The first thing you need to do when you decide to become a blogger is to study the most successful bloggers and blogs around, especially those in the same blogging niche as you.

You must know the blogging mistakes you shouldn’t make or stop making in order to become a successful blogger. Most pro bloggers share their experiences on their blogs, so it’s not such a hard information to gather.

Blogging is a fantastic occupation I must say, but it becomes less fantastic if nobody reads your blog posts. Another thing that makes blogging more interesting is the money involved.

If you are not getting enough visits to your blog or making enough money with your blog, then you must be making a few of the blogging mistakes I will be discussing in this post.

Blogging is very easy, but also not very easy (does that even make sense?). OK let’s see… urrrhhh… It’s like a needle, so light to carry along with you all your life, yet so small that you can look for it all your life if buried under a desert sand (pardon my old-fashioned nature).

There’s a blogging pattern that works, most successful bloggers have realized this pattern, they keep applying it on new blogs, and it keeps working. Whereas, some other bloggers are struggling to get even a single blog up and running.

I don’t want to get you all bogged down with a lengthy writeup, so I’ll move straight to the main reason you clicked to read this blog post.

The 10 blogging mistakes you should not make or must stop making in order to become a successful blogger are:

1. Not posting enough quantity and quality:

One of the things you must first realize as a new blogger is that search engines give preference to quality and highly readable blog posts.

Remember this, people don’t determine the rank of your posts, google bots, bing bots and other search engine bots do. So you must understand how these bots work and use them to yiour advantage.

You can easily check the readability of your blog posts on WordPress using a plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin has made it very easy for me to detect poor grammatical constructions (the plugin rates the readability of your article).

Apart from the quality of your posts, quantity also matters a lot. Your minimum blog post should not be less than 300 words, as advised by search engine experts. However, I personally don’t think just 300 words is enough (can you even explain anything with just 300 words?).

Take a look at Neil Patel for instance, his blog posts are usually not less than 2000 words , and this has given his blog some sort of reputation among search engines. You can hardly see a post of his that’s not among top ten on that particular topic.

2. Random Niches:

Specifying on a particular blogging niche can also give you a search engine presence. Whenever people type in keywords related to your blogging niche, you stand the chance of appearing among search results.

Focusing on a particular blogging niche helps to grow your knowledge about that niche, people tend to believe you are highly knowledgeable when it comes to any topic centering around your niche. And as a result of this, they keep coming around more often to hear from you.

Randomizing your blog posts prevents you from creating proper internal links, and internal links are very important if you want to get your audience more engaged. Besides getting your audience engaged, it also plays a massive role in building your search engine presence.

3. Incoherent blog posts:

This is one of the blogging mistakes I can hardly leave out. There are many ways you can exhibit what I call incoherent blog posts. If you don’t have a set frequency or duration of time it takes for you to write new articles, it’s going to hurt your blog visits.

People need to realize how often you drop your new posts… whether daily, weekly, or bi-weekly. Don’t make your audience feel disappointed when they come around and do not see any new article on your blog.

Another way to exhibit incoherent blog posts is by getting people to click on your blog posts because you have given it a compelling title, but when they start reading, they discover your writeup is off mark. This is a blogging sin you must never commit.

Most people that visit will never forgive you for luring them to click on a post and they end up reading something different or not very much related to the title. Except you are looking to generate one time visits to your posts, there’s no point using this method (this method works for news blogs though).

4. Poor Blog Promotion:

There are a lot of free resources out there for easy blog promotion. You must be able to make good use of these resources. The biggest platforms to promote your blog contents for free are social networks. you need to leverage on the vast opportunity provided by social networks.

Most new blogger feel so scared to share their blog posts on social networks with friends. They feel like their writeup is just not there yet… or the look and design of their blog is not good enough. My take is that, if you are so scared to share your own blog posts, how do you expect others to share it? So promotion of your blog contents must start with you ASAP.

Apart from social networks, there’s nothing wrong in spending small amount of money to promote your most useful blog posts on paid advertising platforms. These platforms will generate good traffic for your business, and if you convert those traffic properly, you’ll end up making more sales.

5. Not offering Freebies:

As we all know, people love free things (we all do). people will visit your blog more often if you offer freebies. I’ve visited a couple of blogs a few times just to make use of their free services.

Over at Neil Patel’s website (pardon me to use him again), he has a free tool for analyzing your website, checking your most used keywords, and areas you must improve on. so you don’t have to be actively involved in the freebies you offer.

6. Not doing enough keyword research:

Keyword research is one of the most needed, useful, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. You should be able to predict articles that will make your blog rank high.

However, It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. So there’s no point ranking for a key word that will not bring you any sales. I could decide to rank for the keyword “a cat turned dog” (silly me right?). Doesn’t necessarily have to be that silly though. Your utmost goal should be getting traffic that brings you sales.

There are a lot of free resources available for you to do a proper keyword research, most especially if you blog from WordPress, there are a lot of plugins you can easily integrate to your website to enable you do a proper keyword research.

7. Not giving your audience what they want:

Now if you are really going to grow a successful blog, you must be able to spot the needs of your audience. You must be able to realize the highest search keywords that land visitors to your blog.

There are a lot of useful tools out there that can help you know all these useful information; one of them is Google Analytics, I find it very useful whenever I’m trying to gather such information. Another way you can get to know what your audience needs is by following their comments on your blog posts. In fact, you can get your next blog topic from the questions they ask.

8. Not replying comments on your blog posts:

Now this is a very important one. Even if you make a few of the other blogging mistakes, please do not make this one. I myself, I’ve always had a personal beef with any blogger that doesn’t answer my very important questions (just kidding).

But to be frank with you, I know sometimes the schedule might be a little bit tight for you as a blogger, but you must always try to find time to provide replies to the comments on your blog posts.

Most importantly, answer all questions asked, so that people will always feel comfortable coming back to visit your blog since they know you will always provide answers to their questions. You don’t have to give lengthy answers, just a short reply would do.

That way, the person would not feel like he had talked to a brick of wall. Also, people will always feel comfortable coming back to visit your blog if they know you will always provide answers to their questions.

9. Not taking your blog as your business:

The moment you decide to monetize your blog, your blog becomes your business, and your business becomes your blog. Not having this in mind is road to failure.

Especially for start-up bloggers, you need to put in immense energy at first before you start to get good results. Thereafter, maintenance becomes a bit easier.

10. Not building your mailing list:

It’s a huge blogging sin if you don’t try to build your mailing list. many people like to scroll past social media updates, but one thing most people will never overlook is an email notification, So the earlier you start to build your mailing list, the better.

Another thing is that, you cannot always trust search engines to generate visitors to your blog, especially because of their constant knack for randomizing their search ranking policy. so what bails you out when google decides not to give you traffic anymore? your email list of course.

I hope having said all these, you are able to realize one or two blogging mistakes you have been making.

Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to get access to tutorials faster than anyone else.