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Avoid These Blogging Mistakes

By on August 5, 2016
Avoid These Blogging Mistakes - Writer's Life.org

Every writer knows that one of the ways you can attract a larger following, and connect with your fans, is by writing a blog.

However, many writers feel that they don’t have the time, or would rather concentrate on their fictional work.

While blogging doesn’t come naturally to all writers, it is something that can be incredibly helpful when it comes to reaching new readers and keeping in touch with your old ones.

Done wrong, however, and blogging can damage your writing reputation.

Here are some of the most common blogging mistakes that, should you decide to write one of your own, you should avoid at all costs.

You try to do too much too soon

Set yourself realistic goals when it comes to blogging. If you can only write one blog a week, that’s fine. One good blog is better than seven half-hearted ones. As long as you are you're consistent, your readers will come to know when they can expect new content from you.

At the same time don’t blog too infrequently otherwise, they will just forget about you altogether!

You try too hard

You should aim for your blog to be informative and entertaining.

This doesn’t mean that you have to turn into a comedian overnight.

Write what you know, be human, and try to pepper your writing with the odd bit of humour now and again. If you try too hard to be witty or funny, the risk is you could come across as rather patronising and annoying - which will turn readers away from you instead.

Be clear and compelling and people will respect you for that.

You lie

Don’t try to entice your readers in with overly dramatic headlines and then disappointing or completely irrelevant content. By all means, write catchy headlines that will get readers to take notice and click through, but if you consistently underdeliver they’ll soon catch on and not bother to engage with your blog at all.

You can’t accept criticism

Now as writers, you would think we would all be perfectly accustomed to accepting people’s not-so-complimentary reactions to our work.

The truth is, it is always going to hurt, and if someone doesn’t like what you have written and lets you know about it, this can be hard to take.

You might think because you have spent your time carefully crafting a blog post that you think will be helpful and useful for your readers, that they should be happy to receive it. Well, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that!

Use readers comments as feedback and try to improve. Accept that not everyone will like what you do.

If you can’t do this, and any negative feedback is likely to make you retreat into your writing shell and never venture back out, then perhaps blogging is not for you.

You hate it

At the end of the day, if you really can’t stand blogging it is unlikely that you are going to keep it up.

Blogging is tricky. You need to come up with new ideas for content and need to set aside time (at least each week) to write, edit, upload and share your blogs for them to have any effect at all.

Remember, blogging is not the be all and end all when it comes to marketing your work, so if you really can’t stand it, it’s probably not worth spending your time on.

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

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