.

Here are some of the content types you should be creating for your blog:

• Long-form content.
• Guides.
• How-to content.
• List posts.
• Reviews.
• Comparison posts.
• Checklists.
• Case studies.
• Inspiration stories from your audience and experts in your niche.
• Interviews.
• Link-worthy content, such as statistics and trending topics.
• Personal content demonstrating your own journey with your niche.
• Opinionated posts.

6. Focusing on quantity rather than quality and consistency

We’re about halfway through this post, and you’re likely already noticing one trend: there are competitors within your niche who already have more blog posts than you and who are actively publishing more posts than you per week.

Many new bloggers discover this on their own and try to rectify it by publishing a lot of small, low-quality posts on topics their audience cares very little for.

After all, search engines want new posts to crawl, right? And you need new posts to promote on social media to help bring more outside traffic to your site.

This is one of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make. Unfortunately, quality mixed with consistency will always trump quantity.

What we mean is your content strategy should not rely on how many posts you can publish per day or per week. It should rely on how many high-quality posts you can publish per month.

This means researching your audience and your niche to identify what problems they’re having, what they care about most and what keywords aren’t as competitive.

To write a good blog post, you should perform proper keyword research on the topic, research the topic thoroughly and read blog posts from competitors who are already ranking for the topic.

This will give you indicators on the best way to approach the topic.

It’s a much more involved process, which means your content production will actually decrease. Just know that what Google and your audience want to see are high-quality posts that accurately cover the topics they’re targeting.

They also care more about consistency than quantity, so determine how often you can publish high-quality posts long term (be realistic), and stick with that schedule.

7. Only using one revenue stream

When bloggers earn their first dollar, they do everything they can to keep that revenue stream flowing.

This is a good tactic to use to ensure that revenue stream continues to grow. However, it’s important that you also take additional steps on the side to open the floodgates for additional streams of revenue.

Blogging is an unpredictable business model. Changes in Google’s algorithm, social media algorithms, your audience’s interests and your niche in general can have a profound impact on how lucrative your primary revenue stream is.

If you rely on a single revenue stream, and that stream dries up, so does your blogging business.

This is why it’s important to establish multiple revenue streams for your blog.

Here are some common ways bloggers generate revenue:

• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsorship deals
• Display ads
• Subscriptions for premium content
• Memberships for premium website access
• Selling digital products
• Selling online courses
• Selling their own physical products
• Paid webinars and live events
• Donations from readers

8. Focusing on content that does not align with your primary monetization strategy

In our post on blogging tips for photographers, we discussed the importance of aligning your primary monetization strategy with the content you create.

In other words, the topics you cover on your blog should attract the kind of audience that’s most likely to convert with whatever business model you choose.

In the post linked above, we described the BACM framework, which stands for:

• Business – The business model you use, as in how you primarily earn your revenue.
• Audience – Your niche as well as your core customer base.
• Content – The topics you mostly cover and the content types you mostly use.
• Marketing – Your primary source for marketing.

The goal is to get all four of these components in alignment.

In our post, we used this example of a business whose content strategy is not aligned with their monetization strategy:

• Business – Freelance photographer.
• Audience – Wedding photography.
• Content – Reviews for camera gear.
• Marketing – Social media.

The issue here is that product reviews for camera gear are not the type of content consumers interested in freelance wedding photography services would read.

Here’s the example we gave of a business whose content is aligned with their monetization strategy:

• Business – Affiliate marketer.
• Audience – Aspiring photographers.
• Content – Camera gear reviews, comparison posts and list posts.
• Marketing – Organic search traffic from Google.

Use each component of the BACM framework to describe your business, and make sure your content aligns with your primary revenue stream, target audience and the way you promote your content.

If anything is out of alignment, decide which component is most important to you, and realign everything else to match it.

9. Relying on your host’s backups

Hopefully, you’re hosting your blog with a reputable web host who offers daily backups and stores at least two weeks worth of your most recent backups.

When a site gets hacked or an update causes things to break, sometimes the best fix is to revert the site back to a time when it functioned normally.

In this case, having two weeks worth of your most recent backups is very useful as it gives you 14 different versions of your site to revert back to if things go wrong.

Unfortunately, your host’s backups are not immune to trouble. For this reason, it’s best to keep your own backups alongside the ones your host stores for you.

We mostly recommend BlogVault for WordPress sites. Check out our post on backup plugins for WordPress to learn about a few more backup solutions.

10. Only sharing link posts to social media

New bloggers know enough about marketing to know that they should use social media to promote blog content.

Unfortunately, in our post on the best times to post to social media, which included data from a few studies Buffer has conducted on millions of social media posts, we discovered link posts to be the worst types of posts to publish to social media when it comes to engagements.

A link post is a social media post that contains a headline for an article, a short blurb that describes the article, a featured image for the article and a hyperlink attached to that featured image that leads to the article.

You mostly see them on Facebook, Twitter (X) and LinkedIn.

Pin

Video posts and image posts receive the most engagements on social media.

So, instead of simply sharing a link to your latest blog post on social media, come up with a few ways to turn your post into its own social media post.

Create short videos, and publish them as TikToks, Instagram/Facebook reels and YouTube shorts.

You don’t need to talk in these videos. Using an automated voice or a combination of text overlays and background music will suffice.

Here’s an example from our TikTok account:

You should also try to turn your articles into infographics and share them on social media as well.

11. Publishing social media content manually to each platform

Running a blog is hard enough on its own. Managing multiple social media accounts just adds more problems to your list.

Fortunately, there’s an easier way to publish to multiple social media channels, and that’s with the use of a social media scheduling tool.

With a social media scheduling tool like SocialBee, you can create social media posts for multiple social media platforms from a single draft.

You can also create queues for social media publishing, which are a large collection of social media posts just waiting to be published or republished.

Pin

In short, social media scheduling tools are a godsend for bloggers, especially solo bloggers who handle everything on their own.

12. Ignoring social media management

Piggybacking off of our last blogging mistake, many new bloggers tend to ignore social media management as it only adds more and more responsibilities for an already overworked blogger to handle.

Social media management involves responding to comments, flagging spam, responding to direct messages (DM) and monitoring brand mentions.

One of the reasons this aspect of social media marketing can seem so cumbersome is because it usually involves logging into a platform’s app manually, opening each post that has a comment, responding to each comment, then responding to each DM before starting the whole process over with the next social media platform.

The solution to this problem is a social media management tool, and fortunately, many social media scheduling tools include social media management features.

These tools allow you to respond to comments and DMs and view mentions of your brand from a single dashboard. Some of them offer this in the form of an inbox, whilst others use social streams.

Pin

Managing all of this early on will help you develop a rock solid social media marketing strategy.

13. Always creating new content instead of repurposing old content

This is a blogging strategy many amateur bloggers often overlook.

When you’ve been blogging for a few months or more, you start to grow your very own library of content. What many fail to realize is the potential that library has for other forms of content.

For example, you can combine a few blog posts and create an ebook out of them.

You can simplify a how-to article into a short video, and share it on social media.

Just like we did with this YouTube Short:

You can even turn a blog post into an infographic that has the potential to be shared across multiple blogs and social media profiles in your niche.

Check out our post on repurposing content if you need more ideas on how to tackle this blogging strategy.

14. Using email forms without lead magnets

Finally, one of the biggest blogging mistakes new bloggers make is using this call to action (CTA) on every email form across their sites:

“Subscribe to our newsletter.”

It’s perfectly okay to use this CTA on some email forms. However, if you truly want new visitors to take action and actually subscribe to your email list, you need to give them some sort of incentive to do so.

That’s what lead magnets are for. They’re something you offer in exchange for your visitor subscribing to your email list.

Here are a few common lead magnets bloggers use:

• Ebook
• Free download
  • Checklist
  • Resource PDF
  • Cheatsheet
• Free consultation
• White paper
• Free trial
• Workbooks

The most important aspect of lead magnets is ensuring the lead magnet you offer aligns with the content you’re promoting them in.

Final thoughts

That wraps up our list of blogging mistakes to avoid.

Successful bloggers produce high-quality content, but they also analyze every aspect of their blogs and marketing strategies and optimize both wherever they can.

Producing SEO blog posts that target primary keywords in your niche is important, but so is producing high-quality content that aligns with your customer base and primary source of revenue.

If you want to get started on your blogging journey, check out our guide on how to start your own blog.