3 blog writing mistakes you need to stop making
Yay, you’re blogging! I firmly believe blogging is one of the most powerful marketing tools for small business owners. Visibility, SEO, fodder for your socials and email marketing, and a great way to generate leads, all in one.
Unfortunately, blogging isn’t as simple as popping an article on your website every so often. In fact, if you’re making any of these common mistakes, you could be preventing yourself from achieving the results you deserve.
Let’s take a look at them so you can avoid them!
Writing an essay
Writing blogs is often the first time many business owners have written anything substantial since they were in education or training. Writing a blog post is completely different to writing emails, cards, and shopping lists! Unfortunately, this means a lot of people automatically revert to a formal academic essay writing style when writing their blog, and this usually makes for dry, boring and sometimes hard-to-read articles.
Think about the tone of voice and language you use when writing, and make sure it reflects you and your brand. Do you need to be light-hearted, reassuring or exciting? Or, something else entirely?
Even if you’re a highly trained and qualified professional, your readers won’t be so they won’t want to read technical, academic text about your sector. Your blog needs to be something they want to read and can easily understand. They need to feel like you are talking directly to them.
And, please leave “therefore”, “hereby” and “thus” well out of it! They may have been great fillers for your academic essays, but they’re a quick way to make your readers’ eyes glaze over when it comes to blogs. They’ll hit the back button so quickly they may as well not have found your website in the first place!
Presenting a wall of text
Have you ever opened a web page and hit the back button after one look at the solid block of text facing you? We all lead busy lives and the vast majority of us don’t have the time (or the inclination) to pick our way through a hefty essay when we’re looking for a quick answer to something.
The blank space around your text plays a huge role in making your articles appealing and helping your reader understand what you’re saying. This blank space, known as white space, helps your reader scan over and navigate through the text, prevents them from being overwhelmed, draws their eyes to the most important parts and makes your website look nice! This is a good guide from MailChimp if you’d like to learn more about it.
Using subheadings throughout your article and short paragraphs is a great start to improving your white space and the readability of your blog posts. If you’d like to learn more about the importance of subheadings, read this, and for a guide on how to use them, read this.
Not checking your work
After all that work, publishing a new blog post feels great, but before you do, take a moment to check that it makes sense and that there aren’t any typos. It can be instantly off-putting for your reader if it looks like you don’t care or don’t know what you’re doing.
Reading through can help you see if you’ve got a bit slap-happy with cut and paste, or you’ve forgotten to come back to a bit to finish it. And, there are some great proofing tools around to help you catch any errors (some of which I’ve covered in this article), so you don’t need to rely on your own spelling and grammar skills.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this won’t apply if you’ve used AI to write your post (please don’t do this!). You might be able to tell it was written by a computer, they’re often littered with American spellings or could even contain incorrect facts.
Are you guilty of making any of these mistakes? You certainly wouldn’t be the first person I’ve met! If you’d like to improve your blog writing or discover how you can improve your marketing with your blog, then get in touch.