Things to avoid in a blog about investing

Blogging may no longer be as popular as a few years ago, but it still may be a very profitable form of expressing one’s views. This is very accurate for blogs with any kind of advice: on smart time management, cooking, or relationships. But not everyone who starts blogging knows how to do it right. Here is the list of x things to avoid in blogging about investments:

1. Do not start a blog about investing if your knowledge about investing is limited. It may seem a basic piece of advice, but there are people who first start a blog with a catchy theme and only educate themselves about the actual subject matter later. Investments tend to be highly complicated, so if you have no idea on how to start investing on a stock exchange, you should not teach others how to do it.
2. Do not start a blog if you cannot write comprehensibly. You may think that everyone in this country is able to write, but not everyone is good at conveying their thoughts. It gets even more complicated if you need to touch upon a challenging topic, for instance if you want to explain the basics of technical analysis to a layperson. A skilled investor or economist is not necessarily a good teacher or writer.
3. It is not a good idea to create posts without identifying a target audience for them. You may blog about investing in two ways: you either explain the basics and less advanced topics to an average Joe, or you target people who are knowledgeable about the subject matter. Also, you may combine these approaches and alternate entries written for laymen with those intended for experts. If you do not know who your target audience is, your text is getting chaotic, because you might tend to clarify some more advanced terms and leave others without any explanation. As a result, your article will be too difficult to understand for laymen and too boring for experts.
4. You should not use your blog to pose as an authority figure if you do not have sufficient knowledge for that. If you convey knowledge in a professional manner, your readers will inevitably start to view you as person who sets a good example or as an expert in your area of knowledge. Adding entries without any substance, for instance posting pictures of banknotes that you earned thanks to your investments, are pathetic. Unfortunately, a growing number of bloggers try to gain more audience with such ridiculous methods.
5. Your blog should not have any intrusive ads, especially ads that promote investing articles and tools. If a blogger recommends or reviews a product, pointing out its advantages and drawbacks in an honest way, they can earn the trust of their readers. However, if they advertise anything they are paid for, they will soon lose any credibility as an investor. In a situation, readers cannot be sure if the next entry on the blog is going to be an honest post or a piece of unfair advertising.
6. Each blogger should treat their readers with respect. This means acknowledging that your audience is intelligent enough to grasp the content you share with them. Condescending, passive-aggressive or vulgar attitude is an absolute no-go. However, you should not allow everything, for instance pointless arguments in the comments section, to happen on your blog.
7. A blog must not consist of meaningless content, optimized for keywords and reaches. While it is known that online marketing should be taken seriously, a well-promoted article, written in line with a SEO expert’s advice, will be useless without any interesting content. Avoid fillers and fluff, verbosity and lengthy paragraphs that are off topic.

This short list will allow you to avoid the most common mistakes committed by authors of blogs for beginning investors. But there is nothing wrong in starting a tentative blog and share entries only with a limited audience that could review them. It is certainly a better solution than throwing yourself into the deep end without any experience in running a website.