Once you create your initial blog schedule, get your ideas together, and start writing, you have to avoid making easy mistakes. There are a number of things you should NEVER do, especially if you want to use your blog to build traffic and online exposure.

Duplicating online content.

This should be a no-brainer, but you should never copy someone else’s content and try to pass it off as your own. This will not help your search rankings, because search engines look out for this sort of behavior and will remove your post from results. Also, you could get into some legal troubles down the road if you aren’t careful. When it comes to blogging, it’s ok to use other articles as inspiration, but it’s not ok to copy them word for word.

Ignore using social media to share your blog.

Blogs are meant to be shared, and social media is the best way of accomplishing that. If you forget to use social media, you are forgoing a free marketing tool that has unprecedented reach. You are limiting your blog’s exposure to its subscribers, when it could be reaching thousands, if not millions of people.

Forget to use analytics to track clickthroughs.

Using analytics is the only way to know which topics you are posting about are generating traffic for your site. Without proper monitoring you will never know which topics to ignore or focus on. There are a bunch of free options out there like bit.ly which you can use to track clickthroughs on URLs. Trust me, using services like these go a long way.

Forget to make content shareable on your blog.

Another easily made mistake is forgetting to include social sharing buttons/badges on your blog page. You need to make life easy for your users by streamlining processes. Many users might think your article is great, but don’t want to go through the ‘hassle’ of copying a link, logging into a service, and then sharing it. Social sharing buttons take care of this potential problem, and can help to create more buzz/traffic.