5 Tips to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes Beginner Bloggers Make

Blogging sure looks easy until you have to sit down and write a couple of posts a week. That’s when beginner bloggers see how difficult it really can be. And that’s when it’s so easy to make mistakes.

Here are 5 tips to help you avoid the mistakes that most beginner bloggers make.

You don’t know where to get your ideas

Don’t write in a vacuum.  You may think what you want to write about is a great idea but does your target audience feel the same way?

Time spent learning what issues are important to your target audience is time well spent. Survey your current customers. Ask your sales staff what questions they’ve heard from your customers. This is where you should be getting your topic ideas from.

Once you start writing your blog, pay attention to the questions your readers post. That is another great source of writing ideas.

Be yourself

Writing a blog post can almost take you back to high school and having to write an assignment for a class. You really weren’t allowed to ‘be yourself’ in your writing for a history essay. Blogging is different. You want your readers to get to know you and your small business. This will build trust and eventually will turn into sales.

When you write your post, be conversational in your writing. Your readers will enjoy that style and come back for more of your posts.

Target your topics

When you start blogging, it can be daunting to write about specific topics. But that is what your readers want.

It’s too difficult to do justice to a broad subject, such as ‘How to Do Social Media Marketing for Small Business,’ in a blog. That topic could easily fill a book! Take the broad subject and break it down into small specific topics. From the ‘How to Do Social Media Marketing for Small Business,’ I can have quite a few blog topics to write on such as:

- How easily Facebook advertising can target your customers

- How to create a Facebook business page

- Is Pinterest the right social media channel for your business?

- How can I make Twitter work for my business?

You get the picture! Also, specific topics tend to attract a more targeted audience which is how you can drill through all the social media noise and find the right target audience for your business.

Be original

Don’t plagiarize content from someone else. Your site could be penalized by Google, which naturally wouldn’t be good for business!

If you really like an article or post by someone else, re-post it and give credit to the author. If you want to use a portion of someone’s post, cite them in your blog.

Stick to a schedule

Consistency is the key to attracting and keeping your audience. If your audience knows that you post twice a week, say Tuesday and Thursday mornings, they will tend to come back at those times to read your most recent post.

Make that commitment to blog on a regular schedule. Use an editorial calendar to plan your post topics, dates, and which social media channel you will post which blog to. By planning in advance, you can write your topics ahead of time and schedule them weeks, even months, out.

Are you ready to start your small business blog now?