15 Terrible Mistakes Amateur Blogger Make | How to Fix them

Did you Just start blogging or thinking why aren’t the posts ranking well? The silly mistakes one commits as an amateur blogger can be the main reason.

Fixing such mistakes and learning from them is essential if you want to be a successful blogger and earn money online.

As a beginner, you should also be aware of the common blogging mistakes that every amateur blogger make and avoid such mistakes during your journey.

Most of the mistakes committed by new bloggers are due to lack of knowledge or sometimes even due to underestimating the importance of the responsible factors.

Whatsoever, mistakes are mistakes, and you need to fix them, if you have done one.

Basing up on my experience and observations, I have come up with the 15 most common and terrible mistakes amateur bloggers make and how to fix them.

MY AIM IS TO HELP NEW and GROWING BLOGGERS, I HAD WRITTEN THIS ARTICLE CONSOLIDATING ALL MY EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATIONS

I believe it will help you for sure.

Let’s get started.

Using Free Domain Name Instead of Custom Domain

Going for a free domain that ends up looking like yourdomainname.seviceprovider.com instead of yourdomain.com is one of the common mistakes done by several newbies.

For examples it looks like myblogging.goddady.com

Even if you do so much work on that free domain name, it won’t be of much use. Your website with a free domain name won’t get the best rankings in the search results it actually deserves.

If you are really serious about blogging and wish to earn money online, then free domains like yourdomainname.maindomain.com are not for you.

Buy a custom domain from Namecheap or Godaddy.

At the same time, I would also like to inform you that some hosting companies offer a custom domain registration free for the first year.

I really don’t prefer it in a long run as it costs a lot in renewal after the first year when compared to domain registrants like Namecheap and Godaddy.

Also select a simple domain name that is

• easy to remember- catchy
• contains the niche level keyword
• containing not more than 3 words

Not Choosing Good Hosting Provider

Hosting is another point that needs attention because it’s the place where your site is hosted.

Also, factors like site speed, uptime, and security are influenced by hosting you choose

Don’t go for unreliable hosting providers, who thrive for money even to fix small issues like increasing memory limit.

Before you choose a hosting provider, check these points along with all the basics like storage webspace, and bandwidth.

The points are

• How is their customer support?
• Automated daily backup’s
• Free SSL’s preferably with let’s encrypt
• Server uptime
• Server locations

The Importance of Customer support and Backup’s in Hosting

Why I really stress on customer support and backup is, whether you are an amateur blogger or a pro blogger, Somewhere and at some point of time, while you test the things, the chances of getting your site messy are really high.

In such case backup’s and the support teams are saviours.

Think about the situation, where the changes to your site are irreversible and there is no backup file. All the work you had done is gone, or you might end up paying lots of money to fix the issue and get back your site on track.

So its good to select a hosting that have a great support and does daily backups.

Apart from that, ensure to backup the site on your side too before doing any major changes to your site.

You can use free plugins like update draft plus to create a backup file

SSL Certificate – A Must Have Thing

Coming to the SSL certificate, using an SSL to your site and getting a secured HTTPS tag before your domain name is highly recommended as it is one of the Google ranking factors now.

Also, having a secured lock symbol for your domain act as a trust signal for several visitors.

There are both free and paid SSL certificates, free versions are also really fine, but you might need to update the certificate every three months.

However, several hosting providers like Site ground, Bluehost, and others use let’s encrypt SSL which is free and by which you can easily encrypt your site with an SSL. Even you don’t need to worry about renewals as they are done automatically in some hostings.

Look at Server Uptime of Hosting

Lets now talk about server uptime, think that your server is frequently down, so your site. The visitors will get a temporary down error or a 404 page.

What they will do? they will just move to another search result and you are losing a customer.

So, Look at a hosting server that have 99.9% uptime.

Server Location – A Important Point Bloggers needs to Consider

Along with these points, look at the available server locations of the hosting provider.

It’s important because the server location influences the page speed (how fast the website loads to the visitor).

Think that majority of your target audience are in the US and your server location is in the UK.

In such a case, It takes more time to load your page for your audience in the US than in the UK and EU.

Closer the server location, faster will be the site loading speed.

So, check for the desired server location basing up on your target audience.

My Recommendation

I had used several hosting providers, some VPS and some shared hosting’s.

Of all, I found siteground is a good hosting provider both from money and support point of view.

Siteground is also one of the hosting providers that WordPress says as some of the best and brightest in the hosting world.

As per my opinion, their customer support is good and helpful and they do daily backups.

They have a unique interface, even a beginner can use it without any technical knowledge.

Selecting Highly Competitive Niche’s

Never ever select a highly competitive broad niche. It’s mainly because of the competition that arise due to the top level and high authoritative players within that niche

With a beginner blog, it’s highly impossible to outrank their posts unless you have an army of writers and marketers.

I will try to explain by taking health niche as an example.

You type any major keyword related to health in Google, I am sure the results will be filled up with giants like WebMD, Healthline, and Mayoclinic.

With a small blog with less authority, It’s not that easy (I can even say impossible) to outrank their posts due to the authority and trust the competitors have over the niche.

It’s good to confine to a microniche’s mainly if your selective field is highly competitive. In this case, you need to look at specific topics like diabetic foods rather than concentrating on a broad topic.

I had just taken the health niche as an example, I personally recommend not to go with health, nutrition, or such type of niches as they are highly influenced by EAT factors (expertise, authority, and trust).

So, you need to be a certified person in that area or your content needs to be reviewed by some authorized person in order to rank well in those niches or you must an over enthusiast on that topic

Simply, if you want to earn money within a short period of time, avoid selecting a broad niche and highly competitive niches and instead go for a micro niche.

Focusing on Highly Competitive Keywords Initially

This point is a very important one that every new blogger must remember.

Whatever the niche you take, go only for low competitive keywords initially till your site gets some traffic and builds some authority over that niche.

Why?

It’s because being a small site with low authority and trust, it becomes really difficult for you to overcome big players in your niche and get ranked for highly competitive keywords.

I personally believe this is one of the major mistakes that amateur blogger make.

To identify low competitive keywords, you can the keyword research tools. I personally use and prefer KWFinder and SERanking to check keyword difficulty.

If you have a limited budget, signup for an account in SEMrush and just use the free searches SEMRush offers daily to get an idea, I like overall SEMrush tools a lot, but not a big fan of their keyword difficulty score showing up.

Also, you can try tools like SEMScoop for getting an idea about your keyword difficulty scores.

Lower the keyword difficulty higher will be the chances to rank

In my opinion kwfinder by mangools offers one of the best keyword difficulty score.

you can even identify the keyword difficulty by just typing the keyword in google and seeing the number of search results that appeared.

Lower the search results, usually lower will be their difficulty score.

During the initial times of your blog, go for low competitive keywords only.

When you slightly start growing and enters to a level of 5000 page views or more, you can try for medium competitive keywords.

Only by building a strong base and improving authority over the niche, you can get placed for highly competitive keywords.

You can even Identify the low competitive keywords easily.

Usually, they will be long tail keywords, which are focus keyword that contains three or more words within them.

For example, compared to keywords like content marketing, keywords like content marketing books, best content marketing books have better scope to rank easily.

Neglecting SEO Both for Posts and Site

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is simply the driving force of most of the websites.

Optimizing the website and blog posts as per the SEO factors plays a crucial part in the success of a blog.

Neglecting SEO for your blog post as well as neglecting the site level SEO factors are some of the common things that are underestimated by amateur bloggers.

It’s important to understand that SEO for a website is like fuel for the car.

The simple thing one should note is to follow the best SEO practices and optimize your posts and website according to it.

There are over 200 factors that plays a role in SEO and Google ranking algorithm.

You need to optimize for all the factors but optimizing your posts for 25 to 30 major factors is good enough.

You can use tools like Rankmath or Yoast SEO to better optimize your posts.

Try to do both on page optimization and off page optimization for your posts.

I was giving you a simple and easy to use checklist of all well-known and predicted SEO factors, which I prepared myself and use for my purposes.

Not Focusing on Blog Design and User Experience

Your blog is the place where you showcase your product or posts to the world.

This is one of the areas least focused by Amateur bloggers

Think that your blog has a poor design and the users who visit are unable to focus on your content due to the terrible font size used.

Do you think that the users who visited will continue reading your blog?

The chances are obviously less.

That’s why new bloggers need to focus on blog design and user experience.

You can improve the design and user experience by

• Keeping a white coloured background
• Easy Navigation within the website by menus
• Using mobile responsive themes
• Optimizing site to load faster (site speed)
• Providing links to internal pages and external resources
• Breaking the content in to small paragraphs and using subheadings
• Using images, infographics whenever required
• By Using good font size and readable fonts.

these you can improve the overall user experience.

At the same time, new bloggers should note the importance of mobile responsive websites, its because most of the searches happening on the internet now are by mobiles.

Mobiles and tablets together occupy more than 51% of the total traffic share these days and are in a forward trend.

Another point to note is Google announced mobile first indexing for all the websites, which means Google first indexes the content in the mobile versions rather than the desktop version.

It shows the importance of mobiles searches as well as mobile responsive pages.

At the same time, I want to give a great tip to you, almost all of the user experience issues, and design issues can be fixed based upon the theme you use.

Use a light and highly customizable themes for better site load speeds.

I recommend generate press or Astra themes to use, which are lightweight and loads amazingly fast. But you can’t really customize much with generate press. I had tried both these themes, and both are good.

Coming to me, for most of my websites, I usually pick a theme from ThemeForest as I love to customize the site without affecting site speed.

I was using various themes on several of my websites, The most loved was Newspaper theme, which is highly customizable. On this website, I was using a different theme.

At the same time, I request to not to go with free themes if you are serious about blogging as many of them don’t have a clean code and support of required.

Ignoring the Power of Site Structure

Site structure or website architecture refers to the way you structured your pages and how you interlinked them.

The user who visited your website should easily navigate to the posts or pages he wants to visit, and he should go back and come to the desired posts seamlessly.

They should also have easy access the related or useful content.

You can achieve this easily.

Optimize your site architecture by

• improving your navigation menus
• building internal links between your pages

This is important both for crawlers and humans.

By Ignoring site architecture, you yourself are spoiling the chance of your posts, getting indexed in Google.

If you have a poor site structure and poor internal links, google bots may not be able to identify and index the poorly linked pages.

Not Writing Consistently and Producing Low-Quality Content

Writing consistently is another point that amateur bloggers should follow.

Keep in mind that achieving success in blogging is a long term process during which you need to produce high quality content consistently at regular time intervals.

Don’t stop writing the blog posts just after posting 5- 10 pieces and seeing that there are no visitors yet.

It’s because it takes months to get placed in the first page of results.

To see the perfect results in ranking, you need to wait at least 4-8 months or even more for your posts, depending up on the keyword you choose its difficulty and other factors.

Also writing posts with low quality content is of no use. To see good results, you need to produce high quality content, which in the sense a resource rich, unique, and highly relevant data to your desired topic.

Be known that low quality sites with low quality information of no use can even lead to Google’s panda algorithm punch on your site.

Never try article spinners or such type of works. Crawlers are smart enough to detect all those.

 So, create a highly valuable, unique, relevant content to the topic and present it in a nicer way by using headings, media, writing in shorts paragraphs etc.

Also don’t lose hope just after writing 5-10 articles and seeing no visitors to your blog. Always remember success is not easy and comes only with constant work.

The only thing you need to do is produce high quality content consistently and optimise them well.

Building Backlinks by Spammy Techniques

Many amateur bloggers go crazy on building backlinks to their site.

I agree that links are important to the site to improve your rankings, but what I say is, they should be gained naturally but not by using spammy techniques.

Many new bloggers submit the links to the numerous spammy directories, PBN’s and even do extensive comment linking, which causes the problems.

Check the reputation of those directories and PBN’s before taking any decision.

If you submit links to spammy directories and PBN’s, instead of boosting your rankings, such links can cause severe damage and can even downgrade the rankings.

Coming to comment linking, they still work. But extensive comment linking does not work and may put your site in trouble.

Also never go for cheap link building services, they don’t work at all.

Be known that by using spammy link building techniques, you are risking your site to google penalties.

Then you might ask me how to get links naturally?

You can get links naturally by producing high quality content and presenting it in a great way by using infographics and statistical data related content.

Also basing on my observation and experience, what i can say is, a post that attains a position in top 3 or 5 rankings for a good keyword are getting links automatically.

So, choose a low competitive keyword and produce a very high quality, shareable content to get links naturally. Also use some interesting media or infographics on your posts.

Additionally, you can even do guest posting or active forum discussions to boost your rankings.

Messing the URL’S

URL’S are the things where several new bloggers go wrong. It’s a good practice to set the URL structure from starting itself.

Good URL structure and optimized URL’s can play their role in ranking your site well.

Bad url structure look like this

website.com/123456

website.com/index.its20%20%an20%url%id=12345

Some URLs can even be as long as a sentence too.

Crawlers can’t understand what you have written in the URL in such cases.

So, Avoid such mistakes

Follow these while you write URL

• Fix a simple URL structure
• Use short and simple URLs
• Use the focus keyword in the URL’s (but don’t stuff with keywords)
• Avoid words like and, or, to, an, (prepositions and conjunctions) in URl’s

In case, if you had done mistake in URL structure, you can fix it by redirecting to the New URL.

However, note that Redirections are not good if you have an established site. Its only for new sites with extremely low or no traffic.

Stuffing Keywords and Using Black Hat SEO practices

Many new bloggers even go wrong at Keywords, thinking keywords does all the magic, But its back during the initial days of SEO. Not now!

Yes, I too agree that using keywords is important. You need to use them naturally only when you really require.

Google’s algorithm is highly developed now and can clearly detect what your page is about.

I usually prefer to use the target keyword in the introduction and one or two keywords in the content that too only if there is a need to use them but not stuffing them.

The point is rather than the number of keywords, look at the keyword density. Try to maintain the density of not more than 1.5% of your total content.

Rather than stuffing keywords, I recommend using semantically keywords, related terms, and proof terms within the part of the natural content writing process to give relevancy signals to crawlers.

Also note that distribution of keywords in your content plays an important role rather than keyword stuffing.

Coming to black hat SEO practices, some amateur bloggers can even get attracted to these risky techniques that boost up your rankings.

But never go in that path, soon or later you can get caught and get penalised or even banned.

Some of the black hat techniques include article spinning, cloaking, spammy link building, using invisible text, keyword stuffing etc.

Never do these type of spammy techniques.

Ignoring Collection of Emails

This is the point I greatly ignored during my initial times, I lately recognized the importance and I still feel bad about it.

Because capturing emails is a great way to connect with your audience and make them updated about your new posts, updates, and products.

But be known that you won’t be able to collect a good number of emails if you don’t provide any value-added resources to the user or if you don’t give them useful information on your site.

Offer your visitors a useful resource that they need, such that both the parties can get benefitted.

You can use high conversion popup’s for your purpose too, but they can be frustrating sometimes to the vistors.

You can create a newsletter signup form and use it to collect emails. You can even optimize your home pages for collecting emails.

Copying Content, Images from Other Sites

Copying images and content from other websites and using it as if the content is owned, is a great mistake many amateur bloggers do due to lack of enough knowledge.

You can write your own version of content by learning from other blogs and based up on your experience but never ever copy the content directly as a whole from other websites and paste it on yours.

If you are using certain content of importance or statistical data from other websites give an appropriate credit and link to those websites.

Also don’t use the photos or infographics of other websites. Its their owned property.

Using such copyrighted or owned content may lead to legal issues in future.

If you have a picture or an infographic prepared on your own, use it or buy a picture from stock photography agencies.

I personally prepare graphic posters I use.

I buy stock photography from depositphotos and dreamstime or use my own images.

Apart from them I use Envato elements an all in one suite type of thing for my purposes.

You can check them out.

There are also websites that offer images for free, you can use those photos if you don’t have enough budget.

Underestimating the Power of Social Media

Social media is an amazing platform to drive traffic, create brand awareness, and to stay connected with your customers.

It’s also a great way to acquire links and increase trust value.

In case if you are not using social media for your business, you are losing all these for no reason.

All you need to do is just share the content on your social media pages.

You can use Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit for your purposes and get a decent amount of traffic from them.

They are a great platform to stay in touch with your customers and update them about your new posts and happenings.

At the same time sharing of your content on social media, likes, and comments too counts in the process of ranking as social signals.

Take all the necessary steps like building interesting thumbnails, using infographics and graphical presentations to increase sharing and engagement of the audience.

You can use graphic tools to prepare your own infographic or styled posters.

As a new blogger you can go with Canva or crello for your graphic design purposes. I use them for my puroses.

Not Liking to your Competitors or Related Websites

There is a misconception among Amateur bloggers on linking to the competitor websites and other niche related websites that if you give credit or references to those websites then you might not rank well.

But it is purely wrong.

If you want, you can avoid referring to competitors in the same topic, but you can give links to related pages or posts of your competitors with no issue.

The point here is to show additional resources for your viewers on a particular topic and make your page a resource rich data for your users.

Moreover, by linking to your competitor pages, you are giving a signal to Google crawlers about your niche and also on the topic you wrote, which helps crawlers to understand your page better.

Also, by giving links to your competitors you can even establish good contacts in your niche area, which is a very good thing.

So it’s good to link to all the resourceful pages even if they are your competitors.

Final Words

With that I hope you got a clear view of mistakes that every Amateur blogger make.

Do follow all these tips and tricks I gave, and I wish you great success wholeheartedly.

Also, to make your work easy, I had prepared a checklist adding some more additional data and tips for you. You can download it here.

If you like my post, leave a comment below. I really like to read your comments.