Every blogger’s dream is to have a blog that ranks in the top ten list for his country and niche. We desire to grow our blogs to a stage where making millions monthly comes on autopilot. You can confirm this when you see how determined many bloggers work, turning out quality contents on their blogs. My advice is that you should keep at it. Successful is not earned in a day.
As you try to build rankings and authority to your blog, It is very important to avoid certain practices that can kill everything you have laboured for.
This write-up is on six of the most common mistakes that can spell doom for your growing blog.
1. Bad Writing Style
Before rushing to get your post online, save yourself a lot of problems by taking time to go through the post again (proof-read) before you publish. Unforgivable grammatical blunders, faulty layout and poor punctuation will turn off most blog visitors.
Other post-related practices that can reduce how much people read your blog include careless boasting, writing too much on off-topics, using too much indigenous language, copy and paste and using terms too difficult for the common person to understand.
2. Blogging Alone
Believing you can pull through and make it alone in blogging business can cost you a lot. It is not just about writing and publishing. To succeed in blogging business, you will need to develop yourself in other areas such as basic html, SEO, online marketing etc. Don’t make the mistake of not networking because at some point, you will need the services (free or paid) of a fellow blogger to bail you out.
As a blogger, It is easy to quickly diagnose what you are doing wrong and get solutions to challenges when you have experienced bloggers in your network. BloggerLab is Facebook group where you meet with other bloggers.
3. Not Optimizing For Mobile
A fraction of your blog readers will visit from mobile devices. It’s a recommended practice to install responsive template or mobile theme on your blog so that the stress of zooming here and there is eliminated. Your SEO can be hurt if your blog is not well optimized for mobile.
If you are on Blogger, ensure you select mobile template for your blog under the ‘template’ tab so that Blogger can serve a mobile version of your blog to visitors that use mobile devices. MobilePress is a plugin that can be used to optimize your WordPress blog for mobile.
4. Too Many Plugins And Image Ads
In a bid to optimize blog design and SEO, many bloggers install too many plugins which end up reducing the speed at which their blogs load. This practice has a negative feedback effect on your blog SEO which will influence rankings in search engines.
Apart from the fact that having too many image ads can distract your blog readers away from post contents, images from ads reduce blog loading time.
5. Using Black-hat SEO Methods
Black-Hat SEO are techniques which some bloggers use to rank high on SERP. These methods are largely frowned upon by Google so whenever Google rolls out updates (e.g Panda and Penguin), websites employing such methods are tracked down and penalized. Such a blog either loses rankings, get de-listed from search engines or get deleted if it’s hosted on Google.
Common black-hat search engine optimization practices include keyword stuffing in posts and H tags, buying bulk backlinks, commenting on unrelated blogs, mass forum posting, publishing unreadable spinned articles amongst others.
6. Not Creating Backups
To avoid stories that touch the heart, cultivate the habit of backing up your blog periodically. Personally, I back up my blog weekly. I have heard instances where Google sends a blog to the recycle bin because the blog was marked as spam. Although this may happen accidentally, your blog may never get restored online. So make sure you always create a backup file in case your blog gets deleted or hacked and you need to restore it.
You can download your blogger blog backup file from your admin dashboard. WordPress-hosted blogs have a big advantage here because you actually have access to all your blog files. Make sure your backup file is stored online (file hosting and cloud storage accounts) and offline (flashdrives, hard disk, CDs).
I hope you were able to learn some things from this post. Did you make mistakes in the past apart from the ones above? Share what you did and what happened eventually.
Source: http://www.practicalbusinessideas.com/2014/10/6-mistakes-that-can-kill-your-blog.html
Nairaland
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