Blogging is the key to a successful internet presence. It is a way of interaction on the internet, where you can put your ideas out and people can read them. Blogging allows you to be heard, whether it’s one person or millions of people.
Blogging is also among the most misunderstood domain on the internet. It has more myths than realities. It took me some time to realize that various blogging myths exist online and each has its own rules and procedures to follow. For newcomers, especially, this can be very dangerous if followed rigorously.
In this article, we have covered 10 common blogging myths that every blogger must know. If you’re new to blogging or planning to start a new blog, it becomes extremely important that you know these blogging myths.
10 Common Blogging Myths
1. Blogging Is Easy
Setting up a blog is very easy nowadays. Thanks to content management systems like WordPress and Ghost. You can set up your blog with just a few clicks of a button. Here are 5 steps:
- Buying a domain name
- Buying a server
- Installing WordPress with a single click.
- Pick a suitable theme for your blog.
- Start writing articles & publish them on your blog.
Yes! Setting up a blog is this much easy!
Once you are done setting up the blog, the actual work starts. If you are truly dedicated to becoming a successful blogger, it will require a lot of dedication, passion, and hard work along with innovative work.
Read other people’s blogs to get an idea about how they write. Once you get the idea about writing techniques, make a wireframe for your content and add points and start writing.
Always keep in mind that you need to produce unique content that gives value to your audience. Here, unique content means writing in your own words the way you speak.
Do not bother copying other writers’ content. You may get a victim of plagiarism and it can harm your blog in future. You might get penalised by Google or DMCA. Initially, go slow and steady. Take your time in producing 100% original content on a consistent basis.
Once you are done writing 5 to 10 quality articles on your blog, consider sharing them socially and social bookmarking websites like Reddit and StumbleUpon work to drive traffic to your blog. If you have quality content that is present nowhere on the internet then you have a great possibility of getting 10K to 20K visitors on your website alone from Reddit. Which is huge! Along with that, you can also plan and manage marketing campaigns.
Well, I am certainly not trying to put you off blogging, but I want you to be ready for the obstacles that you might face during your blogging journey. Competition is huge when it comes to blogging and if you want to survive, you must have to have unique content and powerful strategies to grow your blog.
2. You Can Easily Make Money Blogging
Is it really possible to make a living with blogging? The answer is yes! It is easy.
There are various options available for bloggers to make money online. You have Google AdSense, Affiliate networks, selling advertising space and other pay-per-click (PPC) methods to get on with it.
But why do many bloggers still fail?
Here are a couple of key reasons:
- They are not sure what they are doing.
- They are failed to choose the right niche for them
- They set their primary reason for blogging as to make money.
- They don’t upgrade themselves to the latest blogging techniques.
- Lack of writing ideas (Read: How to Write A More Effective Blog Post?)
and so on…
Here are some tips that will help you to really say that making money from blogging is easy:
- Be particular about your blogging niche and choose that which you feel you are good in.
- Read blogs, articles related to your niche and grab information and write some key points for your article.
- Spend time writing content.
- Upgrade yourself for the latest blogging techniques and at the same time also read about new technology trends. It will help you out becoming a successful blogger.
- Never ever keep your primary priority to make money from your blog. Just provide quality content, make good strategies, be helpful, kind, and generous and money will come by default.
3. Content is King
Yes! We all know that content is the king. But what if you don’t have the audience to read your great content? It does not matter how great your content is, the things that matter are you have the audience to read it, share it socially, reply to comments and stay engaged.
I have seen a majority of the bloggers now accepting that content is not a king unless or until you have an audience to read your content.
4. Marketing is King
Now you must be thinking that this guy has gone crazy! How can marketing be not a king?
There are great marketing tools available on the internet to drive traffic to the website. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can bring thousands of visitors a day to a website. Right?
Right. But once you stop advertising, you don’t get those traffic. Simply because you don’t have great content on your website. If you drag visitors to your website, it is mandatory that you have great content on your website so that they can stick with you.
But if you are planning for Google AdSense on your website, must remember, Google doesn’t like paid traffic.
Let’s take another example, you write a guest post for a well-established blog. Once your post is published, you get thousands of visitors for a day or two. But what after that?
You will again come to what traffic you were getting before.
Neither content is a king nor marketing! What am I trying to prove?
Alone neither content is a king nor marketing. You will have to have a combination of both. You will have a continuous good audience if you have great content, the audience, who will come to your website would like to stick with you.
5. Neglect SEO and focus on social media
I have read people saying to focus on social media as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) relies on social media. Social Bookmarking websites like StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg can send you thousands of visitors a day. So why think about traffic, just sit down and get traffic. But have you ever thought about the value of those visitors?
Your blogging success has nothing to do with the quantity of traffic you receive—what matters is its quality. No doubt social media website sends quality traffic but the same number of visitors from a search engine may be far more effective.
In a nutshell, if you have great search engine traffic on your website, you will have great success on social media as well. Most importantly, you will become a successful blogger as well.
6. More traffic = more money
Most bloggers focus on getting more traffic. They believe more traffic means more money. But having more traffic doesn’t always mean more income —it can even mean less income if your variable costs increase.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to getting the best from your traffic. Authority and reputation are essential things for the blogger. Building reputation and authority can’t be achieved overnight. It will need a couple of months or years if you consistently keep providing quality content that is useful for your audience.
Once you build up your authority and audience, even small traffic as low as 100 visitors can turn into $1000.
At the same time, to earn $1000, even a 1,00,000 monthly traffic will prove to be less if you don’t have a reputation and authority.
7. Set It & Forget it!
This is one of the biggest misconceptions bloggers have. Generally, people believe that creating a blog can be a great source of residual income.
Let’s understand what residual income stands for:
Residual income: Residual income is also called a passive, or recurring income. It is an income that continues to be generated after the initial efforts. Even if you stop working the income does not stop.
So do you think that blogging can generate a residual source of income?
Do you really think that you can make money for a longer period of time even if you stop working?
Many people may have an answer yes. But if you ask my personal opinion, I would say a big no!
Why?
You might be getting a good income when you stop working. For a couple of months, you might not see much difference. But as time goes by, you will find a decline in income.
Do you know why?
Because you still have those a year or two old content on your website that your audience used to read. They eventually get bored and leave your website. Unsubscribe to your newsletters. Only your die-hard fans would stick to you, who might be expecting to hear from you soon.
You must have read that an old post is just like an old wine. The more the post is, the more it is valued, appreciated, and stickier!
But what if you have not updated your great old post for a long time since you stopped working?
What if you have not updated the technology trends and broken links inside those posts?
Does Google rank those post that has not been updated for a long long time?
You might still say yes!
Blogging is a residual source of income.
Hiring a couple of people will do it.
Yes.
It will be a great idea.
But you still have to manage those people.
Well, it clearly shows that you need to be actively associated with your blogging work. No matter whether you work Full-time, Part-time or partially.
8. You Have to Post Every Day
This is quite common amongst blogging myths, one that I get asked about quite often by people. Most people firmly believe that if you want to be at the top of the Google search post regularly. Many webmasters believe this is a “best practice”.
If Google rewarded regularly updated websites and article directories then websites like EzineArticles and InfoBarrel would have been in the top 10 search results every now and then as they publish a lot of content several times a day.
Have you seen them ranking in top search results? When did you last see them in the top search results? Do you remember?
It might have been a year or two or even more than that.
Google continuously change their policy and always release updates for various purposes one of them is to stop spamming by the webmaster.
Well, you do not have to post several times a day or a new article every day to secure a rank in the top 10 search engine result pages (SERPs).
9. You Will Have To Be An Expert Writer
It is one of those blogging myths where many people get put off blogging because they think that they will have to be an expert writer for blogging. They believe that they need to have a professional background as a writer or at least a great understanding of English. Well, you will definitely require good English, but not at a proficient level. You just need a conversational writing style.
What is conversational writing style?
Conversational writing style means writing in such a way that it does not look like theory rather it should be written in the words that you would speak.
Many people interpret “conversational writing style” wrongly. They believe writing conversational content requires you to record the while talking and then typing out that text. Well, it’s another one of those blogging myths.
If you notice a transcript of an interview or a trainer teaching any subject, you will find a bunch of grammatical mistakes.
Writing conversational style does not mean that you write as you talk. Instead, you can edit your text in such a way it does not sound like writing. You do not have to be an expert. All you need is to have some knowledge about a subject, a bit of passion for writing about it, and the ability to write a few sentences that make sense. If you have these three things, you’ll be able to start blogging. The more you write, the better you will get at writing.
10. Longer Posts Bring More Traffic
I have observed some successful bloggers who write longer posts as long as 5,000 words. I was so inspired that I wrote 19,000 words article on Google AdWords. ‘Gosh, it was crazy!’. It is one of those blogging myths that tempted me to write those 19000 words.
It doesn’t matter if you write a longer post of about 5000 words. I personally like to write between 1000 to 3000 words per article. Simply because of two reasons:
- The majority of bloggers posts articles of about 500 words. And like to stand out by putting an extra 1500-2000 words.
- It attracts backlinks and organic traffic from Google timelessly. But at the same time don’t write that long that readers leave in between without reading it completely.
I personally don’t encourage writing articles in over 5000 words. It would be great if you limit your post to 2000 words or max to max 3000 words.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you would like this post and it will help clear out some of these blogging myths. Have you heard about any other blogging misconceptions? If yes! then help us debunk a few more myths by putting them the in the comment section below.