5 Worst Blogging Practices To Avoid

The internet is filled and overflowing with blog articles about blogging, “how to be a great blogger”, “10 blogging best practices”, yada, yada..

If you are a blogger or a digital marketer, chances are you have already crammed your way through hundreds of these “How to Blog 101” family of blog articles. But most of these “How to” articles do not tell you how NOT to blog.

In a sea of “best practices for blogging”, no one cares about educating you about the worst blogging practices, which, by the way, is way more crucial than you would think. Newbies to blogging and sometimes even seasoned bloggers sometimes end up ignoring these advice and their blogs end up not doing that great for their brand.

So here are 7 blogging worst practices that you must avoid!

1. Not having a goal

A company blog without a strategy behind it is just as good for your company as not having a blog at all. There has to be a reason why your company started its blog section in the first place. And this reason falls under your company’s marketing and content strategy. A blog is one of the channels of your company’s growth funnel and each blog piece should be written with a goal to serve this purpose.

2. Keyword Stuffing

This comes under one of the many SEO hazards. So, you have figured out a goal your blog will serve. Then you read about SEO in one of the hundreds of articles on the internet and decided to do the first thing that came to your senses – using keywords. And like a first timer in the kitchen, you decided to use all the ingredients (keywords) you could find in the kitchen drawers. No points for guessing how many people would actually eat your food. (HINT: None).

Keyword stuffing is a legit term in the SEO worst practices. It means using too many keywords in your SEO article to impress Google. Well, not happening. The ideal keyword consistency is 3-4 times in a 500-word article. Basically, your blog should feel natural and not forced.

3. In your face CTA buttons

Many bloggers and marketers tend to treat the blog section as a marketing hoarding or a bulletin board – stuffing it with huge CTA buttons all over the place. Fine, we get it that the SEO best practices articles you read asked you to include a CTA button on your blog. But calm down with it. Don’t use garish CTA buttons like “Buy Now” or “Call Us Today” all over your blog. That’s just mean to your readers. And no one is going to stay on your website if you do that. Instead, write a valuable and useful article and insert a relevant CTA that users will want to click.

4. Misleading clickbaity articles

Definitely one of the worst practices in the blogging world. Clickbait is not the way to attract your readers’ attention. It just isn’t. Even if you succeed in bringing your reader to your blog, they won’t stay to read it. And definitely never come back. Because by using misleading titles, you are risking your readers’ trust on you and your company. A company that cannot build customer loyalty can surely not survive. So keep your titles engaging and relevant.

5. Including outbound links to irrelevant sites

Link building is a great SEO technique to build authority to your website or blog. And all your “How to SEO” articles will tell you how important it is to include links to other content outside of your website for your blog’s SEO. But that doesn’t mean, you lose your track and start including links that are irrelevant to your users or links that direct your readers to sites that are not appropriate and have no connection to what your blog is about. You have to understand that you cannot fool Google’s search engine. You will be penalized. Neither can you fool your readers more than once. Loyalty and credibility are hard to earn. So let’s just be wise about it?

Like what you read? Do you want to build a content strategy for your company? We at Dreamscape Media would love to help! Contact us today here!