Copywriting seems easy when you’re not engaged in it. When you’re reading impressive blog posts, you just assume there’s a talented writer behind them. But, there’s much more. There’s research, audience monitoring, feedback analyzing, idea generating, and tons of work behind each and every good article.

If you just started blogging, you’re probably reading tips on how to do it. Today, we suggest something different: learn what not to do first. We’ll list 8 copywriting mistakes that can ruin your blog’s chances for success.

1. Mistaking Copywriting for Paraphrasing

A copy is not something you copy. Okay? Stealing someone else’s ideas and paraphrasing them just to make your content look unique is not okay.

Just google a random topic, such as best tips for copywriting. What do you notice? Few good articles. You notice something else: most of these articles are basically the same. Only a few have a unique style and unexpected tips. As you keep going through the results, you get bored of reading the same article over and over again.

What makes you think that your target audience would like to read something they’ve already read?

You must always come up with unique ideas and write completely original content. When you’re using someone else’s work, always provide a reference. To make sure you’re not guilty of unintentional plagiarism, always check your content through Copyscape before publishing it.

2. Not Getting to the Point Quickly Enough

Do you start your posts with an introduction? That’s a good thing. If this article started from point one straight away, you would get the impression that it lacked something.

However, you mustn’t make the intro long and irrelevant. Get to the point straight away. You don’t want people to lose interest by reading obvious things.

3. Overly Official Tone

You want to sound like an expert. However, that doesn’t mean you should maintain academic style in your blog posts.

Let’s see an example of a popular blog. Neil Patel always addresses the readers directly. You get the feeling that he understands your problems and offers advice you could use right away. He still manages to sound like an expert.

Always address your readers directly. Write to them like you’re talking to someone you know. Such tone will grip their attention and keep them interested to the end of the article.

4. Not Paying Attention to the Headline

Do you like statistics? Here’s something interesting for you:

• 80% of your blog visitors will read the headline and stop there.
• The headline can make a difference in the traffic by as much as 500%.

Knowing how important the headline is, it’s weird how we keep seeing bloggers who don’t get this part right. We keep seeing headlines that are too long, too unemotional, or even grammatically problematic.

Please, do your best job with the headlines! They have to awaken the interest of your readers, so more of them will continue with the actual post. First, brainstorm and write few potential headlines. Then, use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to analyze them and pick the best one.

5. Not Editing

When you’re inexperienced, you believe the audience doesn’t care about minor mistakes. They do. Even if your post offers great value, the audience won’t notice the good sides if there are issues with the grammar, spelling, syntax, and choice of words.

Editing is more than proofreading. It’s about getting rid of the unnecessary parts and adding information where you notice gaps in logic.

If you’re not sure you can make your own content flawless, you can always hire a professional editor from a service like BestEssays. That will make a huge difference in the quality of your posts.

6. Not Understanding Your Target Audience

Why do you blog? Is it only about expressing personal opinions? When you’re writing a personal diary; not a blog.
The blog is not based on one-way communication. If you want to make the blog successful, then you have to understand what problems your target readers have and offer solutions.

You have to offer useful content and show you understand the audience. You need to support communication in the comment section and use the feedback to get better.

7. Looooong Paragraphs

Do you know what attention span most Internet users have? It’s not impressive. It’s only 8 seconds. Do you think they will give your post a chance if they saw huge chunks of text? No; they won’t even give you those 8 seconds.

Break up the text in short paragraphs, so you won’t make the readers tired just by looking at them. Use visual content along the way, so they will rest their eyes.

8. Lack of Credibility

Should the readers just trust your words?

In this article, we made an effort to provide a link to a source that proved our point. When we told you the attention span of an average Internet user was 8 seconds, we linked to an article where you can see the research study that found that.

People will believe your words only if you show some proof. That’s how they will gain confidence that they are reading something valuable.

Did you notice that we also gave you tips along this list of mistakes? When you avoid the mistakes, you basically know what’s the right thing to do. Now, you’re ready to become a bit better at blogging.