5 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

When first starting out it can be difficult to know what you should and shouldn’t be doing as a blogger. Good design lends itself to going unnoticed while bad design and practices can leave a sour taste in the mind of your readers – often by this stage it’s too late to win them back over. Below are some of the common blogging mistakes that new bloggers often assume are right but that should actually be avoided.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

It’s cool to use funky background images and play around with fonts and colours but the reality is, reading online is a strain on the eyes and like 99% of blogs on the internet you should stick to a white or very light background and dark or black text. It will help the reader focus on whats important and that’s your great content. Simple!

AVOID BUSY DESIGNS AND LAYOUTS

Your blog should be sleek and clutter free. Your words are what is important so let them do the speaking – a fancy flashing image or too many ads will distract and irritate the reader. You want your audience to become engrossed in what they are reading and flashy ads or too much movement on the screen will only distract them. Unless necessary avoid ads in your article and keep your side bar clean and helpful.

POP-UPS! SIGN-UP NOW EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVEN’T READ ANYTHING YET

Numerous times blogs hit the user with a pop-up subscription box immediately when they arrive. Almost every user will click through this with ‘No Thanks’ to get to the content they came for. After all, they will want to see the content before deciding whether to subscribe or not. There is no doubt pop-ups increase conversions and if used properly are a great tool for bloggers but give the user time to get to know about your blog before prompting them to subscribe. It can be annoying otherwise and you only get one shot at a first impression, right!

GOOGLE IMAGES

One of the most common blogging mistakes is to use stock photo’s from google images. You shouldn’t really be doing this to begin with but we understand when you are first starting you have enough to learn without having to add image creation to your list. If possible try to source your own unique images or use text images which is always a safe bet. A sign of a serious blog is when their imagery is uniformed and looks like it has been created specifically for purpose, which is often not the case with images lifted from google.

CLICK HERE

You should definitely be linking content between your own articles on your blog, this is good standard practice SEO. However, there are ways to link correctly and ways to not. For example, rather than saying “here are 8 books every entrepreneurs should read, click here“. Try “here are 8 books every entrepreneur should read” keeping the link text relevant and to the point. Make sure your post is easy to read by avoiding web address urls – A post should read like a book using good English so a link to our site would be written as theAccidentalInvestor not http://theaccidentalinvestor.com/

We’d love to hear what you think! What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen on a blog. Put it in the comments so everyone can see and learn from eachother. P.s. We don’t profess to be perfect ourselves, just pleasant and helpful in what we try to do 😉 Thanks for reading.

If you haven’t started your blog yet, check out our How to Start a Blog – A Beginners Guide which will have you up and running in no time!