Executed by mistake is a Creative Commons image by the moog.
Sometimes it takes years of blogging to notice your most obvious mistakes. I’ve been blogging for several years privately, then a few professionally and still do on several business blogs. By now I have made most mistakes you can make as a blogger I guess. I’m not the only one though.
Most bloggers make the same mistakes either by neglect or due to the limitations of the medium and software itself.
In many cases you have to make the decision to change your ways to stop making the most common mistakes. Here are 10 blogging mistakes most bloggers make and you probably do as well.
Embedding videos from YouTube etc.
Most bloggers embed YouTube videos on their blogs. Vimeo is also popular. There are plenty of other services as well. Some even embed Hulu videos. YouTube videos often get removed aka deleted or censored. Even a teenager managed once to take down several videos on fake copyright charges. Vimeo is less restrictive but people also remove videos on their own sometimes. Hulu videos can’t be watched outside of the US. So for all of these reasons you have an empty screen on your blog. Many posts don’t contain anything beside a video so such a post is dead, even more dead than a dead link. I know because I learned the hard way.
Tweeting instead of blogging
Some people obsess about Twitter. In a way I do as well and sometimes I tweet away my ideas or the sheer time I’d spend on blogging otherwise. Consider each idea you have for blogging before you tweet it. Everything tweeted is lost after a few minutes. Whatever you blog is yours and lives on for ages unless you use a third party service like Blogger or Wordpress.com perhaps.
Submitting your own blog post on social media other than Twitter
Many bloggers still tend to submit their own postings to social sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. It doesn’t work that way. Most of these sites either limit that or downright ban self submission in many cases, especially for business blogs. Don’t do that. Make other people discover your content. Socialize on social media but don’t self promote to get some traffic.
Using 125*125 display ads
Banner ads are dead but everybody uses them on blogs these days. Some WordPress themes even come with predefined banner ads areas. They look ugly, nobody clicks them and your bog appears spammy when it’s plastered with blinking ads. Use text ads instead (I’d recommend Yahoo) and affiliate ads but only very good ones matching your content.
Blogging too often or not often enough
In recent months SEO 2.0 has turned too silent for a good blog. Over the years I’ve noticed that 3 to 5 posts per week are best for a blog. 2 weekly posts are the minimum and more than 5 in a week lead to overload. Many blogs these days blog less often and look more like static websites this way. You lose attention, people start to forget about you when you blog rarely. Several posts a day in contrast lead to an information overload nobody can digest. This way you get more and more casual traffic from search and social media but you overburden your loyal readers. Your loyal readers are the backbone of your blog though. Don’t annoy them.
Automating content creation
Many services offer ways of syndicating content. You can post content to your blog automatically this way you posted on Twitter, Delicious or elsewhere. This scares away your loyal readers as well. I did just recently when testing the Twitter tools integration on SEO 2.0 I disabled now the weekly twitter digest as it’s low quality cross posting. You can add Twitter or Delicious in the sidebar instead so that it doesn’t pollute your RSS feed.
Creating “blog spam” postings
The “blog spam” kind of blog post seemingly will never die. They contain only a link to the source and short description of it . Basically it’s just wasted time. Your blog turns to an obstacle between the reader and the real source. If you don’t have any value to add don’t blog it at all. at least add your opinion beyond “this is great” or collect a few links.
Not socializing enough
Blogs aren’t islands. They only strive as part of the blogosphere. Bloggers who don’t socialize enough with other bloggers and social media users can’t get popular in the first place or they turn to one way communication in case they already are well known. In both cases the overall quality of the blog deteriorates. Never forget your blogging and social media peers. Link out, vote and contact them on a regular basis.
Not updating old content
Most blogs have a huge archive of blog posts which get plenty of visitors from search who bounce after noticing that the post is outdated and the links broken. Make sure to revisit your old postings, update and fix them. You may even republish them once the update is substantial enough. Also write for longevity in the first place. Nobody cares for yesterdays news tomorrow.
Not focusing on best postings
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about it years ago. One of the most common issues with blogs is that they don’t show the most popular postings on top. Plus like mentioned above many popular postings are outdated. I’ve been testing many “popular posts” plugins for WordPress. I haven’t found the perfect one yet. I’ll tell you once I do. Some people recommend the Socialrank widget, formerly known as AideRSS. I might add it in future.
Do you make these blogging mistakes as well? Do you miss some common mistakes by bloggers in this list? Tell me about it. I made all those mistakes above myself and noticed afterwards so it’s easy to recognize them on other blogs.
Related posts:
- The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need
- Does Blogging for Money Work or Not? 6 Noob Mistakes
- Blog Suicide: Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog
- Review: Better Blogging with Michael Martine
- 10 Commandments of Business Blogging
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This thing has 29 Comments
Hi Tad,
Are you really serious with some of these?
1. I’ve never had a video removed from Youtube or Vimeo. I definitely wouldn’t say that it happens ‘often’ unless you’re posting questionable content.
2. My sidebar ads bring in over $400 per month on auto pilot and average 50 clicks per day. I know (as sometimes I put affiliate ads there) that the clicks are also targeted as people are buying products after going through them.
I agree with the rest though ;)
I hope life is good, bro! It has been a while
- Glen
Hey Glen,
the YouTube issue is quite frequent on regular blogs that just show stuff found around the Web. In case you submit your own video to YouTube and then feature it on the blog you are on the safer side of course.
Still there are many SEO reasons not to include those videos. More cons than pros.
Concerning the ads, which blog do you refer to? The question always is: How much money do you lose by having blinking ads on your blog that make you appear like a jerk? I’ve had a few 125*125 banner ads on this blog too but at the end of the day the money was negligible. For monetization text ads work better unless you can make CPM ads work for you I think.
“I definitely wouldn’t say that it happens ‘often’ unless you’re posting questionable content.”
Ya, there aren’t many blogs out there with questionable content. OK because you don’t post questionable content, the other 6 katrillion web users don’t either ?? Very narrow view my friend, very narrow view.
Apparently you don’t Stumble. And yes, katrillion is a real number ;)
I’m with @Glen Allsopp.
I actually thought this may have been a joke post – like I’ve seen elsewhere lately – where bloggers give out contrary advice tongue in cheek… until I saw a couple I agreed with and couldn’t figure out what the joke was. :)
Aside from what was already addressed…
- Tweeting instead of blogging
Do both. Old school headline skills can be used to write brief and tempting tweets, with a link to your blog post for the whole story. Extra exposure super cheap.
- Submitting your own blog post on social media other than Twitter
Most black and grey hatters would say “who gives a sh!t?”.
If you want to make social networking a large part of traffic generation – which can be viable – then perhaps. But I’d rather just post a link myself than ‘waste’ hours and months and years building up a rep on one or more of those sites (use a sock puppet if necessary).
Since those sites seem to rank in Google extremely fast and high, then it’s a good way to get your post front and center quickly (via a link from that social media site).
- Automating content creation
If I understand what you’re saying correctly (autoposting to blog from another source), then do it in reverse.
Use twitterfeed to autopost your RSS feed, and begin the feed with #fb, so the tweet itself gets autoposted to your Facebook status.
3 birds, 1 stone. :)
- Creating “blog spam” postings (re: contains only a link to the source and short description of it)
Those can work quite well for niche topics.
Personally, if I was interested in beanie babies, a website that only posted ‘hot news of the day’ by someone who took the time to scour the internet daily for the most interesting beanie baby news, pics, videos, jokes etc would be very valuable to me as a time saver.
And certainly something that can be done on occasion no matter what the blog is about, imo.
- Not socializing enough
May be true but, to play devil’s advocate, some very successful AM affiliates say they socialize very little because they can make money online by working those hours they’d otherwise be reading blogs, news, websites, forums along with the time it takes to comment and engage in conversations there.
- Not updating old content
I agree 100% that old posts can be freshened up with the addition of new developments for whatever the post was about.
However the problem can often be mitigated to a great extent by writing timeless posts whenever possible… ie. tips on teaching a dog how to fetch is probably going to be pretty timeless.
Depending on the website’s theme, there are probably plenty of topics that could be written that would never need to be updated.
Anyways, that’s my 2 cents. Good article for white hatters to be sure, but nothing is completely black or white when it comes to the internet (and making money on it). :)
Hey Tad,
Good stuff. Have to admit that I’m guilty of a few of those.
What’s unclear to me after reading: What’s your suggested alternative to embedding YT/Vimeo videos?
I disagree with a couple things and parts are incomplete. But overall, I think this pretty solid.
“Over the years I’ve noticed that 3 to 5 posts are best for a blog. 2 posts are the minimum and more than 5 lead to overload.”
What time frame are you refering to with this?
As far as ads go, we get about 10x the CTR with picture ads versus text ads. As long as they are relevant, most people don’t seem to mind. Just pay attention to your ad positioning and use contextual targeting tags. Play around with different variations, it helped us out a lot.
Also, I’ve not once had a video removed from YouTube, but we mostly embed our own videos.
Hey Steve, thanks for your feedback. No, this time it’s NOT a joke although I have applied said technique as well on SEO 2.0
It’s more about the basics that get forgotten in many cases.
As to your Twitter suggestions: Of course, this way it works but most bloggers tend to become lazy once they get used to Twitter.
Some people cross post their updates to several sites. It seems to work OK but reposting stuff from elsewhere on your blog rarely does make sense.
Your blog spam example is an exception to the rule but it won’t work for flagship blogs. You may use Tumblr for such content.
Overall I tend to agree with you. You just point out where my general advice does not apply.
Shane: Good question. I tend to favor downloading the YouTube video and then embedding your own Flash video player or rather an open source one and hosting the video yourself like you’d do with images. Copyright might get in your way sometimes though.
Hey David, thanks for the hat tip. I refer to a week of course. Added the missing time frame.
As to ad CTR you probably refer to Google Adsense with images or without. Simple 125*125 banners don’t work that well.
@Anonymous – Tad was using himself as an example, in my assumption. I highly doubt that anything he would normally produce would be removed from Youtube unless it was controversial.
As far as very narrow views go, it seems you adopted one yourself to respond to my comment.
@Tad
I’m talking about PluginID, and I definitely don’t think they make me look like a jerk. Although I’m sure anon would disagree :)
Hey Glen, YOU don’t look like a jerk whatsoever but many blogs out there cluttered with display ads do. People will ignore them if you’re TechCrunch but they will hate them when you’re a nobody.
Also for PluginId you chose some neat no-animated banners and it’s not a company blog or something. That should be OK ;-)
Of all the points mentioned above most sticky is self submission and promotion does not make blog popular among users even though it may be recognized by search engines, but gradually fades away as could not get natural traffic. Make other people discover your content. Socialize on social media but don’t self promote to get some traffic. Make other people discover your content. Socialize on social media but don’t self promote to get some traffic.” In October 29-30 Google toolbar PR update I find that blogs that have regular posting with keywords in their title and do have blog followers have gained PR.
This is some great information in this post! I wanted to leave a comment earlier, but I noticed that you are a “nofollow” blog. Strange!
Anyway, the best tip in this post for me is about submitting to the social bookmarking sites. I seriously did not know that I was hurting my ranking by submitting my own posts! I have done this several times, but after reading this post, I wonder if my blog will recover from it?
Anyway, thank you for letting me know that I was hurting my blog by doing this. Keep up the good work!
Hey Kenya,
SEO 2.0 is not “nofollow”. It’s just that only real contributors get a real link. The drop in “manual spammers” don’t get one.
Social bookmarking only for the SEO ranking of it is OK to some extent but certainly not to get popular on those sites. It’s good to get indexed quickly and in some cases your Google rankings get a boost.
It’s much better to get popular on these sites.
I tell you the solutions to come out from situations:-
1. Write a post on your blog about one blogging mistake that you did on the past. Describe how the mistake affected your blog and how you managed to correct it. There are no limitations on the number of words so feel free to write a short or long post. 2. Send an email through the Contact form with your name, post title and permalink of the post. 3. After I publish the final list of entries you write a post on your blog linking to all of them.
I like Bill’s solution… That simple solution and easy to follow the instruction, we must focus to the solution not only at our mistakes…
Hey thank you for posting this article about blogging mistake. These tips which you gave are very useful for the budding blogger like me. You must have got great experience in the field of blogging. I added some very useful and amazing into my knowledge base after reading this post. I thought that using 125*125 display ads will be best option to have but I proved wrong after reading this post. Anyway thanks for sharing information.
Great blog, I think my next course of action then for my own blog (been running for 7mths) is make more effort to get a lot more more links in there and then of course figure out what a trackback is and how to do it! That’s why I love coming here every day. You’re always teaching me something new. Very nice article.
I think keeping the user experience in check and providing a unique spin on any topic is a good approach to take. Think about what keeps you reading the blogs you might read and apply those principals to yourself.
Actually, just so no one has trouble finding it, the company is now PostRank, and it’s the Top Posts Widget. :)
You can get it here: http://www.postrank.com/publishers
@David Holder
“What time frame are you refering to with this [how often to blog]?”
If you go back you’ll see that he was talking about how much posting to do on a weekly basis. Though now I notice that this was posted in October, so I’m guessing that that crucial bit of info may have been missing the first time around.
I dont agree to some advices..I love posting youtube videos on my blog..the rest..should be applied though
I don’t think banner ads is dead. Banner ads still useful for high traffic blog/website.
Updating old content also not a good idea. because We will waste time just to find old post. It is better to updating old post in new post. That’s why we make archive on blog.
Thanks for the useful article. It is always interesting to read what is wrong, I’ll now focus on getting more links. Thanks again
You are right about most points. But, in my opinion, embedding YouTube Videos is not problem until you add some text to it and make it valuable. Sure, you should not do escessively (only once per month is good).
Isee famous bloggers like Jack Humphrey embeds YouTube videos frequently.
One more blogging mistake most bloggers make, such as you right here: Failing to provide a mechanism for commenters like me to check a box and subscribe to followup comments by email.
I see you have a RSS feed for comments, but that assumes the commenter wants to get it by RSS, whereas who doesn’t use email?
But what do I know? You can add a comment below but I’ll never see it.
Hey Ari,
this is a good point. I’ve been looking for a good plugin to allow that for a while and I think I’ve found one that suits my blog.
I will also add a comment editing plugin to SEO 2.0
hi, I have read your writing.
So far, I realize things like that.
The most common thing I had left was an old post. I thought that long posts do not have the bother anymore, but to make a new post. That way of thinking it first. Thank you for your advice. I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot for making the new blogger aware of the things that should be and could be avoided while blogging. Thank you so much.
Oh my God I’m do some mistake with last number. I’m focusing in best posting, so that’s wrong?!
Hi, I think the issue with frequency of posts is all down to consistency. If your loyal readers are used to 5 posts a week then keep it up. If they are used to 2-3 posts a week then keep this up. Any less than 2 per week though and your blog is likely to be a little stale.
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