10 WordPress mistakes to avoid.

Mistake #1: Not planning your posts in advance. Write what you know. Take notes on ideas as they come to you and be ready to post them when you're finished writing the post…and the research is done.

Mistake #2: Making things too complicated. You want to post, but you want to post what? You don't know. You've got too many ideas and too few of the time in the day to do it all. What's worse is that you're not really sure why you're blogging.

Mistake #3: Not having a vision of who your audience is. Your blog should be targeted to a group of people. You don't have to have 1,000 rabid fans who hang on every word you write, but it's helpful if there's someone for whom you're blogging.

Mistake #4: Not finding inspiration in the media that your audience consumes. This is where you can get advice from others who blog about similar topics and determine how you might approach the idea differently.

Mistake #5: Creating a site that's hard to navigate and/or read. You don't want your blog to be known as the one with "the tiny font."

Mistake #6: Hesitating to publish posts when they're ready. Write when you have something good, or even when you don't. You can fix the mistakes in your posts after they've been published (most of the time).

Mistake #7: Not maintaining fresh content on your site. If you only post once every few days, or weeks, people will stop coming back. That's too bad because they were just getting to know you.

Mistake #8: Using poor grammar and spelling. Yes, you're a writer. And yes, there's going to be a difference between what you write for fun and what you publish on your blog. You don't have to go overboard by using huge words or complicated sentence structure in every post, but make your writing understandable for your audience.

Mistake #9: Not sharing posts on social media. If you don't share your posts with your friends and followers, who will? You can also use tools like Tweetbeep to automatically tweet a summary of each post as a way to attract new readers.

Mistake #10: Creating content that doesn't belong on the web. Is your post going to help people or is it just something you've been meaning to write for a long time? Will it serve as a useful reference for years to come? If you're not sure, don't publish it.