Guest Post – Our host is Amy Brown, Amy uses her personal experience to list 5 Ridiculous Blogging Advices You *Must* Ignore. See How to Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.
The blogging realm is full of ‘gurus’: some are bonafide experts, others are simply overrated, and then, there is the third kind – the downright wannabes!
While the bonafide ones are those who are sought-after for tips around blogging, the other two categories belong to the self-claimed experts who would dole out their tips and advices unsolicited. Ironically, there isn’t a dearth of people who follow them and their sermon, simply because these sham experts are everywhere.
Now, when it comes to bloggers looking to make a serious mark on the Internet and gaining more and more visitors for their website, they do bank on certain proven methodologies and approaches that they read about on the Internet and try to implement the same on their blogs.
However, Internet is filled with so much fluff and pulp that nitpicking the authentic ways that have more likelihood of working and steering clear of the misguided advices becomes a task too tricky. Unless you yourself have a lot of experience how blogging and digital marketing works, there is every chance that you just might fall for the trap (an unintentional one, but a trap nevertheless).
Here are 5 Blogging advices that you must ignore:
Advice 1: The Internet Folks Don’t Like Long Posts
The mythical overlay of the opinion, “people do not read content-rich articles on web” is enormous and not good. Out of 10, 7 ‘experts’ might advocate writing “short and sweet” posts. The truth however is somewhere between ‘not really’ and ‘absolutely not’.
If you look around and look into the websites like Problogger, which more often than not has posts that go up to even 1500 words, or the sites like Leisure Martini that keep it somewhere between 500-1000, there is an inherent realization that when quality of the content is rich, it works for you anyways. But there have been surveys that have proved that longer posts are shared more than their shorter counterparts.
But the most significant and convincing reason for publishing longer posts is the fact that Google indexes such websites with a greater degree of surety and volume. There is a scope of using the relevant keywords with a greater count too, pushing your SEO intentions further towards glory.
Advice 2 – Write on As Many Niches as You Can to Draw Assorted Audience
Being a bit of everything is a dangerous thing to do. When you aren’t focusing your blog on a particular niche and instead letting it restlessly roam around different themes and topics, you aren’t building a loyal follower base. For example, a blog centered on movies has no business talking about the current affairs.
Deciding on a niche to write on has to be made clear at the time you are choosing a domain name for your brand. And once you set your website up, it is recommended you stay true to the name and the idea that drove you to start the blog in the first place.
Advice 3: All The Headline Advices
When it comes to choosing the headlines of your post, different tips are doled out by an assortment of advisors. One of the most common advices rolled out is “Write Crisp Headlines ONLY”. Crisp headlines do look and sound great, but longer headlines sometimes manage to grab more eyeballs. At the same time, writers try to achieve many things and in the process, end up making their headlines look cluttered and unnecessary long.
So, it totally depends how cleverly you are stringing up the words to make them interesting enough for the reader.
Advice 4 – Keep Content Rich with Keywords
It sure is a good SEO practice to have keyword(s) in the title and in the body of the post, but when you feel that forcing keyword in the content is making you compromise with the beauty of your writing, let go of the temptation. SEO and personalized content can live in harmony, but it takes time to bring that harmony into practice.
Advice 5 – Your Target Audience Isn’t On Social Media, So You Don’t Need To Be There
Social media is an indispensable part of blogging, no matter what niche you are targeting. So even if you don’t believe you have got many potential buyers with very much active Facebook accounts, that’s not a reason for NOT being on this platform.
A real estate brand, for example, might realize that an overwhelmingly large chunk of its Facebook fans is within the age bracket of 18-24, which implies it’s not really attracting people who are the ones investing homes. However, before they jump the gun and scrap the page, they must acknowledge that it is still getting people to talk about the brand. When you are becoming an entity around which the discussions are spun on the Internet, you are already gaining some ground, which can then elevate you to set higher goals.
The misguided advices floating around the web have surely to be guarded against. If you aren’t comfortable banking on your instincts.
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