22 Dec Five Rookie Mistakes Nearly Every Blogger Makes and How to Avoid Them

It is universally acknowledged that nobody’s perfect and everybody makes mistakes, especially when first starting. So, if you’re thinking of taking up blogging, one thing is sure. Errors will be made, but don’t worry too much about it.

Just like any other skill or job for that matter, there’s a learning curve, and hence becoming a top-notch blogger will take time. You can’t just start typing away at a keyboard one day and magically become the best blogger there ever was.

However, some common mistakes seem to repeat often, and these can damage your site’s popularity very early on. That’s why we’ve prepared a list of some frequent mistakes most rookie bloggers are guilty of. Luckily, we’re not going to leave you in the lurch. Aside from pointing out the mistake, we’ll also explain how you can fix them.

But, before we move on, a piece of advice. To help yourself avoid the most fatal mistakes, make sure you pick a good hosting provider. WPMU DEV hosting ticks all the boxes. It’s affordable, fast, secure, fully-dedicated, and the #1 rated WordPress host on TrustPilot. Get 20% off any of their plans here.

1. Not Having a Coming Soon Page

While this is not something you might spend too much time thinking about when starting a website, you absolutely should. Coming soon pages are a great way to announce your upcoming projects and generate hype for what’s to come. In addition, they can also serve as a great way to collect emails and boost your SEO even before your site is online. By taking advantage of coming soon pages, you can always stay prepared and one step ahead.

When it comes to the actual creation of a coming soon page, a plugin is the most convenient way to do it, unless you’re a professional web designer and want to do everything yourself.  However, for those of us that want a gorgeous-looking page that can be customized easily, a tool like UnderConstructionPage or Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode should do the trick.

Both plugins offer a great variety of premade templates and a myriad of customization options, all packed into a handy drag-and-drop page builder.

2. Not Taking Care of Maintenance From the Get-Go

So, you set up your WordPress blog, write a few posts, and everything seems peachy. That usually tends to be the case with new blogs, but the longer you have, the higher your chances of something going wrong are, especially if you haven’t kept up to speed with the technical aspect of running a website at all. Making sure your site is well maintained from the beginning could spare you a lot of trouble in the future, but it could also save you a lot of time if you choose the right tools.

WP Reset is an excellent example of such a plugin. You can use it to maintain your site, update, delete or install plugins and themes in bulk and reset certain parts of your site as needed. It also provides a great backup option in the form of snapshots, aka automatically captured shots of your entire site you can use to restore it should anything not go as planned.

But even if things go wrong, you can always use the ERS. The Emergency Recovery Script is a WordPress independent PHP file that offers a variety of tools that could help you if you ever experience the misfortune of not even being able to enter your site.

3. Getting Free or Super Cheap Hosting

While we’re very well aware that cheap hosting deals are very appealing when you don’t have a lot to invest into your blog initially, opting for a bad hosting provider can damage your site’s well-being in the long run. Two of the most common issues that arise with inadequate web hosting are the possibility of data loss due to a lack of accessible backups and slow loading speeds.

Slow loading speeds are caused by over-inflated servers. Most ultra-cheap hosting plans provide shared hosting, and their servers host many websites simultaneously. Considering that many sites are all hosted on the same server, they are using the same resources, which ends in them being slow to load.

What you always need to keep an eye out for when browning for a hosting provider is the following; high-quality customer support, good uptime, storage, and bandwidth. What we love about WPMU DEV Hosting most is it’s packed with unique and powerful hosting features you won’t find anywhere else (like 7 built-in pro WP plugins). See for yourself and get 20% off any of their hosting plans here.

4. Not Doing Keyword Research

We get it, you want to write about what you want to write about, and there’s nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary. Choosing a niche for your blog that you’re not interested in purely because it’s popular is a surefire way to fail. But, even the niche you’re interested in has high-ranking keywords and competitor analysis.

No blogger can get very far without proper keyword research, as without them, you’ll fail to rank high in the search engines, and what good is a blog if nobody can find it? You can always try doing manual keyword research, but this takes a very long time and usually doesn’t result in anything overly useful. Instead, you should consider a keyword research tool.

There are many tools to choose from Semrush being consistently hailed as the best. But if you don’t have the money just yet to invest in a tool like Semrush, there are some free options like Free Keyword Tool by WordStream, and Free Keyword Generator by Ahrefs.

5. Not Being Present on Social Media

Most newbies in the game completely disregard this aspect, mainly because they think it’s useless, but this mindset couldn’t be more wrong. It takes Google 3 months to index your content correctly, so how will anyone know what you’ve published and how good it is without social media. Be smart and leverage platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and in some cases even TikTok.

Having more than one social media profile is also advisable as it allows you to connect to the highest number of people possible. It does take up more of your time, but it also pays out. In addition to this, we’d also recommend you don’t stay anonymous, as people are way less likely to trust you. And less trust means fewer visitors, subscribers, customers, etc.

Starting on Top

It can be tough to start a blog and turn it into something that could generate revenue over time. To make that process quicker, you’ll have to avoid some common rookie mistakes and start on the right foot.

Create the great content you know you can, but never disregard the technical or the analytical aspect of running a successful blog, as these are both do or die in the blogging business. We wish you the best of luck and remember always to have some fun while blogging because if you’re having fun, so will your visitors.