Common Blog Post Writing Mistakes Newbie Bloggers Make

Here are the common blog post writing mistakes that many newbie bloggers make.

• Choosing the wrong blog title
• Inappropriate opening lines
• Very long paragraphs
• Not caring about keywords
• Keyword stuffing
• No content strategy. No focus
• Little to no commercial intent
• Lots of basic grammatical errors
• Intentional or unintentional plagiarism

The list of common writing mistakes newbie bloggers make is a long one. This post will help you to identify the common newbie mistakes when writing blog posts.

I must confess that I personally made some of these mistakes in the early days. Though I have managed to put a good number of these blog post writing mistakes behind me, there are a few I need to continue working on.

It is difficult to forget the blog content writing mistakes I made as a beginner blogger. This is why I want to share my experience with you. My hope is that after reading about them here, you will avoid the same mistakes most newbie bloggers make.

You will learn why each blog post writing mistake in this list is something that you must take seriously as a beginner blogger with high ambitions for your new blogging business.

Popular Blogging Goals

Generally, the common mistakes newbie bloggers make when writing blog postscan undermine their efforts to achieve blogging success in the following areas.

• Attempts to rank high on search engine pages
• Desire to reduce bounce rate
• Email list-building efforts
• Trying to maximize ad revenue
• Acting to scale all monetization efforts
• Trying hard to sell info products
• Fighting to gain Adsense approval or approval from other ad networks
• Desire to inform and educate website visitors
• Making it easy for customers to contact you

The above are among the benchmarks according to which the potential success or otherwise of a blog post can be measured. Now let’s take a deeper look at the various blog post writing mistakes that can work against your blogging goals.

1. Choosing the wrong blog post title

Here are the tell-tale signs that your blog post title stinks.

It contains no keywords.

Sometimes it is just that the keyword present is too short or too unwieldy. I think that a phrase made up of three or four focus words is good enough.

It is not interesting enough.

An attention-grabbing blog post title stands a better chance of gaining more clicks.

It is too short or too long.

You want your keywords to show up in the search results. For that matter, do not hide your keyword inside a lengthy blog post title. And when your blog post title is made up of just four or five words, it might have problems ranking well on Google.

It is not pointing to any solution.

People who browse the internet are looking for solutions to specific problems. And, while online, they want to know where to find the answers quick enough. So making your blog article title go straight to the core issue is critical.

It is written carelessly.

Have you ever come across a blog post title that pops up in your search result but offers almost nothing to be enthused about? That is a carelessly-written blog post title.

Unfortunately, a lot of newbie bloggers fall victim to this blog post writing mistake. One way to overcome this problem is to search for examples of the best blog post titles. All you need to do is type into the search box any question that internet users are likely to ask about a topic in your niche.

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Quickly you will see the best blog post titles pop up first.

Note that this is not always  the case. There are times you will find to your horror that no serious answer has yet been provided to the question. Everything that comes up is rubbish, so to speak.

That definitely is an opportunity to spot and exploit.

Go to work. Write the best answer for that problem and make sure you have a carefully-crafted blog post title for it.

2. Inappropriate opening lines

Another common blog post writing mistake newbie bloggers make is starting a blog article anyhow. So how do you write the best opening lines of a blog post? Let the following guide you.

It is best when your first sentence provides a direct answer to the question you want to answer. Call it a summarized answer. You will use the remaining paragraphs to explain the short answer you provided in your opening lines.

As an example, take a look at the opening lines of this blog post you are reading.

Keep this in mind. When you do this properly, Google might reward you with a top spot on its first search result page.

This may not happen instantly. But trust me, all things being equal, the result will begin to show within two to three months.

3. Bulky paragraphs

Very long, never-ending paragraphs are yet another blog post writing mistake among beginner bloggers. Avoid going on and on with one paragraph. To put it simply, lengthy blog paragraphs are a put-off for your website visitors.

Learn to split the majority of your blog post paragraphs into single-sentence to four or five-sentence chunks. In most instances, the highest, in my opinion, should be five sentences. The more easily visitors can skim through your blog posts, the longer they will stay on the page.

And that counts positively for bounce rate, longer sessions , conversion rates and possibly, your click-through rate.

Otherwise, trust them to leave in frustration when you pack so much into a single paragraph.

4. Writing like it were a school essay

This reminds me of my first ever blog post. I wrote it the way I would write an academic essay back in school. There are standards for writing the best school essays but most of these do not serve any useful purpose in the world of blogging.

Granted, the rules about organization, logical sequence and mechanical accuracy still hold for content writing too.

But make sure not to sound like the way you would with a school essay. Your blog post’s tone is best when it is interactive or conversational. Sounding too formal is counterproductive when writing blog posts.

Just know your audience and your purpose and then apply the best blog writing tips.

Writing apps like Grammarly and Quilbot can help you to avoid some of the blog post writing mistakes newbie bloggers make.

5. Excessive use of pronouns

Back in school we were taught not to repeat nouns too often in our writing. The recommended practice was to make good use of pronouns whenever we wrote essays. Does this sound familiar?

Now let’s come to blogging. Here, keywords matter a lot. You need to repeat them often and make sure you spread them around.

In almost every other paragraph, your keyword (which is most probably a noun phrase and therefore replaceable by a pronoun) must show up. Repetition of keywords is one of the most important SEO best practices.

Repeat your keywords more. And use pronouns sparingly.

6. Sparse use of subheadings

Writing a very long blog post with few or no subheadings to break it into readable bits does not help much. It is a big mistake newbie bloggers make when writing blog posts.

I encourage you to frequently use the H2 heading inside your WordPress editor. With the Gutenberg block editor, it is super easy to insert subheadings inside your blog post.

7. Not caring about keywords

I have already said a lot about keywords. Long-tail keywords are best for SEO. It is understandable that at the beginning of your blogging journey, you cannot know everything.

So you may be thinking that knowing how to write is enough for you to rank high on Google. But no. Keywords are the key to good performance on the SERPs.

A simple keyword research on Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner will bring you some pretty nice results.

Ubersuggest is a free to moderately-priced SEO tool you can try.

And if you can afford it, there are more expensive keyword research and SEO tools like RankMath, SEMRush and Ranking Gap. These are much more sophisticated tools for taking your keyword planning to a whole new level.

8. Keyword stuffing

Some newbie bloggers are made to believe that the higher the number of keywords they insert into their blog posts the greater their chances of ranking high on the search engine result pages.

For this reason, they place their keywords in almost every sentcnce or paragraph. But this is a ‘sin’ against Google. It is called keyword stuffing.

Avoid stuffing your blog posts with keywords if you want to avoid a Google penalty. Such a penalty will severely undercut your months of SEO effort.

A free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO can help you avoid keyword stuffing.

9. No content strategy. No focus.

You need a content strategy of a sort so your writing can remain focused. Answer these simple questions to establish your overall blog content strategy.

What are my goals for this blogging business?

Who am I writing for?

Which core human problem am I trying to solve?

How far am I willing to spread my tentacles within my niche?

Should I focus on long-form articles or short-form ones? Am I okay mixing the two? If so, in what proportion?

What is going to be my primary content format? Video, text, audio or a combination of two or more.?

I believe that when you know exactly what you want to do with the content on your blog, you will become a better blog post writer.

10. No Categories and no tags

In WordPress, categories serve their own critical purpose in a content creator’s scheme of things. And so do tags.

Learn more about the importance of WordPress categories and tags.

However, there are other newbie blog post writing mistakes when it comes to categories. As you keep writing and gather more experience, you will come to understand how to avoid some of these blog post writing mistakes.

Here are additional mistakes related to WordPress categories and tags.

• Too many categories or tags
• Empty categories or tags or sparsely-populated ones
• Identical category or tag names
• Placing one blog post under multiple categories
• SEO-shy category or tag names

11. Little to no commercial intent

Stop blogging for the mere sake of writing.

In the interest of monetization, it is important that at least most of your blog posts have some commercial intent. What do I mean by this?

According to Morten Storgaard of Passive Income Geek, blog content that incorporates commercial product names and terms tend to do well when it comes to increasing CPC, CPM, RPM or EPMV. And as you can see, the more expensive these products are, the better.

This is the reason why finance, insurance, health and fitness,higher education and make money blogging niches tend to be the most profitable and most popular among bloggers.

12. Lots of basic grammatical errors

No one is perfect when it comes to grammatical accuracy. But we all can improve with every passing day.

One obvious danger associated with this blog post writing mistake is a rather high bounce rate.

Continuous learning of grammar rules can be of help here. It is also helpful to patiently edit and proofread your work before hitting the publish button.

You may also call upon someone you trust to proofread your drafts before you publish them.

Still, Grammarly and Quilbot are effective writing tools many bloggers have fallen in love with. You can try the free version of Grammarly, for example, to ascertain its effectiveness in helping you flush out some embarrassing grammar errors in your blog post.

What I personally do is this. I regularly return to my old posts to update them. In the process, I am able to fish out any hidden grammatical mistakes.

Taking and publishing other people’s content

We cannot finish this discussion of the most common blog post writing mistakes without mentioning this unfortunate practice. I am referring to stealing and publishing other people’s content and passing it off as your own.

Content theft is a punishable offence in every part of the world. So avoid plagiarizing content online.

Sure, the long arm of the law may never catch up with you. But I can assure you of a severe penalty from Google if your nefarious activities catch their attention.

Moreover, the role of original content in your website’s ability to rank high on Google cannot be overemphasized.

But sometimes, what may look like plagiarism might be unintentional. You see, all niche bloggers have to work within a certain range of topics. The likelihood of writing almost the same stuff that someone else has already written is quite high.

Interestingly, there are times when the other writer is unaware of the existence of the same blog post written and published in almost the same manner. This is what I call unintentional plagiarism

One way to avoid this kind of scenario is to use a free plagiarism testing tool like SmallSEOTools Plagiarism Detector.

Additional Blog Post Writing Mistakes

As you can see, there is no end to the blog post writing mistakes beginner bloggers are prone to make. The above are among the most common ones. See below a list of the remaining blog writing mistakes almost every newbie blogger is likely to commit.

• No particular audience in mind
• Saying too much or too little
• Lacking courage to publish the post
• No graphics
• Zero monetization intent
• No email list building intent
• Rushing to publish prematurely
• Inconclusive conclusion
• No Call to Action (or too many CTAs in a single post)
• Missing Social Media sharing buttons

Final Thoughts

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