17 Blogging Do’s and Don’ts (You Must Know)

Last Updated on July 19, 2023 by Jordan Alexo

So, you want to start a blog? But don’t want to mess it up? Fear not!

In this guide, you’ll discover 17 blogging do’s and don’ts, from planning your content and optimizing your blog to not giving up even when it gets tough.

Let’s get started!

Key Takeaways

• Plan Your Content: Before you start writing for your blog, it’s important to have a plan. This means focusing on a specific niche. It’s better to stick to a niche rather than write about different things in each post. This helps your readers understand what your blog is about and helps search engines like Google rank your blog higher.
• Focus on Long-Tail Keywords: When you start a new blog, targeting specific and less competitive phrases people search for on the Internet is helpful. These are called long-tail keywords. They may not have as much traffic as popular keywords, but they are easier to rank for. By creating content around these keywords, you can quickly get traffic to your blog and later target more competitive keywords as your blog grows.
• Write High-Quality Content: Learning how to write good content for your blog is essential. This means writing in a way that matches what people are looking for and provides valuable information. Make sure your content is easy to read. Use headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs. Also, check for grammar and spelling mistakes and offer new insights or more detailed information than others have already written.
• Include Images: Adding pictures to your blog posts makes them more exciting and breaks up long paragraphs of text. Depending on the topic of your post, you can include images that explain concepts or processes. These can be graphs, charts, or even just engaging stock photos. Remember, a picture can often explain things better than words alone.
• Be Consistent: Building a successful blog takes time and effort. It’s essential to be consistent in your publishing schedule. The more content you create and publish, the more chances you have to attract readers and rank higher in search engines. Even if you don’t see immediate results, keep posting regularly and stay patient. Over time, your blog will gain momentum, and you’ll start to see the benefits of your hard work.

9 Do’s Of Blogging

Let’s take a look at the dos of blogging:

1 – Do Plan Your Content

Before you start writing content for your blog, you should have a plan.

One of the things you always have to have in mind is your niche. Nowadays, you don’t want to publish content all over the place. Like one day, you post an article about the “Best Paleo Tips,” and the next, you talk about “The Top 10 Online Marketing Strategies.”

It simply doesn’t make sense for your readers, and Google will also get confused. See, Google wants to rank blogs that specialize in a particular niche. For this reason, you should plan your content around a niche.

Let’s say you publish a review of a new Paleo cookbook. Next, you want to publish several supporting articles that cover topics related to Paleo, such as the benefits of eating Paleo, common mistakes people make when starting a Paleo diet, and so on.

I use Google Spreadsheets to keep track of my content plan. I suggest you do the same.

2 – Do Focus on Long Tail Keywords

When starting a new blog, you should focus on long-tail keywords if you want to see some quick wins with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

These are longer, more specific phrases people search for online. Usually, these keywords have less competition, making it easier to rank for them.

You want to build content around these keywords.

A great strategy is called the “SEO Avalanche Technique.”

This consists of building content for long-tail keywords, which sometimes appear to have zero traffic on SEO tools. However, once you write this, it ranks quickly and brings traffic to your website.

You focus initially on these keywords; later on, as your blog gains authority, you can target more competitive keywords.

3 – Do Write High-Quality Content

One of the most important things for a blogger is learning to write high-quality content. But what exactly is that?

• Search Intent: Your content should match what people are searching for and reply to their queries.
• Readability: You must structure your content to skim through your content easily. For instance, use headers, bullet points, and short paragraphs.
• Grammar and Spelling: Use Grammarly or another tool to check for grammar and spelling errors.
• Originality: Your content should provide new insights (whenever possible) or more detailed information than your competitors.

Anyway, your content should be written and formatted in a way that end’s user journey online. In other words, your content solves someone’s problem, and they don’t need to search further for answers.

4 – Do Include Images

You should add images to your content. This makes it more visually appealing and breaks up long blocks of text.

Of course, it depends on the content. For some content, you may have images to explain a concept or process. This may be graphs, charts, or infographics specific to your niche.

On other content, it may be stock images to make your content more visually engaging.

As they say, “images speak louder than words,” and adding relevant images can help your readers understand your content better and stay engaged for longer.

5 – Be Consistent

Anything worth having takes time and patience; a successful blog is no exception.

Consistency is key when it comes to blogging. The more content you pump out weekly, the more keywords you can rank for and the more traffic you’ll get.

However, most bloggers often get depressed after not seeing immediate results after a few months of blogging. So, they stop publishing regularly, and their blog becomes dormant as the weeks and months pass.

But you need to contradict this mindset and keep publishing content despite the lack of immediate results.

Because over the months, all your content will start ranking more and more, and you’ll start to see the fruits of your labor.

It’s similar to the snowball effect, where the ball begins small but grows larger as it rolls down the hill.

The same thing happens with the more content you publish, as long as it is consistent and high-quality.

6 – Do SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Some people claim you don’t need SEO nowadays. However, search engines still understand your content and rank it based on certain factors.

One of them is the use of relevant keywords in your content. For this reason, you must learn some basic SEO techniques.

I learned the basics by watching YouTube channels like Matt Diggity, Neil Patel, and Moz. 3

Understanding SEO will help you rank higher in search engine results pages and increase your blog’s traffic.

Also, you have two parts to SEO: on-page and off-page optimization.

• On-Page SEO: This consists of optimizing your blog content to be more easily found by search engines. Such as building internal links, using relevant keywords, optimizing your meta title, etc.
• Off-Page SEO: This is everything you do outside your blog to improve its ranking on search engine results. Often this involved building backlinks from other relevant and higher authority websites to your blog.

So, do your best to learn about SEO and implement it into your blogging strategy.

7 – Do a Profitable Niche

The old saying about writing content for a niche you’re passionate about. Sometimes isn’t the best strategy to follow.

For instance, your passion may not make money online, or the market is super competitive.

Hence, it’s essential to do market research. Here are a few aspects you should consider when choosing a niche for your blog:

Do you see products or services you could potentially promote as an affiliate within this niche?

If the answer is “no,” it might not be the best niche for a profitable blog.

Is the niche over-saturated?

Suppose you do keyword research with SemRush or other similar tools. And high-authority websites dominate every result. It might be challenging to outrank them and get traffic to your blog.

You want to be extremely strategic when you build your blog around a niche. I suggest you read this post, “11 Best Niches For Blogging With Low Competition.”

8 – Do Keep Learning

Most of my time as a blogger, when I’m not writing or building backlinks, is dedicated to learning.

See, online businesses are connected to technology. And technology is constantly evolving and changing.

For instance, what worked for SEO well in 2019 might not work now. Also, with the emergence of artificial intelligence, the whole blogging scene is constantly changing.

People are building blogs at a much faster rate than before. Like a few years ago, you could get away with posting one or two blog posts a week and still see growth.

However, nowadays, you need to be more active and publish three or more weekly posts to grow your blog.

You have many things to learn from SEO, AI tools, social media marketing, content creation, and more.

I strongly recommend that you keep learning. You can buy courses, read books and watch videos to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and strategies in blogging.

9 – Do Use AI Tools

Blogging without the help of artificial intelligence tools has become harder. You have AI writer tools like Jasper AI, ChatGPT, Writesonic, and many more to help you create high-quality content in minutes.

See, the difference between someone who uses AI tools and someone who doesn’t is massive. Without them, you may take hours or even days to create a single article.

On the other hand, someone who uses AI can create a lengthy post in two hours or less.

Besides, you don’t need to get super expensive. For instance, ChatGPT Plus or Writesonic is only 20 bucks a month.

And it can help you create content, summarize text, generate outlines for blog posts, and even develop ideas for your next content pieces.

8 Don’ts Of Blogging

Now you know the positive side, let’s check the don’ts of blogging:

10 – Don’t Focus Only On Making Money

Also, all these posts should stay relevant to your niche. I often apply an 80/20 or 70/30 rule – 80 to 70% of my content is informative and adds value to my readers, while the remaining 20 to 30% can be promotional or sales-oriented.

If you do this, you’ll safeguard your blog from one day getting wrecked by Google’s algorithm changes. At the same time, you build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

11 – Don’t Be a Perfectionist

Often new bloggers want to be perfectionists with things that don’t matter. For instance, they may spend hours or even days tweaking their blog layout or design when in reality, it’s the content that matters most to readers.

Or waste days writing, editing, rewriting a post, and trying to make it perfect before publishing.

But the truth is that perfectionism (good in small doses) can paralyze you from taking action. Or, if it doesn’t paralyze you completely, you may take much longer than necessary to produce and publish content.

Therefore, considering adopting a minimal viable approach when it comes to blogging.

This means you have minimal viable-looking blog design and informative content that is helpful to your readers.

And as you keep going, you can always go back and make improvements. I have adjusted my blog front page design several times.

The same thing with my blog posts; I often go back and re-edit them to make improvements.

See, the difference is:

While someone spends hours perfecting every detail. Another person following the “minimal viable approached” has already published several posts.

12 – Don’t Do Everything Yourself

As your blog grows and starts making money, it can be tempting to want to do everything yourself.

However, the objective of a business is to become self-sustainable eventually. Meaning it still runs without your constant intervention.

You can do this through outsourcing tasks but also by using software to automate processes.

For instance, if you hire a writer, you can produce twice as much content at the same time. As a result, you can target more search terms, reach more people and potentially make more money.

So, if you did everything yourself, you could limit your blog’s growth potential. Also, you have software that can automate many boring tasks, such as:

• Email Auto Responders: Automate your email campaigns so that new subscribers receive a series of emails over time.
• Social media scheduling: Use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to streamline your marketing efforts.
• Analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush to automate tracking of your blog’s traffic and performance.

Using these tools and outsourcing your workload can help you grow your blog faster and more efficiently.

13 – Don’t Write Just For Search Engines

There’s a thin line between writing for search engines and writing for your audience.

You want to write for search engines in a way that someone reading your blog posts doesn’t notice.

More and more, search engines use metrics such as clickthrough rate and ending user’s search journey to determine the quality of your content.

So, if your content sounds robotic and stuffed with keywords, your audience will quickly lose interest.

For this reason, try to balance writing SEO-friendly content targeting specific keywords and writing engaging content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs.

14 – Don’t Give Up

Most beginners expect fast results with blogging. And the hard fact is blogging takes time, commitment, and hard work to become successful.

Often blogs take six months or more before they start seeing significant traffic and income.

If you give up after three months because you look at your Google Analytics and see low traffic, you’re missing out on the long-term potential of your blog.

You have a few ways to reduce the time it takes for your blog to take off. This includes:

• Writing More Content: The more content you write, the more opportunities you have to rank for keywords and attract new readers.
• Targeting Low-Competition Keywords: Instead of targeting highly competitive keywords, try to find low-hanging fruit that can help you rank faster.
• Focus On One Niche: Your content should be consistent and focused on one niche.

For example, a blog with fifty or more posts about the “Paleo diet” will rank better than someone with ten posts about the “Paleo diet” and then switch to writing about travel.

Anyway, make a commitment not to give up. You should stick with your blog for at least a year to see some results. And some blogs take longer than that.

But the key is to stay persistent and keep working towards your goals.

15 – Don’t Need To Be An English Expert

So often, people get caught up thinking they must be a perfect English writer to start a successful blog.

The fact is most blogging content is technical. In other words, it is written to be simple and easy to understand for the average reader.

While it is essential to have basic grammar and spelling skills, you don’t need to be an English expert to start a blog. Also, you have many tools that can help you, such as Grammarly, ChatGPT, and others.

Furthermore, the more you practice, the better you will become at writing. You may want to read this post.”7 Easy Steps To Honing Your Writing Skills (Master Your Craft).”

I provide some techniques to help improve your writing skills and help you become a better blogger over time.

16 – Don’t Get Distracted With Shiny Objects

Blogging has been a serious business for many years. You have people who have built a fortune from it.

So, it’s a proven way to make money online. And that’s the only thing you must focus on – making your blog successful.

As explained before, bloggers often give up because they get distracted by other opportunities or “shiny objects” that promise quick results.

Probably, they watched a YouTuber making money after three months of their e-commerce business. So what do they do?

Well, they jump into e-commerce and forget their blog. After a few months, they realized e-commerce wasn’t as easy as they thought, and their blog had been neglected.

Then usually, they jump into the next opportunity. Results? No success in any of them.

You want to avoid this shiny object syndrome. Blogging is an excellent way to make money online, but it takes time and effort.

So, focus on it, learn as much as possible, and blind yourself to other distractions.

17 – Don’t Get Caught Up With Your Emotions

We live in a world where emotions are the being-all and end-all. However, our emotions can be extremely deceitful and manipulative.

Sometimes, what we must do to succeed isn’t pleasant or comfortable.

Usually, I write content without “feeling” like it, but I know it’s necessary to achieve my goals for my blog.

Also, I never feel like emailing people asking to guest post, but I know it’s important for my blog’s success.

So, don’t get caught up in your emotions! Successful people often follow stoic principles and set emotions aside to do what needs to be done.

One thing you need to do to become a successful blogger is to write content consistently, no matter how you feel about it.

If you struggle with this, read “Monk Mode 30-Day Challenge – Become a God Amongst Men.“

Furthermore, you have some good books like “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius that help to reinforce the concept of controlling your emotions and focusing on what’s important.

To become successful at something, managing your emotions is vital. Leaving your emotions unchecked can cause you to make bad decisions and lose sight of your goals.

Last Thoughts

To wrap it up, building an awesome blog needs careful planning, using the right keywords, top-level writing, interesting pictures, and never giving up.

You want to start by choosing a single niche. Preferably one that is profitable. And write content around it. Try to maintain an 80/20 or 70/30 ratio between informational and transactional content.

Also, target long-tail keywords to improve your chances of ranking higher on search engines.

Your writing should be the best it can be. For this, break up your text with headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs so it’s easier to read. Make sure there aren’t any spelling or grammar mistakes.

And adding pictures can make your blog posts more interesting and can even explain things better than just using words.

Most importantly, you have to keep going.

See, building a successful blog takes time, and you need to keep posting regularly. Even if you don’t see changes immediately, don’t lose hope!

Just keep at it; over time, you’ll start to see your blog taking off.

Thanks for reading! If you have any comments, leave them below.