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Starting a blog can be a very interesting and financially rewarding endeavor, but only if you do it right. Unlike other online business models such as ecommerce, Kindle publishing or product creation, blogging has very few ‘moving parts’ to it and is simpler.
Once you install WordPress, a cool theme and some useful plugins, you’re almost set. Now all you need to do is create content.
As simple and straightforward as this sounds, there are still a few pitfalls that must be avoided.
Below you’ll find a list of 7 common mistakes that bloggers make… and what you need to do to steer clear of them. Take note of these pointers and remember them.
You can’t be everything to everybody. It’s important to pick one niche, find a sub-niche within it and target a specific audience in that niche.
For example, fitness for men above 40. Or potty training for dogs. Or self-care for first-time moms.
It can sound counterintuitive because you want a large audience, but a highly targeted audience is much more likely to get you and but from you once they see you as an authority.
Initially, you’ll be excited when you set up your blog. You’ll probably create content regularly and be checking your stats to see if you’re getting traffic.
However, as time goes by, you’ll discover that content creation can be a grind. Writing is hard work. Constantly coming up with topics to write about can be a chore too.
If you don’t post for a month or two, they’ll get tired of checking your blog and won’t show up anymore.
You’ll lose your audience, and your blog will appear stale. So, aim to post at least twice per week. This will ensure that you’ve fresh content in your blog regularly.
If you dislike writing or you’re busy, you can always hire writers from Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork or TextBroker to write articles for you.
You’ll definitely want to build a list from your blog so that you can stay in touch with your readers. Install the Thrive Leads plugin on your site and you’ll be able to create pop ups, scroll mats and even embed sign up forms in your blog posts.
Make sure you use a good autoresponder service, such as Active Campaign or Aweber.
It goes without saying that your content needs to read well and not be full of grammar and/or spelling errors.
Besides the obvious errors, your content needs to be informative and entertaining at the same time. If your readers are bored, they’ll close your page and move on.
Make sure the content is user-focused and it’s best to write like you talk. Conversational content will always win online. Leave the formal writing to stuffy college professors and dusty books at the library.
Your blog needs to provide information that’s relevant, useful and entertaining. It’s a tough juggling act, but that’s what separates the popular blogs from the thousands of blogs that no one bothers visiting.
This is a common mistake made by many beginners to marketing. They either display too many ads on their blogs or their content is too salesy.
People can see through the bloggers’ veiled attempts at providing skimpy information with an ulterior motive to sell.
Let them click on these links on their own… and they’ll be much more likely to buy what you’re promoting. People love buying stuff, but they hate being sold to.
So, don’t overtly sell all the time. Keep most of your posts content-driven but have affiliate links scattered here and there so that you get sales.
The Gutenberg block editor can seem clunky in the beginning but once you’re adept at using it, your blog posts can be made to look great.
You may choose to have a sidebar or not. Not having a sidebar does give a page a cleaner look, but this is a personal choice. What matters is that your content is easy to consume. The user experience is very important.
If you’re blogging for fun, then it doesn’t really matter what you post or when you post. But if you’re blogging for profit, then you must have an end goal in mind for EVERY post you make.
Is it to educate? Or will you be selling products through it? Or is it for traffic generation and list building?
So, decide what the goal is first – then write your blog post. If you want to know more about writing a great blog post, check out this post here.
These 7 tips when applied consistently will help you create a blog that’s engaging, popular and profitable.
Over time, you’ll have an income-generating asset that makes passive income round the clock… or you can flip it for 3 to 6 times (or more) what it’s currently earning and walk away with a sizeable chunk of profit. It doesn’t get better than that!
If you really want to know more about the power of blogging, you can take a look at the Rapid Blogging Blueprint training course or if you just want a few pointers for now you can grab the featured resource below for a free blogging report; download, read it and take action 🙂
If you’re creatively inclined, then you probably enjoy most of your time coming up with ideas, but you’re likely less intrigued by the serious business side that requires a lot of focus and monotonous work.
Any creative projects require these aspects to become full-fledged products or ideas, as annoying as it may seem. Don’t panic when it comes time to set aside your creativity, because you will get back to it.
Instead, just focus on your intentions with the creative idea and work to bring it to reality. While ideas certainly have merit, they’re not particularly useful if they’re never put into action.
Often times, putting them into action can be a tedious process, but it becomes worth it to see your creative endeavor brought to life, able to accomplish the goals that you had in mind when you thought of it in the first place.
For example, if you came up with a great infographic to inform people about a topic that you’re passionate about, it wouldn’t get very far as a simple idea or rough draft. A completed product that was shared and spread online would be able to actually inform others and spread your knowledge, but it’s going to take work.
You’re going to have to do research and cite sources, make it look nice, and go through the work of getting it to be spread and shared around. These are tedious things, but since your intent was to spread knowledge to begin with, it makes it worth your effort.
You might also want to create something with the intent of generating some income for yourself. It might be something like designing logos for up and coming companies or making physical products that people can buy on websites like Etsy.
The thought process is fun when you get to utilize your creativity, but then comes the actual process of bringing it to reality. Gathering materials, stocking your inventory, shipping purchases – all of these things can be a hassle.
Regardless of whether or not it’s a pain for you to do, your intention was to make money. The only way for you to do that is to give them an actual product. Very seldom will people pay good money for the concept of something that they’ll have to actually create themselves.
Instead, they’re more interested in purchasing a completed product, something that they don’t have to put any more work into. That’s where your effort to backburner your creativity comes in handy.
While technology and all of the gadgets we have today are certainly useful and can help you work more efficiently, they may also be dragging down your creativity and focus.
Whether it be a ton of distractions on all your devices or the fact that you might be using them as a crutch, they can sometimes do more harm than good for your creative flow and ability to focus.
In these situations, it’s best to put all of the tech down and just focus with the bare essentials. It’s almost like a palate cleanser. While you spend hours and hours writing on Word documents or drawing pictures in Photoshop, you can just as well get it done with a good old fashioned pen and paper.
It might not be as efficient, but it helps in ways that you might not anticipate. The best thing to do when attempting this is to separate yourself from as much technology as possible.
Otherwise, you shouldn’t be listening to music or watching anything, and preferably it’s somewhere outside where you can really absorb the sights and sounds of nature. When you don’t have the distractions of technology, from constant alerts to easily accessible entertainment, you might find that you’re able to be much more focused.
You’re there with only your own work to do, and otherwise you have nothing to really focus on. If you’re having trouble focusing, this might be a great way to get you back on track.
In terms of creativity, technology is very helpful, but it can start to become more of a crutch than a tool. If you know that you can always reference random guides online and draw inspiration from all kinds of other designs, then you may start to lose your creative edge.
By isolating yourself from all of that, you’ll be able to use your own pure creativity to create something entirely unique, without the reliance on all kinds of other sources. You should always look at technology as a tool – a means to an end.
It’s an amazing tool that you can and should take advantage of, but sooner or later, you’re going to reach a point where you’re becoming overly dependent on it, at which point you need to take a break and reassess.
Productivity is often stressed above all else in businesses today. It’s the best way to put out product after product, which typically results in the highest profit yield. However, productivity isn’t everything.
You need to be able to put out something that you’re proud of, something original and creative, and too much focus on productivity may stifle that, leading to some rather negative consequences.
There are many companies that would rather put out as many products as possible instead of making high quality products a priority. There’s a balance to be found between the two.
You obviously can’t release just one small product every year, but you also can’t be rushing so quickly that you’re not putting enough effort into things. Once you start to rush through your projects without care, you’ll start to slip.
If they’re used to receiving quality products from you, ones that are made with much love and care, they’ll be pretty sour once they start receiving a ton of mediocre work.
At that point, word may start to spread, and you can actually end up losing business. Creativity takes time. That is a fundamental part of business – it doesn’t just come out of thin air.
It takes time and care for you to develop an idea fully and to polish it to near perfection. You can’t take all the time in the world to get it done, since you naturally have certain deadlines to meet, but you can put a bit of extra time and effort into it to get it just as you’d like, to make something you’re proud of.
Extended periods of time spent pumping out as much as you can without any true creative input can actually hurt you in the long run as well. It might get you some short term sales, but it’ll start to fall off.
Creativity is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised frequently in order to grow and develop as well as stay healthy. If you’re not spending some time honing your creativity over a certain amount of time, it will start to degrade.
Eventually, you’ll be left without the same degree of creativity that you had before, and it can be difficult to get back into your flow when you need it. Instead of focusing on pure quantity, make sure you’re actually putting some heart and effort into the things you produce.
Well, as I’m sure you can appreciate, there is a lot more to be learnt about increasing focus and productivity; far more than can be covered in this short post, but if you’d like to know more about this, then click on the featured resource below where you can pick up a free report, Stay Focused For Success, that covers this topic in more detail. Download, read it and take action 😊
Work addiction is just like most other addictions. It’s hard to break and you’ll need to be mindful about it at all times so that you can wean yourself off this addiction.
The good news is that unlike smoking or drug addiction, it’s easier to stop being a workaholic. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy… and in these times, with the workload and stresses that abound, Jack just might go mad if he doesn’t take a break.
The first step to understanding why you’re addicted to work will be to self-reflect on why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Very often, there are feelings of guilt or fear associated with working too much. You may feel guilty at not earning enough to provide for your family. Or maybe you’re working long hours just to please your boss because you fear losing your job.
Once you understand what’s making you work such long hours, you’ll be able to understand how to fix the root cause of the problem. In some cases, it would be a good idea to speak to a professional for guidance.
The best way to break work addiction will be to have a fixed schedule that you blindly follow. This will mean starting work at the same time every day and stopping at the same time.
Ideally, you shouldn’t be working more than 8 or 9 hours a day. You could push it up to 12 hours, but not beyond that. Even 12 hours is extreme.
All work you need to complete for the day needs to get done within the working hours. Then it’s time for you to switch off and wind down.
You MUST be extremely strict with this routine of starting and stopping work at the same time daily. This will help you break your addiction to work and help you to let go of the need to keep hustling and grinding to do more and more to a point where it’s a never-ending cycle.
You can get more done in a shorter time by increasing your productivity. Very often, people spend time at the water cooler gossiping, or attending unnecessary meetings that are time wasters.
You want to be doing work that matters and not just ‘busy work’ that makes it look like you’re working – but what you’re doing is irrelevant, and you’ll need to spend more time doing the relevant work later.
Whatever can be automated, should be automated. Whatever can be delegated, should be delegated.
You may need to pay for software or hire help (workers, freelancers, etc.) to handle your workload. The investment will pay for itself many times over by freeing up your time so that you’re not overworked.
Exercise is fantastic for giving you a mental break from the stresses at work. It’ll also release dopamine in your body.
Try to end every workday with a 20-minute exercise session. It could be yoga or sprints or just some bodyweight training. These 20 minutes will help your body stretch the muscles, get the heart pumping and the blood flowing.
You’ll feel better and less stressed out. You’ll also have something to look forward to after work, provided you enjoy the activity you’re doing. So, find one that’s fun.
“Workaholics are addicted to activity; super achievers are committed to results.”
– Charles Garfield
Being a workaholic can have many negative repercussions in your life if you do not get your addiction under control. Just like most addictions, very often, the person who is addicted to work doesn’t see their addiction for what it is.
Their reasons for working so hard are often plausible on the surface. They’re trying to progress in life, or provide for their family or they love their job and so on.
Relationship with the spouse is strained and they’re a stranger to their family members. They’re also highly stressed out and life seems to have lost its purpose… and work is the only thing keeping them going.
It can be extremely hard admitting to yourself that you’re a workaholic. A few common signs have been listed below. If you agree with 2 or more of them, you’re probably a workaholic and will need to take steps to remedy this problem.
This is the most obvious sign. You can easily work 12 to 14 hours a day and it seems normal to you. In some cases, it could go up to 16 hours or more.
While some minimum wage jobs have 12-hour shifts, these are mandated by the company, and you’re given rest days too.
However, when you’re working from home and subjecting yourself to such long hours daily with minimal rest, you’re a workaholic.
Most workaholics put their family commitments in second place. Work always comes first. Family events, communication, dinner time, etc. are all distractions that get in the way of the work.
If you often let down your friends and family because of work, you just might be a workaholic.
Workaholics are so busy working they rarely even think of taking a vacation. If the last time you went on a holiday was years ago, you’re probably a workaholic.
If you do go on a vacation, but keep thinking about work, you’re definitely a workaholic.
A workaholic thinks about work while having their meals or talking to others or even watching TV. They can’t think of anything else besides their work commitments.
Most workaholics are either addicted to caffeine, alcohol or nicotine.
Very often, caffeine is used to keep them alert so that they can keep going even when they’re tired.
Alcohol and cigarettes help them to calm down because the stress at work gets to them and these deleterious habits are their coping mechanisms.
Workaholics tend to be perfectionists, or they have unrealistically high standards for themselves. The work can always be better and improved upon.
They dislike delegating their work because they don’t want to lose control and feel like others will not be able to do as good a job as them. As a result, their hands are full and their workload never decreases.
Recognition and acceptance of the problem is the first step. From there, it’s just a matter of better time management, increasing your productivity and learning to delegate more so that you can maintain a good work-life balance.
Whatever you want in life will require discipline to achieve and maintaining a healthy work life balance is a small part of that. And if you want to know more about harnessing the power of self-discipline, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
“I learned that by being entertaining you make a connection with another person.” – Robin Williams
There are several reasons why someone would start a blog. Maybe they wish to build an audience or an email list. Or maybe they wish to have an authoritative site and make money online with affiliate marketing.
Whatever your reason for building a blog, ultimately, you’ll want people to see it. To attract people to your blog, the content needs to be excellent and your blog has to look great.
In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to ‘spice up’ your blog posts and your blog overall. Apply these tips and you’ll definitely make your blog more interesting and attractive!
Are you ready to get started? Let’s go…
A picture says a thousand words. If you want your blog to be interesting, you absolutely MUST break up the text with images – and ideally, all your images must have a caption between them.
When was the last time you came across an image and didn’t read the caption?
Almost never. People like making sense of the image and the caption reinforces their perception of what they’re seeing.
There are 2 types of images you can use on your blog:
You can get creative commons images from sites like Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash, etc. You won’t need to pay a cent for them and can use them in your blog posts.
Royalty-free stock photos can be purchased from sites such as IstockPhoto. Generally, these photos tend to look much better than what you’d find in the free sites.
Furthermore, the sheer variety of images in the paid image sites will mean that you can find photos that very closely match your content.
Use photos in all your blog posts. They’re one of the best ways to make your blog posts ‘pop’ and capture the readers’ attention.
People love quotes. Social media is replete with motivational quotes. Even the latest trending, “Let’s go, Brandon!” is a quote. Ingenious marketers are using that quote on mugs, t-shirts, etc. and making tons of sales.
You can always do a quick Google Image Search for quotes related to your blog post. For example, if you’re writing a blog post on productivity, a quick search for ‘productivity quotes’ will bring back these results.
Now all you need to do is compile a few quotes and verify that the quotes and the attribution is correct.
There are 2 excellent solutions for creating quotes:
Canva is free to use. Stencil and Snappa are paid options.
There are also other websites that you can use such as Quotefancy, Quozio and MediaModifier.
Quote images have the same purpose as stock photos – to break up the monotony of the text and add a dash of color and ‘punch’ to your blog posts.
Memes have been all the rage for the past 7 years or so. They show no signs of waning in popularity. Because memes are shared all over social media and they’re usually humorous, people automatically look at memes hoping to be entertained.
You can make free memes with a meme generator such as Imgflip or Kapwing. It’s best to have a good sense of humor when creating memes. If you lack ideas, you can visit Me.Me for inspiration.
There’s a fine line to walk here. You’ll have to exercise common sense when using memes. The same applies to using gifs that you can find on Giphy, which you can embed in your blog posts.
Remember to use memes and gifs in moderation. They work wonderfully well for grabbing attention, but too many of them can be distracting.
Reading text on a screen is a lot more stressful on the eyes than reading a paperback. This is why it’s imperative that you break up the text in your blog posts.
For starters, keep your paragraphs 3-5 lines long. Forget what you were taught in school about paragraphing rules.
And they’ll leave your blog and you’d have lost them. So you definitely want to break up the text on your blog post into smaller bite-sized chunks.
As mentioned earlier, you can use images, quotes or even have sub-headings (H2, H3,etc.)
The sub-headings will make the content easier to read for skim readers and you can have an extra line break before every sub-heading so that there’s more white space in your blog post.
You’ll want to maintain the same format of headings and sub-headings throughout your blog so that there’s uniformity and consistency throughout your blog.
Nothing grabs more attention than a video. These days, most people prefer watching videos over reading. So, you’ll definitely want to embed a video in your blog post.
There are two ways you can do this:
Even if you’re shy and prefer to do a screen recording using a tool like Camtasia, your voice will still engage your readers. Just make sure the video is interesting.
One of the benefits of creating your own videos and having your own channel on YouTube is that your videos will attract traffic. You can then have links in your video description that points viewers to an opt in page to build your list. Or you can point them to your blog posts.
If you decide to use someone else’s video on your blog, you’ll probably be embedding a video from YouTube. This is legal and nothing to worry about.
Just click on the share button…
Then click on ‘Embed’ and you’ll be given the code to copy and paste in your blog.
The video will show up in your post with the play button. You can use a video to break up the text on your blog.
No matter how many attractive images and engaging videos you use, at the end of the day, the quality of your written content will decide how interesting your blog post will be.
The content needs to flow well and should not feel like a mishmash of clunky paragraphs virtually stapled together to form a post.
If you dislike writing, you can always hire expert writers on sites like Freelancer. Always make sure that the content reads well, and is interesting and engaging.
Many marketers try to optimize their blog posts for SEO (search engine optimization), and they end up adding keywords in parts of their content just to rank well. Very often, these keyword-rich sentences don’t fit in well with the content and can sound awkward.
So, if you’re trying to rank your blog posts for specific keywords, make sure the keywords are woven seamlessly into the content so that the reader experience is good.
This tip is especially useful for content that needs to be simplified. Any listicle can have an infographic created on it.
When creating an infographic, you’ll want to distil the blog post and use the most important points as your infographic’s data points. Keep your points short and succinct.
An infographic doesn’t require too much text because the icons and symbols in the image will convey the message effectively.
Once the infographic is completed, you’ll insert it in your blog post (somewhere in the middle or at the end. This will help to break up the text or sum up your content in one neat image.
If you have no idea how to make an infographic, you can easily hire a freelancer on Fiverr to create an infographic for you. It’s very affordable.
The font you use on your blog needs to be legible and easy on the eyes too. There are countless articles written about fonts and font pairing. You may wish to use 2 different fonts – one for your paragraphs and one for your headings.
The most popular and effective fonts for a blog are:
Avoid using cursive fonts or other fonts that look stylish but when used in large blocks of text becomes difficult to read (e.g. monotype corsiva).
When it comes to readability, the font size matters too.
Avoid making your font size too small. Many older people will find it difficult to read your content. 14pt is the new 12pt!
The color of your font makes a difference too. Avoid using light grey font on a white background. Some websites will mention that having lighter text is easier on the eye. That may be true, but if it’s too light, it’ll strain the readers’ eyes instead. So exercise common sense here.
If you’re using WordPress for your blog (and most people do), the theme you use will play a huge role in your blog’s appearance. Avoid using free themes. The paid ones have more features and usually look much better.
Many of the most popular themes have a lot of flexibility so that you can toggle between the different options and make your blog look exactly the way you want it to.
Some of the most popular themes are:
A good theme will not only give your blog a clean appearance and make it look professional… but it will also load fast. We live in a day and age where people want everything fast.
If your blog takes ages to load, you can bet you’ll be losing visitors by the boatload. They’ll just close the page (while it is still loading) and will never see your blog. So, use a WordPress theme that has a fast load speed.
You can check the speed of your blog here: https://gtmetrix.com/
People love watching and listening to others. It’s why Oprah is a billionaire with her talk show. It’s why Joe Rogan’s podcast gets downloaded millions of times… and it’s also why reality shows still remain as popular as ever.
As a species, we’re curious to hear and watch what other people say and do. Why else do you think social media is so addictive?
There are many movies based on other people’s life stories. Rocky, The Pursuit of Happiness, The Blind Side, and many other poignant movies are stories about people’s trials and tribulations… and how they overcame all odds.
There are always opportunities to add your own stories and opinions. It’s better to be opinionated than to have no opinions. Even if your opinions are polarizing, you’ll still benefit by building a tighter audience who agrees with what you’re saying.
They’ll feel that you’re authentic and are on the same page as them. This is the type of ‘loyalty’ you want. You don’t want your blog to be sterile and bland like vanilla. You must let your personality shine… and your readers will enjoy reading it.
These are just some of the many ways you can make your blog posts interesting. Always remember, you’re writing for other people. You want their experience on your blog to be an enjoyable one.
If you can do that, your blog will always have a loyal following, and if you monetize your content, you’ll see sales and profit.
It all starts with giving the people what they want.
“The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust.”
– Jason Calacanis
If you really want to know more about the power of blogging, you can take a look at the Rapid Blogging Blueprint training course or if you just want a few pointers for now you can grab the featured resource below for a free blogging report; download, read it and take action 🙂