Blogging Advice You Should Not Follow
Most of the time, I share blogging advice you should follow. But if you’re someone who spends time online and reads about how to improve your blog, you’ll notice that there is tons of bad advice out there too. And sometimes differentiating between the good and bad is difficult. So, I thought I would do it for you in today’s post and hopefully save you some time and energy. Anyway, here is some blogging advice you should not follow:
Blogging Makes Money Instantly
I have heard a lot of people say that blogging is an easy way to make a passive income. It’s not. I mean, it’s a great way to make an income. It’s just not easy. In fact, it’s quite difficult. Maybe it was easier back in the day, but with the rise of social media platforms and decrease of popularity of blogging, it’s much harder to make money blogging.
A lot of people talk about it like you just need to post what you feel like, when you feel like and you’ll magically make an income. As someone who works online and has been blogging for almost a decade, that is absolutely not the case. It takes so much research, time and effort to create posts, get a following and find streams of income.
Again, it’s not impossible to do. If you’re passionate about blogging, you can absolutely make a decent income from it. But be ready to put in the time and effort. It’s not going to happen overnight, money is not magically going to show up. You have to work at it constantly and have enough patience to stick with it longterm. It doesn’t happen overnight, at least not for the majority of people.
SEO
A lot of people will tell you about the importance of SEO including myself. And, I’m not here to deny that having an SEO friendly blog will do wonders for you. But I am here to tell you not to let SEO consume your blog. If you only make your site SEO friendly in every way possible, but forget about genuinely writing what you’re passionate about you will end up losing readers. People don’t want to read posts that sound robotic. They want to hear your voice in your writing.
And it’s absolutely possible to both make your posts SEO friendly but also keep sharing content you love and enjoy creating. You may have noticed, I write about a lot of different topics on my site. But I mostly try to write about things that I love or that interest me. A lot of people ask me how I grew my blog and how it got as big as it is now. And personally, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I try to genuinely connect with my readers. For me, it’s not just about sharing SEO friendly things that get me to the first page of Search Engines. It’s more about writing content that people will find interesting, entertaining or informative. You need to have a purpose for your posts and SEO is not a purpose.
In my own experience, I got too caught up with SEO back in the day. And my stats suffered because although it increased my traffic from Search Engines, it decreased the activity on my posts. People felt like they could no longer connect with my content and left comments much less often than before.
So, my advice is that take SEO seriously but don’t make it your only goal when creating content.
Related Posts: SEO For Dummies, SEO For Dummies #2, SEO For Dummies #3, SEO For Dummies #4
Related Post: How To Increase Your On-Page SEO
Quantity Is Key
People will often say quantity is key, post as often as possible. Those of us in the biz will tell you that this is called spamming the system. By posting as often as possible, you’re statistically increasing your chances of creating a trending post. Furthermore, at least one of your posts are more likely to be pushed by the algorithm. And the more content you have, the more traffic you’ll get. And sure, I guess this technically works… for a while.
But eventually the system/algorithm is going to make you as spam and your content will no longer get pushed. You’ll see a steady decline in your stats. And it’s not even just the technical side of things. Most people don’t want to follow a site that shares like twenty posts a day. It’s exhausting. So, eventually people will begin to unfollow you and stop commenting on your site too.
Spamming, in my opinion, is the easy way out. You don’t have to put much work into it and for a while you see a big increase of traffic etc. But it’s not a longterm solution. In fact, it actually does more damage than good.
Tags
I’ve heard lots of different advice when it comes to tags. What tags to use, how to use them, etc. And I see many people say that you need to use really specific tags. So for example, if you’re sharing a lasagna recipe, they recommend using tags like “easy vegan lasagna recipe” or ” best vegetarian lasagna recipe.” However, I don’t think this really works well for WordPress.
If you look at the tags that are trending the most on WordPress, they are tags that are vague and only one or two words. These tags have their own pages on your Reader and lots of bloggers use these pages to discover and interact with specific posts about that topic. Although specific tags are good for SEO reasons, they are not going to help you on WordPress.
When it comes to tags, what I’ve seen works best is to use a mix of specific and more broader tags. Also, always check what’s trending and what tags are currently popular on WordPress. It’s so easy to see and takes a second but will really help get your post out there to a wider audience. And for those of you that don’t use tags, please use them if you’re looking to grow your site. They are vital.
Related Post: How To Use Tags Correctly
Conclusion
I hope this blogging advice you should not follow has helped you better understand what not to do. I think sometimes we are so focused on what to do, that we forget to check up on what not to do.
What is some blogging advice you regret following? What is some blogging advice you want to tell bloggers not to follow? Was this post helpful? Let me know in the comments below because I would love to hear from you. Or simply stop by and say hi!
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