There are good ways to blog, and there are wrong ways to blog. Every day, people often make the worst blogging mistakes out there, and they end their blogging career within just a few months after starting. While many of these mistakes are easy to make, they’re also effortless to avoid. Luckily, you can prevent the worst blogging mistakes by following this and other great articles about blogging. Many bloggers out on the web want to help you; that makes this type of content platform so great. But it is up to you to follow the advice given not to make these mistakes with your blog.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 1: Being Dishonest to your Audience

One of the worst blogging mistakes is being dishonest with your audience. Anyone who starts blogging to help a niche market should focus on helping that market. The content you produce should be yours, and it should be helpful. And you need to make sure anything you endorse is accurate and honest.

A common mistake made in this area is with sponsored content. Some companies desire backlinks, and they will try to trick you into sponsoring their content without saying it is sponsored. This is ethically wrong and even illegal in many areas. Plus, if you’re caught, and it’s easy to get caught, you’ll likely be deemed a liar from then on out. It is a quick way to end your blogging career.

Avoid this mistake by always being honest, and if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 2: Cheating at Blogging

Blogging takes work. If you don’t want to work for success, you’ll have to pay for it. Nonetheless, if you try to cheat the blogging system, you’ll be making one of the worst blogging mistakes to make. Cheating will result in nothing but trouble for you and your blog. Many out there will try to convince you to cheat and, in the end, if you fail and they don’t, they could care less about you.

An example of how one might cheat is with content plagiarism. Some bloggers will search, copy, and paste someone else’s blog post on their blog and call it their content. Search engines can detect this quickly, and the site that stole the content is generally penalized where recovery is almost impossible. Stealing content can also be subject to legal problems.

Avoid this mistake by being original and creating your content.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 3: Writing for Robots

Search engine algorithms are getting more and more advanced by the day. Most of them use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) of some sort. These “robots” can detect when content creators write for search engines versus those who make up their audience. When you write for search engines, your content looks generic to your audience. Not writing for people is one of those worst blogging mistakes that often is beyond challenging to recover from.

A common mistake of this nature is with SEO. While it is acceptable to target keywords, it becomes noticeable by human eyes if you stuff your content with keywords. Often, the content looks cheap, and because of all the scams these days, many people might mistake it as fake content meant to scam them. Search engines are more intelligent than this and will detect it and penalize the search rankings of these blogs.

Focus on minimal search engine optimization that Google is telling you to do, and that is how you avoid this mistake.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 4: Not Being Consistent

You don’t have to write a blog every day. You don’t even have to write one every week. However many blog posts you choose to write and when to publish, you need to focus on consistency. Search engines, as well as people, like consistency with content. They want an idea of how often you post, and they base that on your posting routine. If you’re not consistent about how often you post, the search engine or the person has no clue when new content will be published.

Many new bloggers make this common mistake. They will post once or twice a week and then quit. Usually, it is because writing at first can be overwhelming. If you start posting a lot each week, it might become overwhelming quickly, and you might easily burn out. It is so easy to burn out and end your blogging career by not being consistent about when you write and publish.

Avoid this by creating a lot of content before you start a blog—schedule one a week for a few months’ worth to be ahead of the game.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 5: Spamming Your Blog

Spamming might be on the top of the worst blogging mistakes you can make that end your blogging career. If you spam, you will ruin your name and your blog’s name. Spamming will not only get your blog penalized in search, but it can get it banned from search as well. Once you get the title of being a spammer, it is tough to get rid of it. Spammers don’t often make it shortly after being caught, and it is easy to get noticed.

An example of spamming would be posting quick generic comments on other blog posts that match your niche to get your blog link seen. It is easy to detect these types of comments as spam, and usually, a built-in system will automatically label you as a spammer. These systems often report for a spam database that shares information. Spamming will get marked as a spammer quickly, and before you know it, your blog is ruined, along with your name.

You can avoid all of this by not spamming. It is as simple as that.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 6: Not Marketing Yourself

Not marketing yourself is a mistake in blogging. This is especially important for niche bloggers. You’re blogging about content as if you’re an expert. As an authority within your niche, other people within the community need to know about you, who you are, and what you bring to the table. Of course, don’t spam yourself, but you should still enter your market and be seen. Sometimes, it is more important to market yourself than to market your blog, especially if you wish to earn an income by blogging.

An entire community based around your niche market is likely out there. You can’t just start blogging and expect to be known in that niche. You have to get out there and make yourself know. Find your community on social media. Find it on other blogs. Find it on discussion forums and social groups. You might be able to find it on websites like Quora, even. You probably have communities waiting for your expertise, but you have to look for them.

Avoid this mistake by joining these communities and providing helpful, original, and unique answers to questions. You should especially try to answer the hardest of the questions. Do that, and you’ll get noticed quickly.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 7: Not Having a Niche

The internet is much bigger than in the late 90s and early 2000s. Everything is oversaturated, and everything has competition. There are no more one-stop shops for every kind of information you could seek. Niche blogs and communities have leveraged these options. When people want to find something, they turn to those who identify as experts and authorities in the niche. Being a “blog of all trades” is one of the worst blogging mistakes you can make in 2022 and beyond.

A good example is looking at the many blogs about different topics that don’t relate to one another. For example, you have a blog about cycling named something to do with cycling. But the author also enjoys minor engine repair and throws articles about that in their blog. It is mixed with minor engine repair and cycling. This confuses search engines as well as people looking for these topics. They don’t understand what the blog is about. They usually move on to a better blog in the end.

You can avoid this mistake by centering the focus of your blog on a specific niche. It also helps to focus on one particular sub-niche within the central niche. Back to cycling, you’d blog about mountain biking rather than the entire cycling discipline.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 8: Using Free Hosts

So, this is a common mistake that bloggers make. You create a new blog on a free hosting platform like Blogger or the WordPress free hosting service or even a social media page. The problem with this is that it is considered a rented space. If the service decides to close shop or kick you off for some reason, they can do so at will, and all your work is a total loss. In most cases, you don’t get access to your user data or the ability to download your content. Everything you have created and worked hard to make great lies in the hands of these free services.

Let’s say you create a blog on the Google Blogger platform. There are several cons to it. Sure, it is free, and hosting is free. But you don’t get access to download your content. You also can’t usually monetize unless you pay the free hosting service, or they get some cut. The hosting service usually runs ads on your content, and you do not get a slice of that profit. You could be putting a lot of work into it, and the slightest mistake gets you banned, and you lose everything.

You can avoid this by getting your hosting service plan, domain and using a self-hosted blog such as the self-hosted free WordPress option, which gives you complete control and access to the blog and its database.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 9: Not Keeping on Top of Your Niche

There is no such thing as an ultimate expert. There is no king (or queen) of a niche. There is no such thing as knowing everything about anything. Learning never stops. Don’t make one of the worst blogging mistakes by not learning and not keeping on top of your niche. The niche you write about is likely changing all the time. It probably changes more than you know, at that. Advanced in technology, societal changes, evolutionary changes, and more will always dictate almost everything. If you don’t keep up with changes, you’re not that much of an expert.

Blogging is an excellent example of this. I am constantly trying to learn more about blogging. Advanced technology, especially AI, continually changes how blog content is ranked. Google will release information about these changes. If you don’t keep track of those changes and you don’t change how you attempt to rank your blog, you might be doing it wrong, and you could be penalized. Did you know that Google requires alternative links when you also link to affiliate content? This is a new change that could hurt a lot of bloggers if they don’t know about it.

Avoid this by learning something new about your niche every day. Whether it’s 5-minutes a day or 5-hours a day, try to get new knowledge into your brain.

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 10: Guest Blogging for Links

It would help if you were blogging outside of your blog. You can accomplish this through guest blogging or writing content for other blogs in your niche. People wrote content for other blogs to get a backlink in the old days. That shouldn’t be the reason to do it anymore in these modern times. Instead, you should be guest blogging to promote you as an authority in your niche rather than your blog. If you can have a link to your blog, stick it in the bio and write the post to make you look good rather than get people to your blog.

A good example will be all the posts you get for guest blogging requests when your blog starts to gain traction. You’ll notice everyone wants “do follow” links which means search engines will count them as backlinks. They also want to put commercial links or affiliate links in the content. Many so-called guest bloggers are trying to cheat the system, and it might take your blog down in ranking because of it. Thus, this has scared a lot of bloggers away from accepting guest article submissions, but if you’re not trying to advertise something and instead just yourself, you have a better chance of getting accepted.

Look for smaller blogs within your niche that match your blog and its ranking. Those are the blogs that you should try to guest author with. Collaborate and network!

 

Worst Blogging Mistakes 11: Rushing

Rushing is one of the worst blogging mistakes that most bloggers make. You’ll likely misspell more and create generic posts if you rush creating content. You’ll burn yourself out if you run trying to get rich fast because the ending results don’t happen soon enough. If you rush your expectations of getting a viral post, you will disappoint yourself. Running anything in terms of blogging is a bad idea and will likely cause you to crash and burn.

If you want to see examples of this, go check out the Quora website, especially around the blogging section. So many questions are being asked, like “How do I get 100,000 visitors in 10-minutes” or how can I make a million dollars with my blog. Because of social media misinformation and viral creators, some people have a misconception that anyone can go viral quickly. They think there is a secret formula. Most people who go viral or make a ton of money with blogging have been doing it for many years. Falling into this pool of misinformed people will quickly burn you from blogging altogether.

Avoid this mistake by setting yourself up with smaller goals that eventually lead to more prominent objections.

 

And there you it! That was 11 of the worst mistakes you can make that will kill your blogging career. Don’t make these mistakes if you want to be successful. But know this, if you do make some of these mistakes, most of the time, you can recover. Some of them, like spamming, will be a lot harder to recover from, though. If you have enjoyed this article, please share it with another blogger you think would appreciate it.

Now over to you! Have you made any of the mistakes above as a blogger? If you could add another error in the list above, what would it be?