Blogging is the best way for an entrepreneur to fully articulate their thoughts in a unique way. Your blog has the potential to add tremendous value in a much larger conversation surrounding your target audience. The key is avoiding blogging mistakes.
Many entrepreneurs are unaware of some serious blogging mistakes that are killing their blog’s momentum and message. Avoid these six blogging mistakes and your blog will jump off life support and stand out from the crowd.
1. Writing for the wrong audience
As you develop your target audience, know what they’re wanting to hear. Don’t write about cat names if your target audience is C-level business executives. You will at the least disappoint them, and at the worst, drive them away. Know your audience and add valuable content to an ongoing conversation. If you’re not writing to your audience’s interests, they will find someone else who is.
2. Writing long posts
Too many blog posts are close to a thousand words, almost twice the length of an ideal blog post of 500 words (+/-). The argument that excellent content will always outweigh a reader’s attention span is now an urban myth in our ADD culture. Unless you’re breaking up content with rich images, bullet-points, quotes, or videos, a thousand words quickly translate to a snooze fest.
Be succinct and get to the point!
3. Being unclear or unfocused
Napoleon Bonaparte demanded three things from all of his couriers: be clear, be clear, be clear. The value of clarity in your content is immeasurable. Your brand’s voice needs to be unmistakable, calculated, and intentional. Your audience needs to know who you are, why you wrote what they just read, and why they should keep reading.
4. Writing for SEO, not for your audience
Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, whatever the animal name search engine algorithm may be, here’s the truth: search engines are not people, your audience is. Write for your audience. Yes, include keywords, optimize, don’t ignore SEO altogether, but don’t make it your primary focus.
It’s worth repeating: write for people, not robots.
5. Not using images or videos
If you want to capture and hold attention, use pixels. Marketing research shows again and again that rich imagery draws traffic much more than any quality of content. Be picky when it comes to choosing which images will highlight your content. I typically search at least 100-200 images on various sites before landing on the exact image I want to use.
6. Being inconsistent
The number one reason most blogs die is because their owners starve them. If you don’t feed a blog with consistently good content, it will die. Put a writing schedule in place, whether it’s once a week, day, month, whatever is consistent and at least somewhat frequent. Then, stick with it! If you need to carve out time to write great content, think of what you need to give up to make blogging a priority.
