Blogging Mistakes And Why We Need To Avoid Them
Over the years, there have been so many changes on WordPress. The design, the features and pretty much everything else except the things that actually need changing. And that can make it harder to use this platform than ever before. I see a lot of bloggers, especially newer ones, that make blogging mistakes that could easily be avoided.
These are small, seemingly insignificant mistakes. However, they can have a big impact on your stats. It can be what stops someone from following you or interacting with your posts. And some of these mistakes are simply because it’s become so much more difficult to use WordPress recently.
So, I thought I would make an updated post about blogging mistakes you should try and avoid. Here are the blogging mistakes and why you should as well as how you can avoid them:
No About Me Or Contact Page
This is one of the most common blogging mistakes that bloggers make and it is one that costs a lot of people followers and backlinks. Although blogging may not be as popular as it once was, this platform is still filled with talented bloggers that are still active. Why should someone follow you, what makes you stand out, what makes your blog special? That’s what a lot of people want to know before they commit to following your blog.
Having an About Me page or any sort of introductory page will help potential followers figure out what your niche is, what topics/topic they can expect to find on your blog, what your interests are, what your writing style is and so much more. A lot of people will only follow blogs that they are certain they will like and an About page will help them figure out if your blog is for them.
There should also be a clear way for bloggers to contact you because the blogging community is a very social one and sometimes people want to chat and get to know you before they follow your blog. If they find you to be friendly, kind and genuine they’re much more likely to follow your blog. Having a clear contact page or your contact information written clearly on your About Me page helps a lot.
And just to be clear, you can’t just post an About Me post and call it a day. It needs to be on the homepage of your blog where people can easily locate it.
Spamming
This should be a no regardless of what platform you choose to use. Spamming is not only incredibly annoying but it will also very likely stop bloggers from following your or even visiting your site.
There are multiple types of spamming. The first kind is leaving comments asking bloggers to follow your or view your posts without mentioning their blog post or anything else. This is such a tacky tactic. The next is liking a million of their posts in like a minute. No one wants that and you are just taking up space on their notifications tab and making them miss actual notifications. Again, tacky and annoying.
If you want to interact with other bloggers, make sure you leave genuine comments and instead of spam liking a bunch of their posts like one or two that you actually enjoyed. Keeping it real will get you everywhere on this platform and spamming is a great way to get yourself kicked off.
Not Using Your Features
This one annoys me so much because WordPress has so many great features and yet they make them harder and harder to use. It makes no sense to me to make features less user-friendly or to make so many features paid features when they should be free. But what can you do, WordPress is as it is.
Thankfully, some features are still completely free and can do wonders for your blog if used correctly. Firstly, tags and categories. You should only be using a combination of 15 tags and categories. I always recommend using even fewer than that. I would recommend 1-2 categories max and 10-12 tags max. If you use more than 15, WordPress automatically marks your post as spam and will keep it off the Reader, tag pages, the Search page and the Discover page. This will drastically drop your traffic and people will find it very hard to find your blog organically.
The next features are images and gifs. Not only are they great to keep the readers attention, they’re also great for SEO. WP offers so many free images and gifs, use them!
SEO
SEO is a must if you want to get traffic outside of this platform AKA Search Engine traffic. If that’s not one of your goals with blogging then feel free to ignore this one. I know a lot of people blog as a hobby and don’t care too much about increasing their Search Engine traffic.
However, if you would like to increase Search Engine traffic please do your SEO research in advance because it’s so much work going back and editing older posts to make them SEO friendly. Seriously, it takes forever and is a lot of work. You don’t want to end up having to spend hours every day for months just to fix problems that could have been fixed months or years ago.
One of the biggest blogging mistakes people make is ignore SEO till it’s too late.
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
Taking Breaks Without Announcing Them
I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers do this and I do understand that maybe people are going through something and can’t post for a while. But if you are able to announce that you’ll be taking a break and share when you’ll be posting again, that would really make a difference.
When you dip unannounced, it makes your regular readers think you have abandoned your blog permanently (which happens a lot here). This will lead to you losing followers and people no longer remembering to check on your blog when you do decide to come back and share posts again. It just disrupts the whole cycle.
Check For Errors
Please always be regularly checking for errors when it comes to your blog because WordPress has become a very glitchy platform. There are people that like my posts or even comment on them but I’m unable to view their blog because their link doesn’t lead me to their site or shows an error message. Please make sure your username leads to your blog.
Also, some sites use retired themes which makes them harder to use and navigate. Sometimes the comments function doesn’t work or the like button etc. Please make sure everything is updated and working well because you can lose out on a lot of traffic and followers simply because your site is not user-friendly.
Conclusion
Those are some blogging mistakes I see very commonly and think bloggers should work on if they would like to grow their presence both on this platform and on Search Engines. What are some common blogging mistakes you think bloggers need to work on? Did you find this post informative? 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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