blog writing pit falls

How difficult is it to blog like a pro? The rules are simple, right? You can just write about topics that you’re familiar with, update the blog regularly and interact with your audience if you get any comments. Unfortunately, being successful requires a bit more than adherence to these very general rules. Many bloggers and copywriters have had to learn this the hard way. We’re here to help you not do that. Blogging pit falls come in all possible shapes and sizes but some could be more detrimental to brand establishment than others. We’ve compiled a list of some truly bizarre and funny blog writing errors. This is your opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others rather than experience the consequences of such shortcomings on your own. 1. Both Bad: Too Short, Too Long How would you react to a blog post that is 150-word long? Yes, some bloggers do think that the length is sufficient to present an idea and back it up with some evidence. How about the exact opposite – a blog post that exceeds 4,000 words? Who has time for that, right? Discovering the golden standard when it comes to blog post length involves staying away from the extremely short and the boringly long. Some of the best ranking pieces online are 2,416-words long. Blog post length that falls below 200 words can seriously jeopardize the search engine ranking of the blog or the website. Just think about it – how much can you say in 200 words? These will add up to just a few paragraphs, which is totally insufficient to present an interesting idea, develop it and support it with evidence. On the other hand, it’s important to refrain from getting carried away. Say what you need to say and stop. The audience doesn’t have time for all of your ideas and the concepts that you want to share with the world. It’s best to break it up in several different blog posts than to overdo a single one. This approach will also enable you to link the posts to each other, thus helping the audience explore more of your content and visit a bigger number of pages. 2. Not Breaking It Up: The Large Chunk of Text & Other Bad Styling Imagine searching for a topic of interest and coming across a title that sounds promising. You follow the link and come to a page featuring a large, uninterrupted chunk of text. It goes on and on for the next 1,000 words. Even if the content is great, chances are that you’ll give up on the piece after struggling through the second lengthy sentence. Poor formatting, large paragraphs and endless sentences interfere with readability and make it impossible for the audience to reach the end of the text. Many people will get bored with this kind of structure even when it comes on a printed page. Trying to go through the endless paragraph on a screen is going to be even more challenging. Here’s a simple visual example that will shed some light on why formatting is so important for the readability of blog posts: Formatting does make a difference with the second style being much easier on the eye and encouraging scanning through the text. Think about it the next time you feel the urge to write a lengthy paragraph that is full of convoluted, complex sentences. Another example of bad styling is consistently bolded text. Bold and capitalized text can be used to put some emphasis on the most important parts of the text. When every second word comes in a bold font and the author uses capital letters to share an exciting idea, however, the reader feels as if the content is “screaming for attention. Need a visual example? Here’s one: Words in bold and italic look different from the rest of the text, which is why the eye of the reader is immediately drawn to these parts of the content. Abuse in terms of text formatting, however, accomplishes the exact opposite – it confuses the reader and leads to the lack of focus. Using subtitles and pull quotes is a much better idea in terms of creating structure. The same applies to bulleted and numbered lists. This example expands the idea of how bad a large chunk of text is. In essence, formatting is as important as having quality content. Even the most brilliant article will become virtually unreadable because of poor formatting. While we are still discussing this point, it’s a good idea to mention the importance of font selection and text color. Fancy fonts may look great on an ad but they will do very little for the audience. Avoid gothic, handwritten and funky fonts because they’ll often make the text unreadable. The same applies to white text on black background. Try reading an entire article this way and you’ll know what we mean: 3. Doing Too Much Self-Promotion & Blogging Selfishly It may seem bizarre that some people would still attempt to sell through every aspect of their online presence. Excessively promotional and spammy blog posts are still a major problem that newbies deal with. Unfortunately, this problem can lead to the devastating loss of visitors. When looking for content, people want to read something informative, original or entertaining. Having a call to action at the end of the post or discretely mentioning a product or two is acceptable, as long as the text provides a lot of valuable information. According to Hubspot, excessive focus on promotion, especially if it comes with a misleading title, is a certain way of aggravating the audience and making sure that people are never going to come back to the blog. Now what do I mean by blogging selfishly? I mean blogging only about the titles you care about without considering your audience. Just like writing a cliché blog posting is a really bad idea, trying to go for something exceptionally niche and industry-specific isn’t going to be good either. … Read more