Before I list the top five blogging marketing mistakes, I just have to tell you that having a blog with multiple posts ranking on the front page of Google is amazing on so many levels. Unfortunately, very few people will every know what it’s like.

But with just a little bit of effort and education, you can have great success, and fun, with a ranked blog.

So, here are the top five blogging marketing mistakes:

1. Using the wrong blogging platform. And the answer, in a nutshell, is wordpress. A proper hosted wordpress blog.

And I’m definitely not alone in this assessment.  Jack Humphrey, a very successful and famous blogger, says:

Jack Humphrey on WordPress

So don’t waste your time on the freebies, a hosted blog is very inexpensive, but much more powerful.

2. Wrong Permalink structure. Here are the different permalink options in wordpress:

Blogging Marketing: Correct Permalink Structure Is CRITICAL!

Of all of these, the only correct one is the last one. In other words, it displays the keyword that the blog is about in the URL, which is vital to getting posts ranked. In wordpress, you can edit the permalink structure to be correct by pasting this in the Permalink custom field: /%postname%/%post_id%/

3. Not creating a title, description and keyword list before you get started. Why is it so important? Because when your post is ranked, and a searcher sees the results in the search engines, all they can see is the title, description, and URL of the search results. Like so:

So your title, description and keywords all work together, to get your blog ranked, but also must read like a Pay Per Click ad, enticing your visitor to click on your site rather than your competitors.

4. Lack of keyword research for each blog post. Sometimes we are so excited to post to our blog that we just  publish it as quickly as we can. But slowing down just a little to research the keywords, makes all the difference.

For example, when I got the idea for this post, I wrote out the top five mistakes, then I did a search in the free Google research tool for the words “blog marketing.” One of the keywords came up, “blogging marketing” as getting 2,600 searches per month. It’s a little weird to use “blogging marketing” in a sentence, but hey, if 2,600 people a month search for it, it sounds like a great “long tail” keyword to go after, so I incorporated it into my title and first paragraph, then again a little bit throughout the post.

I suggest that you choose the keyword that is best suited to your content, and has anywhere from 500-20,000 searches per month.

5.  Lack of activity. Laziness! Most people don’t post nearly often enough. And you don’t have to post more than once a day to get a front page Google ranking, I only post to this blog 3-5 times per week, and it’s got a #1 Google ranking! Generally, 3-5 posts per week is great, more is better, the key is just committing to it and getting it done!

There are some great courses and help, and even a full service suite of tools, including blog creation, hosting, posting… at our social marketing software service, check it out. But however you do it, just get started, it’s easy, fun, and very rewarding.

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