Every day, thousands of people from around the world begin the task of starting their very own blog. Unfortunately, most of these attempts end in failure, abandonment or disillusionment. It takes a dedicated, creative person who applies their talents to the art of blogging consistently in order to have a successful blog. In the beginning, a variety of mistakes can wear you down and make you feel as if your efforts are in vain – and these feelings lead to failure. Below, we’ve outlined five of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make when starting out in the business and how you can avoid succumbing to them.

Failing to Add Multimedia

If you are just beginning, you may not be aware that pictures and video add to the value of a blog post and increase the likelihood that it will be shared. By incorporating at least simple imagery into the blog post, it has been shown that sharing both via email and social media is markedly improved. Some people will even scroll through the entire blog post after clicking on it, just to see what the imagery of the post looks like – in other words, a subtle summary. This shouldn’t be misconstrued to mean that it’s OK to litter the page with images and video; just a couple will be fine. By capturing your audience’s attention from the start, you can then proceed to gain their trust via your written content.

Not Using Social Media

By spending just a few minutes each day on social media, you can be pinging your blog posts to any and all followers – helping to grow your exposure immensely. At first, it will seem rather unrewarding; you will first need to gain some followers and in order to do that, you will need content beforehand. Just focus on producing quality content and publishing it to a Facebook page and Twitter account at regular intervals and the rest will come in time.

Writing About Generic Topics

If you feel like you are forcing your blog posts, then how do you think you readers will feel when they read them? It’s a pretty simple idea: write about what you love – or at least about a topic on which you’re a good writer – and you readers will find the posts to be informative and worthy of sharing. If your blog posts read more like a step-by-step manual than they do a dynamic piece of content, then you will have a much harder time excelling as a blogger.

Worrying About SEO

It is definitely necessary to be pinging your blog to various sources, but too many new bloggers worry about SEO elements when they really should be worrying about content. If your blog does not have an ample amount of original content on it already, then no amount of SEO is really going to help you. Take the simple route of periodically promoting your content in social media and updating your blog on a regular basis. These actions in the beginning will do more for your credibility and your future SEO potential than anything else.