10 Common Mistakes Made By Bloggers Who’ve Just Started
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If you are just getting started or only considering taking the plunge into blogging, don’t be surprised if you make a few mistakes along the way. As with most jobs, running a blog or blogs will take a little time to adjust to. Most bloggers, even the really successful ones, have made a few mistakes along the way, so don’t expect your path to be any different. Still, there are things you can do to avoid some of the pitfalls that others have encountered.
1. Level of Expectation
It will take time to build a fan base and grow your blog site. Reading stories about bloggers who make tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars from their site won’t help bring you back to reality. You should be realistic when it comes to how quickly you can grow your site as well as how popular you will be initially.
2. Lack of Focus
To build your blog’s success, expect it to take a lot of time and effort. You can’t just set your blog up and wait for the money to start rolling in. This commitment can deter many people who expect running a successful blog to be easy, and they can become distracted, leaving their site to wallow in a slew of ads and inactivity. Maintaining your focus is key to keeping your blog popular.
3. Being Behind the Curve
Always being a step behind the competition can hurt your readership. Try to stay up on the most recent news when it comes to the subject matter of your blog. Being ‘in the know’ can keep your views up and activity steady on your blog.
4. Reliance Upon Ad Revenue
Sure, while you might love the subject matter you are posting upon your blog or blogs, you’re probably hoping to make a little cash at the same time. But don’t lose your fans in a plethora of ads smattered across your site. Too many ads can be distracting, detract from the actual information you are posting, and make your guests feel as though you’re only out to make a quick buck.
5. No Working Subject Knowledge
Just because a topic or certain subject matter is popular doesn’t mean you should be setting up a blog about it. While you don’t always have to be an expert in the field you decide to blog upon, having a working knowledge of the subject so that you can make your posts informative and interesting is critical to bringing people to your site.
6. Confidence
While you might not know it, people can often tell by your writing whether you have confidence in the subject matter you are discussing. Making broad, generic statements or never pinning yourself down to an opinion or point of view can make this obvious. While you don’t have to know everything about the topics you are discussing, it helps to have done your homework first.
7. Marketing
In all likelihood, unless you have the most unbelievable blog known to man, people aren’t going to immediately flock to your site without a little effort on your part.
You will probably have to put quite a bit of time into selling your blog by sending out invites to friends, family, organizations you have contacts with, etc. While you might not be into self-promotion, you’ll probably have to sell yourself and your site to get a base of followers, then, hopefully, if you have a worthwhile site, word of mouth will start to bring other people in.
8. Complacency
Once you have a decent size following, don’t get cocky. Just like a popular sports team, it won’t take much of a losing steak to hear the fans start to grumble, and ticket sales start to drop. Complacency is one of the quickest ways to lose followers and decrease their confidence in your blog.
9. Networking
While you obviously don’t want to give the competition a leg up, sometimes linking to other sites can be beneficial, especially if they are willing to return the favor. But choose your links carefully. You don’t want too many visitors flocking to the competition and you don’t want to send them to poor blogs sites, which could diminish your level of professionalism. Linking to posts on your blog or other blogs that you run can increase traffic and highlight some of your best work.
10. Being Too Serious
Remember to have some fun with your blog site. A bit of levity now and again can liven things up and give your site a more personal feel. Remember, you are writing a ‘blog’ post, not encyclopedia entries.
Tom is a writer and designer based in the UK working with a supplier of Epson Stylus ink, toner cartridges and paper. You can read more of writing on their blog, CreativeCloud.
Keeping it Professional
One of the most difficult challenges you will face with developing a blog for your business is keeping it professional. The word, “professional,” may conjure up all sorts of different definitions, but I am referring to more than how the blog looks, although that is an important element. I am referring to the way the blog actually functions.
The more you blog, the more tips and tricks you are sure to learn, such as the tags that work best for your readers, the best placement for ads and widgets, popular subjects, etc. However, what makes a blog professional requires a bit more looking and effort. Think of it like learning a new language. At first, you communicate with basic words and sentences (the basic blog) and, as you get more comfortable, your speech relaxes and you use the words you know better (experience). However, if you never attempt to learn advanced tenses and different words (advanced blogging), you will never be fluent in the language (successful).
Successful blogs are professional blogs; they have good design and stellar functionality. To increase the professionalism of your blog, consider the following adding the following elements.
- SPAM PREVENTION: Professional blogs have a minimal amount of spam comments, if any. The reason is not that they have a team of bloggers constantly monitoring comments. Rather, it is because of clever plug-ins that take care of the issue, such as Akismet, a Wordpress plug-in that monitors comments for spam and blocks them with over 99 percent accuracy, or Spam-free, a plug-in that captures automated comments.
- SPEED: Professional blogs are also fast. This is not because of a super computer locked in someone’s basement; it is due to facilities that create static pages of the blog, such as the WP Super Cache plug-in, so that the time it takes to load a page is reduced by over 60 percent.
- SITE MAPS: Professional blogs have site maps that are updated in tandem with the blog’s content as well. This is done through the use of an XML Sitemap plug-in (i.e. Google XML Sitemap) that automatically updates the sitemap when content is updated.
- SEO: Additionally, professional blogs are optimized. When one of your readers tells his friends what an amazing blog he found, you want that friend to be able to find your blog easily just by the name. In order for that to happen, you need to make sure that your blog is optimized for that.
- SEARCH: Lastly, professional blogs have stellar search and navigational capabilities. Think of the best blogs you have read; they tend to have easy-to-read searches, solid tag categories, and the ability to search by the most popular blog posts, the newest posts, etc.
The most amazing part about these elements that make your blog rise from hobby to professional vehicle are that they are, for the most part, free. You can include these elements in your blog by using downloads that are available free-of-cost from the designer’s website or via the plug-in menu from your blog’s dashboard. Just like the language example, it only takes a small amount of time and effort to learn something new to enrich your language or blog. So, why not? Your readers will thank you for it.
What you can Learn from a Redesign
You’ve started your blog and things are going well, but there are just a few things you wish you had done differently in its design. The fact is that redesigning a business blog is inevitable.
Maybe it is that your own personal skills have increased, allowing you to incorporate better design elements or change the overall structure of the blog. Maybe your business has started to change its focus or product/service offering. Maybe you just want a fresh look. Whatever your reasons for changing your blog’s design, there are several things that you can learn from redesigning your blog that will help you “evolve” the blog to new levels of profitability.
To do this, you will need to create several different designs, at least two in addition to the original, and use something like Google Website Optimizer to effectively analyze the various designs.
Categories
You will be able to see whether including “Categories” is beneficial to you at all. Some readers find that simply scrolling by category can take too long to find an interesting post and prefer to use a “Search” feature, others may adore the category listings and you may want to feature your categories more prominently.
Most popular widget
Being able to include a most popular posts widget in your blog can really increase traffic, because it shows the consensus. However, you may make the decision not to include it if you are trying to encourage more site interaction.
Converting traffic
If your business model is predicated on converting traffic, it is important to see which elements are hitting the mark for you and which are not. This can allow you to remove extranneous sales copy and result in more perceived validity to your blog.
Top commentors
Some blog will benefit highly from having a “Top Comentors” ranking, others not so much. If your blog is geared towards encouraging dialogue, you may want to focus on this element. If not, save the space for something else.
Comment subscriptions
This is a feature that can be wildly popular or a waste of space deending on your blog. Redesigning your blog will help you to see whether a comment subscription feature benefits you or if it is better to simply omit it.
Questions and answers
Questions and answers is an important element for many blogs, and you may want to evaluate its relevance for your blog. Questions and answers allow your readers to ask a question directly to you and provide you with an easy avenue for response. It is very easy for a reader’s question to get lost among a sea of comments. Sectioning off questions and answers can be very beneficial, but if the concept is not appealling to your readers, it may be better to leave it out.
Social media
Social media buttons are very popular. Retweeting and wall posting are rapidly becoming de rigeur on many websites and blogs. You may find that incorporating this element into a redesign is a smart idea. It may be a good idea to work more on their optimal placement that the issue of their inclusion.
RSS feeds
Using a feed egenration service is a great way to draw your readers to your blog and to let them know that a new blog has been posted. You may also want to incorporate RSS feeds from industry news into your blog so that your blog can be more of a “first place” the reader looks, rather than a side-thought. In performing a redesign, you can see whether this is a good element for you to include, the optimum placement, and the scope of the offering.
Contact page
Lastly, pay attention to your contact page. As your blog gets more popular you will end up receiving a ton of spam. Make sure that you do not have contact information that you do not want publicized or spammed, such as your address, your phone number, or your chat/IM (i.e. skype, AIM, Gtalk). It may be better to encourage interaction through the blog itself or social media. By trying different designs, you can see which is the more effective.
