Bad habits will decrease your likelihood of success in nearly any endeavor, including blogging and social media content production.
Many promising bloggers put off fulfilling their best ideas or let distractions destroy their passion, which can take a toll on their mental health and creative energy.
These counterproductive habits can derail progress fast. The goal of this article is to help you get back on track by determining which bad habits are causing you problems.
Like with anything creative, social media content writing is vulnerable to bad habits that weaken quality, consistency, and audience loyalty. Fortunately, your content marketing is an ever-evolving entity; you can break these habits if you are aware of them.
Many of these bad habits don’t just hurt your blog and social media performance; they can also impact motivation and mental health over time. If you catch yourself involved in any of these content marketing habits, it’s time to reevaluate your strategy and move past them:
Table of Contents
1. Irregular Posting Frequency and How it Impacts Your Results
Posting inconsistently quickly frusturates readers who have developed a liking for your blog. If you want a steady stream of loyal followers, be sure to post on a regular basis.
How regularly should you post to your blog? It depends. You could update your blog daily or weekly. No matter what schedule you choose, stick to it religiously. Consistency builds reliability and signals freshness to search engines.
The importance of consistency in a content marketing program cannot be understated.
Each article should feel unique but also align with your overall tone and schedule.
Small business owners especially have a hard time maintaining a consistent social media schedule due to limited resources and competing priorities (some entrepreneurs take it upon themselves to do all the web optimized writing for their business). This kind of inconsistency makes it impossible to build a loyal audience—unpredictable social media use means nobody knows when to check back for more updates. This inconsistency can also cause stress and anxiety, which further affects your mental health and creativity.
Ran out of ideas to blog about? Here’s a great list to keep the creative copywriting juices flowing.
2. Ignoring Visitors and Damaging Audience Trust
Nothing is more rewarding for bloggers than seeing readers visit their blogs regularly.
Make a point of appreciating them replying to comments or mentioning them on social media. And if people are tweeting your posts, return the favor by tweeting their content marketing or simply posting a shout-out or tweet that acknowledges their attention.
Make acknowledging your visitors a regular habit, not only to build solid loyalty among your followers but also to develop a healthy two-way relationship from which both you and your readers will benefit.
3. Paying Too Much Attention to Stats and Key Metrics
Tracking stats helps you see what is working and how you can improve your blog. It gives you insight as to which key words visitors used to find you.
However, you should not obsess over the numbers. Over-analyzing your stats wastes time that could be used to produce further great content. It can also harm your mental health if you’re not careful.
Consistent quality content grows naturally.
4. Obsessing Over Social Media Use & Link Building: Finding a Healthy Balance
Marketing on social media platforms can expand your audience.
However, don’t trade your blogging time for social networking time. Dedicate focused blocs of time to research and create great content. If your social media content is worthy enough to go viral, loyal readers and one-time visitors will naturally share it.
Set times for blogging and social media interactions for when you feel most productive. Separating creative work from social media use supports your mental health, improving focus and emotional well being while ensuring high quality, consistent social media content.
If backlinks don’t come, you can increase your knowledge on how to build links with our SEO link building guide.
5. Limiting Your Content to Newsjacking and Content Borrowing.
Newsjacking can be a valuable part of your content marketing strategy, when used sparingly. Newsjacking, the process of scouting the news or your competitors’ blogs to repurpose (or worse–duplicate) the same content to be valuable to your readers, can be useful. However, relying too much on this shortcut can become a trap.
While these bad habits might allow you to satisfy Google’s algorithms, this exact same content can prevent your from becoming an authority. Make sure you have a sizeable contribution of unique social media content—material, facts, and opinions that users can’t get anywhere else. Feel free to leave newsjacking as a component of your strategy, but don’t neglect the importance of originality.
6. Writing More Than You Read: Why Reading Supports Your Well Being and Growth as a Writer
The only way to get better at writing is to read. Otherwise, you risk falling into repetitive thinking and writing, and you’ll never advance your own skills. Reading opens the door to new opinions, new ideas, and new styles of writing that can influence you and help you grow in the right directions.
Many writers lose the reading habit once they become more confident in their field of expertise. But even the most conservative industries change often, and staying up-to-date with the latest content can keep you ahead of the curve. Make sure you subscribe to several major publications, including the blogs of your competitors, industry news sites, and national news sites. Reading can also serve as a form of mental rest, helping protect your mental health from the burnout that comes with nonstop output.
7. Using the Same Format, Every Time.
Content marketing has evolved beyond the need to replicate the exact same content format with every post. While written content is still valuable because of the sheer volume of scannable text that is presented to major search engines, users crave a more integrated experience.
For example, instead of posting a traditional written article, you could write a step-by-step guide with images or videos accompanying each step of the process to keep readers engaged.
When you start your blog and begin writing blog posts regularly, following the same content format becomes an easier way to manage the process. However, it will ultimately work against your campaign. Diversify your formatting in order to reach the widest audience and preserve the interest of your blog and social media channels.
8. Failing to Listen to Your Audience.
Your content marketers and content marketing strategy cannot remain stagnant; it must evolve to meet the needs and desires of your customers. After writing for long enough, it’s easy to focus on production instead your readers’ perspectives, which can damage results. The most successful content marketing programs on social media are the ones that actively take their readers’ opinions into consideration.
Read your users’ comments often, and respond whenever you can to build the conversation.
You can even ask what topics interest them or survey them to learn how to serve them better. When you write with your readers in mind, you’ll be far more successful in the long run.
Bad habits can result in a serious burden for your content marketing campaign, so it’s essential that you get rid of them eventually, but try not to break them all at once.
Instead, focus on one bad habit at a time. With small, actionable steps, you’ll succeed in triumphing over these bad habits and restoring your content marketing strategy to its former glory. Remember, nurturing your creativity and your mental health go hand in hand; breaking bad habits benefits both.
We provide blog writing services, including quality, high-quality link building, and white-label SEO for agencies. We would love to work with you. Until then, happy blogging!
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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