7 Mistakes To Avoid As An Amateur Blogger

As an amateur blogger, you are prone to make mistakes. But the good thing is, you can avoid them if you know them beforehand.

In this blog post, you will learn the biggest, or I would say the common mistakes amateur bloggers make when they start out blogging.  

Here is the list of common mistakes an amateur blogger make :

1. Not having a top-level domain

One of the mistakes I have seen amateur bloggers make is not to have a TDL(Top-Level Domain).

They create a blog on wordpress.com or bloggers.com with a long and unattractive URL which doesn’t look professional at all. 

There is no harm in using wordpress.com blog or bloggers.com blog, but if you are serious about blogging, and want to become a professional blogger from an amateur blogger, then you have no other option than to buy a Domain name. 

Remember, your domain is your online business address, your brand – so make sure you have a proper top-level domain in place before you start.

You can get a domain for as little as $0.88 from Namecheap.

I would highly suggest you have a .com domain to get the best exposure.

2. Ugly Looking Website

When people arrive at your Blog, no matter where they come from, the first thing they notice is the design/feel of your Blog.

It wouldn’t take much time for them to form an opinion on your Blog. People bounce off if they don’t like the design and the feel of the Blog.

I, when I started, spent a reasonable amount of time/money customizing my Blog. From the logo to the menu, to the footer, I had customized it all.

It would be difficult at first, but trust me, it’s all worth it in the end. 

So be sure you invest in a premium theme or freemium theme like Generate Press, Elementor, StudioPress, etc. to give a professional look to your Blog.

Do not hesitate in spending a little amount on Customizing the Blog.

The Blog is going to be your business, after all. Right?

If you are not tech-savvy or for some reason if you don’t want to do it yourself. You can always hire someone on fiverr.com to do the work for you. 

3. Not Collecting Emails

Believe me or not, an email list is one of the most powerful things you will ever have in your blogging or affiliate marketing career. Nothing would beat the traffic/sales you would get from the email list.

When I had started affiliatehacker, I had started collecting emails from day 1.

As an amateur blogger, you should never miss the chance of collecting and creating the mail list from day 1.

An email list helps you reach the already engaged audience, an audience who is interested in your Blog, your guide, and the products you promote to them.

To get started with email marketing, you can use any email marketing software like GetResponse, SendGrid, ConvertKit, etc.

4. Not Publishing SEO-Optimized Content

Do you know what I love the most about blogging? It’s free organic traffic.

But how do you get free traffic from google? To get free traffic, you would need to write SEO friendly content.

If you don’t write SEO friendly content, your post will get lost in Google’s Search engine ocean. You would never get ranked for your keywords.

Now, you would ask how do I write SEO friendly content?

If I went into the details about writing an SEO friendly content it would require an entire post altogether, which I would write shortly, for now, you can keep the following things in mind before writing a blog post to make it SEO friendly.

Install the plugin called Yoast. Make sure you do the following before publishing your blog post

• Find the keyword(s) that you want to rank for.
• Make sure the keyword is present in the title of your post.
• Make sure the keyword is present in the opening statement of your blog post.
• Keyword in your Headline tag
• Add some Internal Links
• Add Outbound/external links
• Keywords in the image alt attribute.
• Add the keywords in your meta description
• Make sure the keyword is present in the URL slug.
• Make sure you add the right amount of keywords in your blog post.

All of these should suffice for you to rank well in the google search engine for your keyword(s).

5. Creating Too Many Backlinks 

As an amateur blogger, you would be tempted to create too many backlinks in a shorter period of time.

I have seen bloggers who start spamming their links everywhere from forums to blogs comments to social media sites.

But keep in mind this is 2019 and not 2009. Back in the days, it was fine to add/spam links anywhere you want, but this doesn’t work anymore now.

I have tried creating 1000’s of backlinks in a day using Scrapebox or the Senuke to get on the top of the search result, it was all easy back then to get higher SERP, but now, with multiple Google updates, the game has changed.

What I would suggest, you as an amateur blogger should focus more on content than backlinks in the beginning.

Work on creating good content at least for 4-6 months.

And yeah, you can obviously have few do-follow links and few no-follow links via Blog commenting, but don’t do it too much yet.

Once you have enough content, let’s say around 50-60 posts, then you are allowed to go bit aggressive on creating backlinks.

Again, remember this is not 2009-2010 anymore, you don’t want to look spammy in the eyes of the Google.

Just build everything nice and slow.

As they say,

“Patience is the key to success.”

6. Not Passionate about the Niche 

As an amateur blogger, if you do not start your Blog on a topic you are passionate about, then it would be hard for you to sustain.

It would be hard for you to come up with good content; it would be hard for you to write a blog post. Unless, of course, if you hire someone to write for you.

But I am sure you wouldn’t want to do that as beginner, would you?

Start a blog that you are passionate about, keep producing great content.

Once you get the hang of it, once you become authoritative in your niche, you can start exploring the other niche.

7. Not Planning Your Content Ahead

Anything you should do, you should do it with a plan.

That’s how I do it, that’s how successful people do it, and blogging is no different.

Once your Blog is up and running with all the design and stuff done, you should start creating a plan for your blog posts.

How do you plan your contents ahead? Again this would need an entire blog post altogether but in short.

Here’s what I do and I would recommend you should do it too :

• Define your goals for Long term & Short term: Imagine/Visualize where you want to be or where you want your Blog to be in the next six months, in the next one year or so.
• Generate Post Ideas: Once you define your goal (Short term and long term). Now is the time to start planning your content accordingly.
• Visit sites like BuzzSumo, Flipboard, Feedly or In fact, Quora to check what’s trending in your niche. What are those people looking for? What is that people aren’t getting answers for? Make a list of all the ideas you get from all these websites.
• Keyword Research: Once you come up with all the How, Why, When and What post ideas. It’s time for you to do some keyword research. There is no point in writing something if there is no search for it on google, Right? Use the tools like Google Keyword planner or UberSuggest to do your keyword research to find out the search volume for the keywords you want to rank for.
• Create a Calendar: Once you are done with the Post Ideas and Keywords list, Create a calendar to plan your content.
• Write blog post and Publish it: Now that everything is ready – Your blog Ideas, Your keyword lists, Your calendar. Now is the time to write blog posts and publish them — one by one according to your calendar plan.

That’s all I have for this blog post.

According to me, these are the mistakes amateur bloggers make. So if you happen to make any of these mistakes, Correct it, learn from it and move on.

If you have any queries, do not hesitate to drop a comment.

Share it and help other amateur bloggers from not making these mistakes.