This is why I’m sharing all of these blogging tips to inspire and educate bloggers or bloggers-to-be so that you’re able to achieve lifestyle freedom like this.
Right now, I’m creating this content in the beautiful Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru. I’m in a hotel and am working with this hotel as part of our brand collaboration. They’ve offered us 2 nights of free stay as well as breakfast and a couple of activities along the way in this beautiful hotel as well.
In this article, I’m going to cover the most common mistakes that bloggers make when starting up their blogs and what not to do. So that if you’re trying to set up your blog, you want to set it up for success.
Once you’re aware of these common mistakes, you’ll be able to prevent them and set your blog up for success to become a money-making blog.
At A Glance
7 Most Common Mistakes Bloggers Make To Avoid!
1. Thinking that blogging is easy
1. Thinking that blogging is easyThe first and most common mistake that most bloggers who want to be full-time bloggers make is thinking that blogging is easy, and that’s far from the truth.
Blogging is, in fact, a really multifaceted role where you not only have to write, you also have to be present on social media. If vlogging is your thing, you even be in front of the camera. There’s a lot of research that goes on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of admin work as well, like working with brands.
If you’re looking to work with big brands or luxury hotels, or do press trips, it’s necessary for you to learn how to pitch especially if you’re already at the stage where you have some followers and traffic.
As a travel blogger, I sometimes work with tourism boards to get free press trips in exchange for promoting the destination.
If you’re a lifestyle blogger, fashion blogger or food blogger and you want to work with certain product brands, you have to know how to reach out to them and pitch to them to sell yourself.
Email Outreach Template Bundle
I have a couple of email pitch templates and compiled them into one email pitch bundle that you can use as a copy-and-paste swipe template. You can easily tweak a few wordings based on your own niche before sending it out. These templates are what I’ve been using to secure awesome and unique collaborations.
Pretty sweet, right?
2. Not posting consistently or regularly
The second point is not posting consistently or regularly. Just taking blogging on its own, discounting social media.
You want to be posting regularly. I recommend posting once a week at least, or if you are really pressed for time, the very minimum is twice a month.
Why’s that so? It’s because Google recognizes a website’s relevancy based on how often it’s updated. So if your website is updated regularly, it tells Google, “Okay, so this website is up to date, it’s sharing information.”
The more content you post, the more keywords you have in your blog. This contributes to the overall keyword density that your blog has, It really helps to tell Google what your blog is about. So you definitely want to be posting at least once a week or twice a month.
3. Not knowing what to write
Another common mistake that most bloggers make when they are starting out is not knowing what to write or not taking the time to think about what to write.
If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your blog, then you’re not going to be able to run it in the long run. It’s always good to have an end goal in mind.
For example, as a travel blogger, my end goal back when I started was I wanted my travel blog to be the platform where I’m able to do cool adventures, like what I just did at Via Ferrata in Sacred Valley.
Maldives
I want to be able to stay in unique hotels. I want to be able to go on press trips to destinations that I never thought I could ever do, like the Maldives to stay in overwater villas. That’s what I wanted my blog to do because I didn’t want to work and slog my life working in a corporate job to save up huge amounts of money, only then to splurge and pamper myself.
So you have to take the time to think about your blog and what you want to achieve in the long run. Maybe it’s wanting to be able to monetize your blog so that you have an additional stream of income that’s passive.
By passive income, I mean the blog is generating income for you even when you’re sleeping. I’ve covered a ton of different ways to earn money from blogging on my Youtube, which you can check out if you’re interested in monetizing your blog through online streams of income.
4. Blogging about something you’re not passionate about
The other common mistake that most bloggers make is blogging about something that they’re not passionate about.
I know a lot of bloggers are jumping onto the blogging bandwagon because they’re seeing lots of case studies and lots of people teaching others how to make money blogging and going to an uncompetitive but high-in-demand niche, where bloggers can actually get a lot of traffic from it.
Coming from someone who really enjoys travel and loves writing about travelling, I still do today. After 5 to 6 years of blogging, I still enjoy writing about travelling, I still enjoy discovering new places and writing about them. It’s almost in my DNA.
But if you were to pick something that is unrelated to your interest, if you were not interested in it at all, you’d have to talk about stocks or cryptocurrency or NFTs, which you’re clueless about but you’re forced to write. Well, you can always outsource it to a VA or to a writer, but it’s not going to be your passion project.
I believe that having something that you are super passionate about is important. Just like in a corporate job that you don’t enjoy every day, if you’re going to be spending a lot of hours on a project you don’t like, then you’ll just end up dragging yourself to work every day.
Whereas for me, I love what I do every single day and I enjoy working. I’d sacrifice my Netflix time to work, seriously.
So pick a topic, choose a subject that interests you and that you know you’ll be able to write tons of content for, and you’ll be able to run it in years to come.
5. Using unappealing blog post titles
The next most common mistake that most bloggers I find tend to make is that they don’t know how to make their blog post title appealing in a way that drives clicks.
Even if you’re already ranking at the top on Google if you don’t have an appealing title, it’s not going to encourage people to click on your blog post to read more about it.
This is why I’ve created a completely free downloadable called 100 Powerful Words for Headlines that Convert to attract clicks and shares. You can download and use these powerful words to include in your headlines and in your blog post title to encourage people to click.
After all, clicking through to your blog post is also a metric that Google would measure when deciding whether or not to put your blog post at the top of Google search.
For example, if you have 2 search results, and more people click on the second result and spend time on it reading through the article, whereas for the first result, people are clicking in but realizing that it’s not answering their question, and then leaving to click on the second result.
It’s then going to tell Google that this second result is better; it answers people’s questions better, and so it’s going to bump the second search result to the top where it’s going to stay at the top of Google results.
6. Not having an email list
Another pretty common mistake that most bloggers make, I would say, is setting up the blog but not having an email list.
It’s really important to have an email list as soon as possible because it’s necessary to collect emails from readers that have entered your blog. You don’t want your readers to just come in and then leave forever.
Having an email list is a way to consolidate your readers together and send them periodic updates on new posts so that they can constantly interact with your blog posts. Because chances are, those readers that have already entered your website and read your blog post have probably enjoyed reading what you’ve written.
You want a chance to retain them and hold onto them before they leave your blog forever and move on because of how fast the internet market is, right? You don’t want your readers to bump away or jump to other blogs.
If they enjoy your words, if they enjoy your writing, you want to be able to hold onto them and send them periodic emails and updates about yourself, and really foster this audience that you have.
7. Putting too much pressure
Down to my last point, putting too much pressure on yourself to get everything done at once. You may want your blog to be successful instantly, but let me tell you, that’s not going to happen.
Blogging is really a long-sum game. I like to say Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long-sum game, but blogging is also a long-sum game in general.
Because when you first start your journey, no one’s going to know about you, and it takes a lot of grit, a lot of determination, and a lot of consistency in posting your content to grow an audience. It takes multiple different streams. It takes time for people to discover you. It also takes time for your articles to be ranked on Google.
On that note, if you’re new to SEO and you want to learn a little bit more about it, or if you’re already blogging for some time, but you’re still stuck with traffic growth and have no idea how to get more traffic to your blog beyond just actively posting on social media, then I highly recommend going in-depth into SEO.
SEO is really a long-sum game, but it guarantees passive traffic. For example, I have this blog post I published about 6 Best Places to Visit in Greece in October, and I’ve only written it once. Every summer season, this post gets bummed up to the top and I get tons of traffic just from one post alone without me having to go back and reoptimize the post. It’s always ranking at the top whenever summer comes.
If you’re able to do that for multiple posts on your blog, you’re going to be able to get traffic from each of these posts automatically, passively, on autopilot, each time people search for the keywords that you’ve targeted.
So if you’d like to learn more about SEO, I have a couple of free SEO resources that can help you out.
I’ve also compiled the A to Z of SEO. Everything that I’ve learned about SEO during my whole time travel blogging in the past couple of years. I’ve experimented and tried different strategies, finding out what worked and what didn’t work.
I’ve compiled all these tips that I’ve learned that have allowed my blog to be where it is today. Where I’m able to have a full-time income where traffic is coming in. Even when I’m walking or strolling in the gardens. Even when I’m playing with my kitty.
I’ve compiled all the strategies that I’ve learned throughout my travel blogging career into this one SEO course.
There you have it. These are the top 7 most common mistakes that bloggers make. I hope you have gained some insight into it. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve learned anything new or if there is anything else you want to learn about, whether it’s pitching to brand collaborations or how to write articles that make people click.
Cheers. I’m going to go back to enjoying my life in Cusco and celebrating the holidays!
