Creating great blogs is a central element of content marketing. But there are some blogging errors to look out for that you should be sure to avoid.
Blogging is a crucial aspect of a digital marketing strategy. Attractive, authoritative blogs with good SEO, high-quality images, and copywriting that appeals right to the heart of the needs and wants of a target audience can go a long way to turning them into customers.
It can do this in several ways:
Firstly, it builds up awareness of you and your firm
It increases the chance that they will take actions to become marketing leads
By capturing their attention, they will keep on reading your blogs
Quality blogs that gain lots of attention will build up your authority, boosting your organic ranking on search engines
All this is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. It can complement other measures such as the use of PPC (to build up leads before your organic SEO authority is established), social media posts, and email marketing.
So far, so good. But there is a right way to go about blogging and many wrong ways to blog. The following are common, but avoidable errors.
1. Forgetting about your audience is the biggest blogging error
The ideal blog should focus closely on your buyer persona, an archetype of the characteristics of your ideal customer. This will include the following aspects:
Demographics such as age, sex, and geography
Situations such as marital status, career, or income
Most importantly, their needs and wants that you want to offer solutions for
However, it can be very easy for bloggers to lose sight of this. That could be through getting carried away with writing something that may seem very entertaining or stylish but doesn’t communicate to the target audience. Or it might happen because the correct buyer persona has not been identified, so the blog fails to reach the right targets.
All that means a great deal of effort could be wasted.
2. Sacrifice quality for quantity
It is certainly true that you need to blog a lot to be effective. But there is a right way to go about it.
The right way is to make sure you are regularly producing high-quality content, gradually building up your authority on search engines as you go along. In addition, producing numerous blogs makes it possible for those interested in what you are writing about to encounter your marketing messages several times.
The rule of seven – where the average person needs to see a marketing message seven times before they commit to a purchase – is particularly relevant here.
Where bloggers can go wrong is to think the solution is to produce as many blogs as they can write, churning out as many as they can in any given week.
In doing that, it can be too easy to sacrifice quality for quantity, which is pointless because if the blog is not interesting or attractive, it will not gain much readership and could lower your authority on search engines. Sometimes, as the saying goes, “less is more”. So, focusing just on quantity is one of the most important blogging errors.
3. Not having a schedule
The best way to make sure you produce the right amount of content and post it at the right times is to have a schedule. Whether it is on a weekly or monthly basis, draw up a calendar and plan what you are writing and when.
This has various advantages:
Your content is regular: You are not writing lots one week and nothing the next
You can produce a series of blogs on a theme over time to maintain reader interest
You keep a record of what you are writing so that you avoid duplicating topics
Your blogging can fit in with the rest of your marketing schedule
By not having a schedule, you can end up writing in a very unplanned, haphazard way that undermines your overall digital marketing strategy, while your readers have no idea when your next article might appear.
4. Neglect backlinks SEO is essential to your blogs and most people will have realised that they need to have good keywords in them to help optimize the blogs and ensure the highest possible ranking.
Many will also be aware of the value that good images can add, with video also being extremely useful, while authority is very important in helping raise a ranking.
However, one element of SEO that can easily be overlooked is that of backlinks.
Good backlinks are hyperlinks in the text that will add value for the reader by connecting them to further information provided by outside sources.
Ideally, these should be:
Reliable and authoritative
Sites that have a lot of traffic, with hundreds of thousands of hits, if not millions
The backlinked article title matches or is synonymous with the linked text in your article
Opening in a new window so readers are not steered away from your blog
There are a number of major blogging errors that can be made using backlinks.
Using backlinks with low traffic, poor quality, or a lack of reliability
Broken or toxic links
Linking to one of your rivals, who will be delighted with the free publicity
Reciprocal links – sites used to be able to link back to each other and improve their rankings, but search engine algorithms now penalise this
Overdoing it – ideally, half a dozen backlinks or less should appear in your article, or readers may be distracted from it
Not using backlinks at all and thus missing out on their benefits
5. Fail to update blogs The need to avoid broken backlinks can be met by going back to your existing blogs and updating them every so often.
Other things you may need to change include:
Altering bits of the text to bring them up to date, such as a section referring to an event in the present tense when it was written that has now come and gone
Including new information that is relevant
Tweaking content because your buyer persona has changed.
Often people forget that their content stays out there on the web permanently. By allowing it to go stale instead of updating and refreshing it, you lose the benefits of it.
That’s why it is important to keep track of your old blogs and look after them. Otherwise, the content can include outdated information and it will be a blogging error which you should avoid. If you can’t update it, you can also think about deleting or redirecting it.