In my opinion, one of your tools has to be a blog. I’ll cover why another time, you’ll just have to trust me for now.

Blogging is going to be something new to a lot of you and you’re going to make mistakes. We all make mistakes. However, if I can point a few of those out for you now, it may save you some time and trouble. Here’s six of them:

1. Not interacting with others.
You ever been to the pub where you see a guy going on about himself for hours? Notice how quickly the people around him look for excuses to leave? It’s BORING to listen to ‘me me me’.

The same principle applies online. Don’t be a blogging bore. Be useful, form relationships with people, give people a reason to stay on your blog and then come back later to see if there is any more useful stuff. This business is like any other business… a people business.

2. Not building your list.
You should start your email list from day. Get something free that people need to subscribe to get. Or maybe your content is so good that people will subscribe just to be the first to know when you release new posts. You can then use that list in the future for seeing if anyone wants to hire you for your skills.

3. Not using Wordpress.
Just use Wordpress. Trust me.

4. Not writing very well.
For you freelance writers, this will be easy. For the visual creatives… you may need to learn to how to express yourself in the written word. A good place to start is Copyblogger. Also think about building stories around your blog posts. People like stories and if you can create some that help you stick in people’s heads, they will come back.

5. Not getting a good blog layout.
Now the arty ones may get this one bang on. But then again i’ve seen designers with poor looking blogs. There’s a ton of free Wordpress layouts, but you may want to invest a few dollars in a very good one from WOO THEMES. Keep your content concise and clear. Make it simple for people to access examples of your work too.

7. Not Being Real.
I’ve said this a billion times, but i’m going to say it once more. People buy from people they know, like and trust. So if you’re being fake, you will be found out. If you’re being boring, you’ll lose out. Just be you, you are interesting i’m sure of it.

This blog post was inspired by the 6 figure blogger David Risley.