Well, I can tell you from experience it’s not enough to know all the technical concepts associated with blogging. When it comes to blogging about Christ and the gospel, the things we learn in the textbooks aren’t enough. Sure, they do build a good framework to work with on your blogging journey, but blogging for the Lord requires so much more.
When we talk about mistakes made by Christian bloggers, we don’t mean the regular mistakes associated with beginner bloggers in general, for a niche like this, things are different.
I personally faced such problems during the early days of my blog, fortunately, I’ve been able to breakout, and take my Christian blogging career to the level where I see substantial progress. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing some of the blogging mistakes Christian bloggers should avoid in their blogging careers.
7 common Blogging Mistakes to avoid at all cost
Some of these mistakes I encountered while I was starting my blogging career, so I’ll also be adding solutions that helped me along the line.
#1. Writing like somebody else
This is the first thing you need to avoid as a new Christian blogger. Yes, it’s okay to look up to the big names in this industry and draw inspiration from their work as well.
However, while doing this, don’t lose yourself, trying to write or speak like them. Everyone loves to read content from the likes of Bob Hayton and Nelson Searcy, that doesn’t mean you should structure your content to look like theirs.
Now the issue of plagiarism is quite different, we’ll come to that later, but first, you need to understand that nobody needs someone else to be the second Sarah Bessey or the next Ray Comfort. You need to develop your style and voice; it should reflect in every content you produce.
#2. Being a copycat
Plagiarism is perhaps the most common issue with content creators across the world, especially beginners. Yes, it is very important writing on contemporary subjects especially when it’s a need blog that needs to get noticed by the public, and search engines.
But coping with someone’s work isn’t the way to do it; you want your blog and every content in it to be original. If you’ve read something very insightful, maybe a paragraph or sentence from a blog, and you’d like to have it too, you can ask for permission from the blogger to put it as a quote on your blog or giving a backlink, attributing to the original author. That way your blog looks neat and original.
#3. Not reading and researching enough before writing articles
This is one area where I fell short a lot during my early days. I wasn’t doing enough background research before putting the contents out there. Sometimes I would just write about the topic discussed in last Sunday’s sermon without even doing some extra research to add more facts, and bible verses to make my blog posts interesting.
I would often find myself having the proverbial writer’s block because I didn’t have a lot of background work done beforehand, and it often resulted in creating articles that are too short (this part we’ll talk about next).
However, it all stopped when I started burning the midnight oil. You can’t go empty when you do a lot of research before writing an article. Read blogs that are talking about the same thing as you, read books, and above all, read the Bible; it’s the greatest book to find inspiration.
#4. Publishing articles that are too short
We see it in textbook blogging tutorials that humans have a short attention span, and that means bad for long blog posts. Well, this I can say is partly true, because it depends on the subject and/niche you’re writing on. As a Christian blogger, you should think of yourself as an evangelist spreading the gospel online.
Now ask yourself, when evangelists preach the gospel, regardless of the topic, do they usually round up in 3-5 minutes? If they don’t, why should you think that articles that are just a 5-minute read are enough?
You aim to write something that will be on the web for a long time, and still remain evergreen and relevant; you don’t get this when you write something that’s a 5-minute read.
#5. Publishing too frequently
Now, this might sound shocking to some of us; if the aim is to spread the gospel using online media why not do it as often as possible, that makes sense right? Well, while this question is valid, you need to understand that you take time in writing these articles, and you want to give your readers enough time to meditate on them as well.
While you shouldn’t ghost on you your audience, don’t flood them with content all at once, this might lead to some of your articles not getting read or followed up daily.
It makes no sense to post five articles per week, each containing at least 1500 words, and your audience only having enough time to pay attention to three only. Unless you run a daily devotional on your blog, I suggest two to three contents per week is enough.
#6. Focusing on posts to go viral
This one I was guilty of during my early days, always looking for that trendy topic to write and take me to the limelight. Of course, every blogger wants to have that single post that boasts of over a million views, there’s no shame in wanting that, but don’t make it the central focus in your content writing process.
Your primary focus is to preach the gospel and help believers through content in your blog, no matter how little this audience might be at first. Believe me, the exposure and traffic always come by default through dedication and consistency.
#7. Aiming for perfection every time
First off, I’ll say this “There’s never a perfect blog post, that’s why you should aim for creating something better every day”. We often push pressure on ourselves trying to put out there the best Christian blog post for the year, but this is wrong.
Only God is perfect, so let’s ease up on trying to publish the perfect article that we can promote, and get featured across multiple blogs. We should rather, aim to be better in our content writing article by article.