Nine Blogging Mistakes You Should Avoid
Blogging is a popular pastime that has quickly emerged into a money-making tool. While many people blog, only a handful actually follows rules. This leads them to commit a number of mistakes.
Here are the most common mistakes that you should avoid when creating or managing a blog:
1. Failure to Provide Search Function
Like conventional websites, blogs should be searchable. You should install a search function on your blog to make it easy for visitors to find the content they are looking for.
2. Failure to Offer RSS Feeds for Syndication
Blogs need to offer RSS feeds for their content to get syndicated. This will help to get the blog a number of followers. It is common for many blogging platforms to create automatic RSS feeds for content.
3. Failure to Personalize
Blogs reflect the personal views and experiences of the blogger. This gives a blog its distinct personal touch. Readers tend to go away if your blog contains impersonal entries.
4. Failure to Subscribe
As a blogger, you should subscribe to your own blog so that you can see exactly how your visitors see your blog. Check your links if they’re working as you wanted them to. Subscribing to your own blog will enable you to arrest any errors and correct them immediately as they happen.
5. Failure to Provide Efficient Navigation to Archives
Efficient navigation is a very important aspect of any website or blog. You should not give your visitors a hard time accessing your blog posts and their related entries.
6. Lack of Consistency
Blog posts need to be consistent in frequency and tone especially if it has some following. Readers expect a blog to be consistent. If you stray away from your readers’ expectations, you will likely lose them.
7. Lack of Theme
Blog entries should be bound together by a common theme. This is especially necessary when people subscribe to your blog because they want to follow a topic that needs your inputs.
8. Failure to Use Stable Hosting
A reliable blog hosting service is one of the factors that can keep your blog’s presence felt on the web. You only have a few seconds to catch the interest of your visitors. This means that your hosting service should be able to display your blog before your prospect visitors are tempted to wander away.
10. Lack of Monitoring Metrics
You should know which of your blog contents attracted the most visitors. This will make you understand the type of content that your readers are looking for. You will have an idea of what your readers want by viewing your blog log on a regular basis.