Many people are inspired by pro bloggers who are making a living out of it, and just by reading their success stories many people choose to make their own fate in the world of blogging. From the first look it may seem to be an easy task but in fact it is not so simple to make a successful blog and drive a lot of traffic to it as they say “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
There are many elements which needs to be addressed to make a successful blog, and many of these are simple yet important takes which needs to be taken care of. I will be telling you some of the mistakes and also their fixes which most of the newbie bloggers tend to make whose consequences are discouraging results and eventually many bloggers quit.
Networking with other bloggers
Networking for your blog online is as important as networking in the real life. Networking with other bloggers creates a reputation for you, and at many times when any of your blogger friend likes a post that you have written he will mention your posts on his blog which will give you a backlink from your niche and traffic too.
The Ultimate Guide To Networking With Bloggers
How to Promote Your Blog through Networking
How to Start Networking with Other Mom Bloggers
How to Easily Network with Other Bloggers in Your Niche
4 Tips For Networking With Other Bloggers
How To Network With Other Bloggers To Build Your Own Brand
Tips for Networking With Bloggers in Your Industry
How to network with other bloggers – 5 techniques
Creating a Network: Socializing With Other Bloggers
Networking with Other Bloggers
How do you get more traffic to your blog?
Cheap or free WordPress Theme
It is not recommended that you should pay for a good theme, but you should check for the faulty ones. Regardless, if they are free or not. You might have to put in some money but a good WordPress theme would always pay off in the long run as it will also aid in giving better loading speed. We know that WordPress keeps on updating at regular intervals and free themes or even cheap ones do not have regular updates which is why they do not support the newer versions of WordPress. Vouch for the default themes of WordPress and once you are in a position to upgrade then I would recommend the Genesis Framework of Studiopress.
Choosing the Right WordPress Theme
What To Consider When Choosing A WordPress Theme
Selecting the Perfect Theme for WordPress
Tips on Choosing The Best WordPress Theme
15+ Tips for Buying the Perfect WordPress Theme
How to choose a wordpress theme (and what I use)
Free WordPress Themes: How to Choose the Perfect Theme for You
How to choose themes for WordPress cms expo
How to Choose The Best WordPress Theme for Your Business
How to Choose a WordPress Theme?
To choose a custom WordPress theme… or not.
Top Tips To Help You Choose The Best WordPress Theme
Choose a Topic from Your Niche
Choosing the right topic to write about and that too from the niche of your site is very important. When a reader comes to your site he/she would be expecting some thing similar to your website’s niche and it may make them run away. If there is a very appealing topic that you want to write about, guest post on some related website or even start a new.
How to Choose a Niche Topic for your Blog
How to Choose Blogging Niche of your New Blog?
21 Warning Signs You Chose the Wrong Topic for Your Blog
How to Choose a Profitable Niche
How To Choose The Perfect Niche For Your Blog And Avoid Failure
How To Pick A Topic For Your Authority Site
What to Do When “All of the Good Ideas are Already Taken” – Tips to Help You Pick a Niche
Single Topic Vs. Multi-Topic blog : What is Better and How?
Choose a Blogging Niche You Can Expand On for Life
How to Choose a Good Niche Blog Topic
How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche
How to Choose a Profitable Topic for Your Blog
Niche Selection 101: How To Choose a Hot Niche
Poor Web Hosting
[How a Terrible Web Hosting Company Has Forced Me to Build This Free Tool]
Always try to get your webhosting from a trusted web host whose service is never down and capable of handling large amount of traffic. If someone visits your blog and its server is down then you are self-destructing your blog. There are a lot of affordable options like hostgator.com, godaddy.com, bluehost.com etc.
5 Signs Of A Bad Web Host
Choosing best webhosting for Blogger blogs
How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?
How to choose the best web hosting service for your new blog
How to Rescue Your Website from the Clutches of a Bad Web Designer or Bad Web Host
Poor Web Hosting is Totally Bollocks!
How to Save Money on WebHosting Renewals For WordPress Blogs?
Types of Web Hosting for Every Blogger
Why I Switched Blog Hosting Companies (and Who I’m With Now)
How to Choose your Blog Hosting Service
10 Dedicated WordPress Blog Optimized Web Hosting Server For Speed and Performance
Over Advertised Blog
Advertising is usually the major source of income for most bloggers but it should never be undone. Lots of advertisement and promotion banners creates a really unprofessional and spammy image of your site and the user may never come back to your site again. So, it is important to keep the number of advertisements in moderation.
Are you Over Adve[divider]rtising (ovatising)
How To Advertise on Your Blog Without (Completely) Selling Out
Social media advertising Twitter Facebook LinkedIn
Your Blog is not Mobile Responsive
It is imperative to have a mobile responsive site so that mobile users do not find any difficulty in reading your blog. Replace your current theme with a mobile responsive theme.
If you want to test a few pages, you can use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
Finding more mobile-friendly search results
Is Your Blog Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update?
Responsive Design for your Website, Blog or Store
How to embed media to WordPress Responsive Themes
Best Responsive WordPress Themes for All Devices and Screen Resolutions
What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive Web Design, Most Complete Guide
How to make Mobile Friendly WordPress Blog
Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It
Make Blog Post From Mobiles With WordPress Mobile Apps
WordPress Themes and Creative Website Designs for iPad Apps
Create a Mobile Friendly Site With WordPress Mobile Framework
How to Transforms WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme
You don’t Write Consistently
Writing consistently is part of the game. If you publish articles after a few weeks, then readers might think you are think that you are about to abandon your blog and publishing fresh and unique content and that too in a consistent manner is appreciated by google.
How to Write Consistently
8 Mindsets that Free You to Write Consistently
Should you write consistently or in bulk?
How to Stay Motivated to Write Consistently and Produce Content
Author Q&A: Ann Handley on Content, Creativity and Writing Consistently
4 Fantastic Tools To Keep You Writing Consistently
How to write consistently with your brand
How to Write Great Blog Content Consistently
AdviceHow to make writing a habit and write consistently – Real advice and not “Just write!”
Simplify your writing
Simple yet correctly written blog posts are readers favourite. Adding unnecessary and difficult vocabulary can complicate what you are trying to convey to your reader and can leave a bad impression about your blog.
You are writing for search engines
Doing SEO for your blog is an important thing to be taken care of but it should not be the sole purpose of your articles. Your readers are humans and they would quickly notice if your post is poorly written and stuffed with keywords, even search engines now don’t like these posts. Don’t bother about SEO in your posts, if your posts are high quality and well written then automatically search engine will give them good rankings.
Follow these 3 guidelines to simplify your writing
How to Simplify Your Writing
THE MARKETER’S POCKET GUIDE TO WRITING WELL
7 Surprising Ways to Simplify Your Writing
Simplify Your Writing
How to Simplify Your Writing
Can’t Keep Up? 8 Ways to Simplify Your Writing Practice
3 Ways to Simplify Your Writing Life
How Can I Simplify My Writing Using Readability Formulas? by Brian Scott
Simplify That Perspicuous, Transpicuous Writing
Security of your blog is a low priority
Web security is very important and even though WordPress upgrades its security shortfalls but everything is not covered for. Adding features like IP filtering, reducing the number of loin trials etc would definitely strengthen your security. Secure you blog by Installing the plugin known as iThemes Security.
WordPress Arena WP SECURITY ARCHIVE
Essential steps to secure your WordPress install
Everything You Need To Know About The iThemes Security Plugin
Cyber Security and Child Safety Low Priority For Rural Digital Users
Developer Security Awareness: Is Security Your Top Priority?
How to significantly improve your WordPress security
HTTPS as a ranking signal
Getting Started with iThemes Security
Lack of research
In order to impress your readers, it is eminent to have made an in-depth research of your topic. You should give your readers an impression that you know ins and outs of what you are telling them about.
Your post lacks an introduction
Whatever type of post you are about to write, whether it is a list or a paragraph one it should have an introductory paragraph or two which give an idea to the readers what is the post going to be about.
Best way to write an introduction for an essay
Your website doesn’t have a sitemap
Users Sitemap & Archive – WordPress Plugin
A sitemap is basically the structure or map of your site and it is to be submitted to the Webmasters Tools powered by google so that the contents of your site are known to google and the contents get properly indexed. Without a sitemap the contents of the site can never be indexed. You can use the wordpress SEO by yoast plugin to generate a sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tool.
How to create a sitemap and let Google know where you’re at
What is an XML Sitemap? How to Create a Sitemap in WordPress?
Should I Create a Sitemap or HTML Site Map?
HOW TO SET UP AND OPTIMIZE A SITEMAP
My Advice on Google Sitemaps – Verify, but Don’t Submit
Submitting Your Sitemap to Google
The Top Reasons Why Google Isn’t Indexing Your Site
Sitemap Generator for Youtube Music Engine
Sitemap Generator for WordPress (Google Sitemap)
Publishing lots of posts
If you are publishing a lot of posts daily, it is going to do you no good. Large number of articles means that you are sacrificing quality while generating quantity. A few high quality and well written posts are worth more than a lot of low quality posts so make sure you don’t stress out yourself and maintain quality in your articles.
You ignore what readers comment on your posts
Ignoring comments of your readers shows that you don’t care what anybody thinks about your posts. If the comment is a positive one then you should thank them and engage with them and if the comment is a negative one, note what the reader complains about and assures him that its never going to happen again. Replying to each and every comment shows the readers your sense of commitment.
Your heading is boring
Heading is the major difference between a hit and flop post. Heading should always be an interesting one, something which creates a spark into readers’ eyes and attracts them to open the post page. Perfect headings are concise and striking.
Long paragraphs
Short paragraphs and pointer are more liked by the readers than the longer ones. They are easier to scan and sift through which maintains a reader’s interest in your blog post.
Non-moderated comments
Comments should always be moderated because there are a lot of spam bots and even real people who spam, just to get a backlink for their site or for the sole purpose of attracting traffic. You should carefully monitor each and every comment, and only allow those comments which add value to the discussion being made.
Non-scannable content
Most of the people scan the blog post before reading the entire post in detail. Having content in well written format which includes a nice introductory paragraph, short yet informative bod paragraphs, some related pictures and a useful conclusion would make the visitor become a reader.
Check your post before publishing it
Checking for errors in your posts is essential, publishing posts which are full of errors leaves a negative image of your blog to the readers. As you can witness yourself, you can rarely see a mistake in the posts of most of the pro-bloggers. They proofread every time they are about to publish a post on the internet.
Your blog lacks an “About” page
Telling your readers about yourself and your personal life story can build a strong bond between you and the reader. You can put opt-in box here to get more subscribers since every one visits the about page when visiting a new blog.
Discard unnecessary plugins
Take out some time to look for all the unnecessary plugins and get rid of them. Doing this will in-return aid you while you are trying to improve your site speed. Go to Plugins, then Installed Plugins and deactivate the unused plugins and then delete them.
Catchy Logo
Logo is the identity of your brand. Create a simple yet meaningful logo which would make an impression in the users’ mind. They will remember your blog and its logo if it is an amazing one.
Stop checking your web page analytics
You might hamper your productivity by constantly refreshing your analytics. Check your analytics not more than 2-3 times a day.
Don’t have a favicon for you blog
Favicon is the small image besides the title of your blog on the browser’s tab, it gives and professional look to your blog and makes it easily recognizable among other opened tabs. When getting your logo designed, ask your graphic designer to make a favicon for your site too.
You don’t do internal linking
Internal linking has two plus points: 1) You will have a much better bounce rate because whenever you internally link something, you are letting the user know that you have some other relevant material as well. 2) You will have better SEO. Check your older posts and link them to any relevant material that you have recently posted and make it a habit.
Installed WordPress in a sub folder
It is better to change your subfolder when you install WordPress, because otherwise your blog home page would look like “http://www.myblog.com/wordpress”, which obviously doesn’t look good. Install your WordPress using the root directory and don’t use the sub directory.
Put social sharing buttons
Social media is a great way to get targeted traffic for your blog, having lots of likes or subscribers of your blog page can boost search engine friendly traffic for your blog. Putting up simple and easy to use social sharing buttons can rapidly increase your page’s shares and likes. If your blog is hosted on wordpress then you can easily install awesome plugins which are specifically made for this purpose.
You don’t write how to’s
How to tutorials are very popular amongst the readers. Many people search for different problems they face and usually prefers a how to tutorial which addresses to their particular issue. If someone searches for the problem whose solution is posted by you in the form of a how to posts then it is highly likely that he will end up on your blog.
You use pop-up ads
Placing certain advertisements on your blog can be quite irritating for the visitors especially when you have pop-up ads in your site because they tend to block all the content written in your blog. Moreover, you do not really benefit from these pop-up ads even in the long run. The benefit is not worth reducing your visitors.
Having so many categories
The main purpose of categorization is to enable you to list things in an organized way, but creating a new one every time would not serve the purpose; in fact it will make it more difficult for the readers to look for the relevant material. Create a few distinct let’s say 4 to 5 categories and be precise. Define a new category only if needed.
Slow site speed
If the site loads in 3 or more seconds then a huge chunk of the users would leave it; 40 % to be precise. SEO depends on the user experience and a site which has a slow loading speed means that the user is unsatisfied, hence poor SEO. The reason behind this is that most of the users lack the sense of patience. Firstly, see if the web hosting you have is reliable or not as mentioned earlier. Secondly, quicken your site by installing a cache plugin.
Find the right audience
In order to get a good conversion rate, target the people from your niche. Attract traffic who would have interest in your niche then only you will be able to get a good conversion rate. Promote your blog on similar forums or sites.
Blog lacking a contact form
Aid your users by putting up a form, so that every visitor gets notification through email and in case they really want to get through to you they can call you up for an ad or maybe a sale. Keep a simple contact form on your site and never use a complex captcha making it easier for them to get to you.
Analytic tools
Keeping track of the number of visitors visiting your site daily is very important because it will operate as a feedback to you as to how well are you doing. For this reason you need a web traffic analytics and the good news is that you can have a very good analytic for free. Sign up for the google analytics, it is the best.
Change your default tagline
If the above mentioned tagline is also your tagline then configure your blog and change it because it is the default tagline of WordPress. To fix it go to Settings, then General. Identify the tagline and change it.
You are not storing your images locally
Earlier in the days, the web master would host the images on some sites externally to any image hosting firm and very often one would notice a phrase saying that the “Image is unavailable”. Nowadays, storage is quite cheap and web hosting also provide us with unlimited storage, which gives us all the more reason to host our own image and keep it stored. Upload all your externally hosted images into your WordPress media.
Using the default username and password should be avoided
It is better to change your default username and always try to keep a different username. The password should be strong containing a variety of different symbols, letters and numbers.
Not testing site features
Always test your freshly added plugins by running some basic test to make sure that everything is working fine or not. When ever you add a new plugin or a widget, check out the basic working of your site.
Broken links
If a reference link in any article of yours pointing to some other site ceases to exist anymore, then it is known as a broken link. It is important to find such links because they badly affect your user experience. Get a broken Link Checker plugin and always keep a check on your links.
Get your images optimized
A big size image is harmful for site speed as the bigger file would take longer to load, so it is wise to scale your image size down to a smaller size. WP Smush.it. is a great plugin to Resize your images.
Indexing unnecessary pages
Sometimes there are some pages on your blog that don’t need to be indexed and having them indexed would not serve your purpose. If you need a page to stay de indexed, configure it on Robots.txt. By doing this you are basically limiting the web crawlers from going to that page. In case, that page is already indexed, you can remove that URL by using Webmaster’s tool of URL removal.
Background music on your blog
It is a bad practice to put up some music as a background in your site because it can happen that you might be the only person who is actually enjoying that music. The user would no be able to turn it off and there are chances he might prefer, not visiting your site at all. Never put any music forcibly on your blog.