Top 25 Most Common Blogging Mistakes
1. Visitors can’t find an ‘About Me’ (or About Us) page or information.
2. You place too many ads all over your blog.
3. You have too many blinking text or distracting animation in your blog.
4. Your long blog entry of 400 to 500 words is lumped into one chunk of a paragraph.
5. You’re not encouraging people to comment in your blog. (Say “Add a smart comment!” or “See what others said.’ or something to that effect.)
6. Your blog starts playing an audio announcement or mp3 without visitors’ approval (this isn’t helpful for those who have multiple tabs opened at once that may mean multiple audios playing automatically at the same time).
7. Upon visitors’ exit, your blog uses too many pop-under pages or ads.
8. You did not set up your blog’s autoresponder correctly. For example your blog uses an autoresponder to send emails without unsubscription instructions and also without your own email address that subscribers can contact you directly.
9. Your blog is not open for comment to bloggers outside blogger.com or blogspot.com
10. You have a blog that forces people to register before they can post a comment.
11. You have too many unwanted spammy comments which you do not care to delete (despite not using spam deterants or anti-spam plugins).
12. You do not respond to comments made in your blog (or read them).
13. You blog once in 6 weeks or lesser.
14. You do not offer RSS feeds or if you do, you do not provide information about what RSS are and how they can be used. Not everyone who visits a blog knows what RSS is.
15. You blog in flowery language that only a geek or a pharmacist understands.
16. Your blog is in a language other than English AND without option for translation.
17. You use ultra-small font types in your blog that’s hardly readable to most.
18. You have lotsa mispelled words you don’t care to correct. For example, you mix up “It’s” with “Its”, or “You’re” with “your”.
19. Your blog’s opt-in form (other than a blog subscription form) lacks a privacy policy (eg. are subscribers’ email addresses only to be for blog updates, or for statistical purposes?)
20. There’s too many polls, quizzes or widgets in the sidebar of your blog. (Widgets may slow down loading of blog.)
21. You outsource all blog posts! What happened to your natural personal voice? Are your blog entries really your OWNopinions and thoughts?
22. Use ambigious (or useless) blog titles like ‘Just had breakfast!’
23. When using images and content from other sources, you don’t care to give the content-owners or bloggers credit.
24. You use a blog template that looks like a thousand other free blogs around the net.
25. Well, actually I’ve left #25 for you to “fill in”! Sorry!
More related “juicy” info:
- Greg shares the 7 DEADLY blogging mistakes that I didn’t think of.
- T Edwards shares the First 5 Things he learned about blogging
(This article first appeared in BloggersBase.)
Itching to talk back? Please do!
Update Feb 22nd 2009: I thought of another mistake!
Not giving your visitors the choice of starting (or stopping) music. This is because many visitors browse the internet with multiple taps (or is it tags) opened. It is very irritating to find one or multiple sites playing music automatically at the same time.
Sphere: Related Content
You should especialy avoid a combination of 2 and 6. Ads that play annoying sounds or music are the worst thing ever. When I have over 5 tabs open at once (which is almost always) I need to spend a considerable ammount of time looking for that annoying ad. And I usualy never come back to the site that greeted me with something like that.
[Reply]
admin Reply:
April 7th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Yep, I agree Web Design Miami!
[Reply]
@styleanywhere You are always free to learn along with me! Likewise, I think I can learn something from you!
[Reply]