A New Generation Marketer

While I haven’t been a blogger for an extended amount of time (only since January 2010 to be exact) I have had a significant amount of time to learn about blog writing. To date, I have experience publishing 101 blogs on this site (this is 102), was invited or asked to guest blog on over thirty sites, and I have written well over forty blogs for the company I now work for. This adds up to a little less than 200 blog posts written in just eight months.

From this experience, I have gained a good understanding of the do’s and don’ts of blogging, both for a personal site and a company blog.

Below are the top 10 most common mistakes I have experienced or seen to avoid:

1. Not backing up statistics.

Coming out of college, I started blog writing the way I wrote research papers. I very quickly realized that the two writing styles were very different in several ways.

a. How you cite your source. When writing college research papers, I was accustomed to using parenthesis and citing the source of information. In blogs, you use a link over the text. In general, whether it is a paper or blog, it is crucial to cite your source to establish credibility.

b. If you spout of statistics like “80% of X attributed to a 25% increase in X” without any link, how will anyone know you are correct?

c. The first step to establishing blog credibility is in linking your statistics and research to real links.

2. Promoting you or your product in every blog post

You may be familiar with the inbound marketing rule that no one cares about you or what you sell; they only care about what is in it for them. This means that while blogging, don’t write about yourself or your products. Instead, write about what interests your customers. At Backupify, our customers are interested in social media compliance, new technologies, computer security, etc. We write about our research on this and how to safeguard against security threats. Not once do we promote our service in the blogs.

3. Not editing posts before they are published

Thankfully I am a stickler when it comes to editing and writing good sentences, but it surprises me to see how many people forget spaces between words, misspell the most common words, use the wrong word type (i.e. their instead of there), or write incomplete sentences. Even people who are regarded as thought leaders and who have high subscription rates on their blogs still make obvious mistakes. All it takes is a few glances back over your post to check for spelling and grammatical correctness. This goes a long way towards establishing credibility.

4. Writing an unorganized post

Many times when writers sit down to write a blog post (and I am guilty of this as well), they get so excited about what they are going to write that they forget that there must be a structure to the post in order to engage the reader. If your writing is all over the place, the reader will wonder what you are trying to say.

As I am a writer for BostInnovation here in Boston, my editor, Kyle Psaty taught me that there must be a strong, compelling introduction that explains why I am talking about my topic. Then I need to bring the reader through my story in a clear, chronological order followed by a strong summation of the importance of what I learned from what I am writing about. People want to read a story, not a random collection of sentences that seem semi-related. Always keep the reader in mind.

5. SEO is ignored

If you are trying to rank your post in search engines, make sure to pay careful attention when adding relevant and targeted keywords into your post. There are several keyword discovery tools including Trellian Keyword Discovery, Hubspot’s Keyword Grader, Wordstream, etc. Also, just putting yourself in your reader’s head and thinking about what they would be searching for to come to your post is very helpful. Make this the last part of what you do before publishing to ensure you include all relevant keywords.

6. Headlines are sloppy and uninviting

Many of you have experienced the dramatic increase of information available to us on the web. While this is generally a good thing, it also causes us to put up strong information filters while looking for information. If your blog is in a blog aggregator site such as StumbleUpon or Digg and your title, for lack of a better word, sucks, no one will want to read it. Why would I open up an article with a title like “Inbound Marketing is the New Thing” when I could open one up that says “Ramp Up Your Company’s Marketing With These 10 Internet Marketing Tips”. Not only is this more eye catching and intriguing (people LOVE tips) but it also includes important keywords in the title that will help your article rank in search engines.

7. Not including keywords in the title

As a follow up to the point above, it is also crucial to include keywords in your title. This is important for many reasons:

a. Search engines will pick up your post as related to a particular search term much easier.

b. People will click on it more if it has keywords they are searching for right in it.

c. Google Alerts and other web filters will be more likely to pick it up with a keyword included in the title.

8. You’re writing about something you think you should write about, not what you want to write about

While it is sometimes hard to avoid writing about something you aren’t inspired to write about (such as if you are doing it for your company) it is very important to be passionate and excited about what you are writing. If you don’t even want to read what you are going to write, why will anyone else? If you write with conviction, passion and integrity, it will surely show. You can probably tell that I am passionate about this post by the detail and conversation-like tone I have added to it. This has hopefully led you to read this far down. If this was a post that I was negatively motivated to write, you would not have read down this far.

9. Not including keywords in the post itself

Many times when writing, you don’t think about SEO until right before you are about to publish. However, since SEO is still such a huge part of getting found online, it helps to put keywords not only in the title and post description, but in the body as well. This helps Google confirm that what you say the post is about is really what it is about. For example, if you are writing about the importance of mobile advertising, make sure to include mobile advertising and variations of that phrase inside your post.

10. Not promoting it or making it easy to share

After all the hard work you have put into your post, why not share it with the world?! Your blog should have multiple social sharing buttons such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Email, etc. This allows visitors to easily share a post they love without having the trouble of submitting it themselves. It is also important to share your posts on your own social channels. After I publish this post, I’ll share it on social media so my network will see it. This exposes it to thousands of eyes who will then pass it onto thousand more. Once you hit publish, begin sharing!

For beginning bloggers, this may seem like a daunting task. It takes a conscious effort to incorporate all these skills into every post, so integrate them at your own digestible pace. After a few posts, you’ll get the hang of it and will become a blogging maven!

To find out more about blogging best practices and to follow up with me, make sure to follow up with me on Twitter @kristinedziadul.