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Making your first foray into blogging means stepping out into the dense jungle of content on the internet and trying to create memorable, engaging work. This translates into a lot of trial-and-error as you find your voice and refine your writing skills.
In other words, making mistakes is normal.
That said, blog posts that break down some common mistakes and how to avoid them are always at the top of my must-read list, so today I want to do my part to ease that learning curve for all the beginner bloggers out there looking to make a name for themselves.
In this post, I’m going to outline the biggest mistake I made repeatedly when I first started blogging regularly and how you can take steps to avoid falling into the same trap with your writing.
Previous Experience Can Sometimes Hold You Back
Before I started blogging consistently in 2010, I was a communications major who had always dabbled in creative writing. Short stories, half-baked screenplays and novels, that sort of thing. I had always gravitated towards the written word and excelled in English classes but relied on my raw writing ability and never took the nuts and bolts of the craft too seriously.
My first steady gig as a blogger was an unpaid one, writing about the biggest storylines and players in the NBA. Because a lot of the posts I produced were time-sensitive, it gave me my first taste of deadlines (usually tight ones) and working with an editor who, bless his heart, was very patient with me.
I can remember submitting those first few pieces as quickly as I could. My fingers raced along my keyboard as I built pieces about the league’s hottest targets at the trade deadline, who had the advantage in an upcoming playoff series and so on. Looking back, I can only imagine how much my editor’s skin must have crawled when he opened yet another unruly draft from yours truly.
The problem wasn’t what I was writing about — the issue was rooted in how I wrote.
Choosing Your Structure Wisely
As I quickly found out, writing long-form fiction and writing long-form blog articles are two very different…
