10 Typical Mistakes of a Beginner Blogger

If you have a passion for writing and learning, then there is no more perfect career than blogging. But, like all professions, there is a learning curve. In the beginning, you will make mistakes that are typical of all new bloggers. Fortunately, they are easily corrected with commitment and effort. Here are 10 of those typical mistakes and how you can avoid them.

1. Writing in an Academic Style

A lot of bloggers major in English or communications. And during their college years, they wrote a huge number of academic essays and papers. Forget all of that now. Blogging is informal and conversational. Write as if you are talking or writing a letter to a friend.

2. Reading Level is too High

Write for a 7^th grader. This means short simple sentences and a middle school vocabulary. Review every post you write, chuck the big words, and break up those complex and compound sentences. There are tools you can use to check the reading level, and they’re free. Try http://read-able.com. You copy and paste your post and it will generate the reading level – you want content that is appropriate for a 12 year old.

3. Too Much Text

Again, you are not writing an essay. How you format your text will either attract or dissuade visitors. Paragraphs should be very short with sub-headings so a reader can scan down the post (most people look for points of interest and read those). Using bullet points or numbering items (like this post, for example) makes scanning easy. When a reader sees a bunch of text all scrunched up, s/he will have not motivation to read your words of wisdom.

4. No Images or Other Media

Visuals are a necessity in blog posts. Find photos or other images to attract attention. Viewers are 53X more likely to read your stuff when there are images. Posts with great images, photos, infographics, and videos are far more likely to be shared too. Readers also love to interact with content and invite their friends to interact too. If you can come up with quizzes (you’ve seen them all over Facebook) or surveys/polls. There are plenty of tools you can use to create these.

5. Not Showing Expertise

Whether you have your own blog with a specific niche or you are a freelancer blogging on a variety of topics, you have to become an expert. This means that you must research the topics about which your write, and that can take some time. But if you’re in this to make good money with the content you create, you take the time. If you are in a particular niche, then becoming a revered and “go-to” expert will mean you get some online self-education that is of much greater depth. Taking some online coursework either in your niche or even on blogging/content marketing itself will go a long way. You will avoid many of the mistakes in this post and/or become the “guru” you need to be.

6. Boring Headlines

Think like a journalist. The first thing that attracts a reader is a truly catchy headline. If you want some good examples of headlines that engage, take a look at those that Upworthy uses for its Facebook posts. The have a huge click-through rate because of those headlines, and every blogger would love to steal their creatives who do these. But, there is hope and help. There are several headline generator tools you can use. Even if you don’t love the ones they generate, there are enough options that you will get some great ideas.

7. No “Killer” Opening

What motivates you to read an article you pull up? Besides, the headline that is. It’s the opening sentence or two. When you can open with some startling statistic, a joke, an inspirational quote, or an anecdote, you can capture your reader. If that reader does not engage in that first sentence or two, he bounces. Spend as much time on your opening as you do on the rest of your post.

8. No Clear Purpose

A lot of beginning bloggers know they have to meet a deadline or a publishing schedule. So they search for a topic idea, find one, and even give the post a decent headline and opening. From there, though, it all kind of crashes and burns. Every post has to have a purpose. Are you educating your reader and solving some sort of problem? Are you writing to entertain and make that reader’s day a bit brighter? Are you trying to inspire your reader? Don’t waste your time writing a post if you can’t define a purpose.

9. Not Telling Stories (at least some of the time)

Readers love stories. Any time that you can make a point or give an example by telling a story, you will endear yourself to your readers. The stories can be humorous, sad, scary, or poignant – it doesn’t matter.

10. No Invitation to Engage and/or Share

Readers also love to comment and express opinions. At the end of each post, readers should have the opportunity right then and there to ask a question, make a comment or give you feedback. And you must respond. That’s how you keep a following.

All seasoned bloggers have horror stories to tell about their “newbie” times and the mistakes they made. Many of those mistakes are on this list. You can avoid some of your own horror stories if you take heed.

About the author
Ben Brychta - MBA student from San Jose, CA. He is big movie classics fan and love to share his opinion on different thing happening in the spheres of the film industry, blogging and lifestyle. You can contact him through his Twitter!.

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Stand Out with Unique Digital Marketing

Nothing but a small startup investing most dollars in digital marketing tools and strategies is the epitome of how vital it is to spread this digital panorama further to ultimately compete with top business insiders in present time. The new businesses can only gain recognition if they turn up successfully to user's laptop screens and smartphones.

Honestly, e-commerce has made marketing a lot more fun for business groups, sales and marketing teams at various organizations. What can be more amazing than knowing who is interested in your business and who visited your website how many times and stayed for how long? The statistics are crystal clear, which let marketers proceed in the right direction and invest in result-oriented resources and services, generating better ROI.

However, this digital business has led to rigorous action among all kinds of and categories of enterprises. Everyone is adopting the latest tools released in the market and investing immeasurably in upgrading their skills and strategies. Then how do you stand out from the rest?

This is the biggest question we need to speculate, research and find at least one such natural approach that can be implemented quickly. In this article, we have tried compiling some innovative tactics, digital marketers can use to shift from their cliché traditions and change the rules of digital marketing. It's time to commence Digital Marketing Training, including SEO to Social Media to Content Marketing.

Promote your business through Podcasts

If you are not listening to podcasts, do not undervalue them as the data reveals that around 46 Million of Americans listens to Podcasts every month, as stated by Edison. The average user listens to six podcasts per week. You can initiate your podcast series on the most in-demand and best-in-class products and services you offer, brainstorming with some relevant facts and information and defining various use cases. Release them on YouTube or any powerful TV channel to capture larger audiences and gain consumers.

Native Advertising is Difficult to Recognize

Make use of the fact that more than 50% of the audience are barely aware of native advertising. Many of you may also not be knowing what the terms means and how is it implemented. These ads look like they belong to the editorial and look and read like non-promotional content. It is even hard to recognize by ad blockers and thus, you can publicize your products without worrying about the advertisement blocking nightmare.

You could seriously pull more traffic by distributing your content through choice-based advertising on various famous blogging websites, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, mailers, Forum discussions, Quora QAs. Click through rates often see a high jump with professional native advertising.

From Mobile to Wearables

M-commerce is already a buzzword as shopping and gaming and informative apps have reached to your mobile phones. Needless to mention, our smartphone is the most trustworthy companion to entertain us on our busy professional days and hang out with us on our lone nights. While smartphone technology is evolving at a faster pace, individuals are gravitating towards smartwatches and tech-savvy wearables. Now you can control your cell phone operations using your smartwatch and thus, marketers must not waste a minute to move their applications to people's wrists. Involve your enterprise and the sale steam more into the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting technology with sales.

Embrace Video Content

Think of our childhood days when we cherished reading and learning with colorful images and videos on the television. Words are best understood when combined with pictures, graphs and videos. Infographics, graphical reports, and content-based videos will take you ahead in the race. All these verticals link your business to digital media and give you more audiences, long-lived consumers and higher conversions.

Integrate traditional advertising with Social Media

An established truth is- Laptop and mobiles have scaled down people's interest in Television. However, the commercials have been an intriguing means to generate awareness among large audiences and influence them so much so that they can relate it to their real life.

Traditional advertising can be ingeniously integrated with modern social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, engaging audiences into creative advertisements of your products and services. There is a good scope to incorporate tactical social media elements like hashtags, contests, campaigns, 'vote to select a winner' and many others give you strategic and persuasive ways to increase the number of likes, comments and shares on your advertisement posts.

About the author
Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing & have a passion for technology. She currently writes for Intellipaat. She is based out of Bangalore & has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing. Her work has been published on various sites related to Hadoop, IT and more.

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