Common Mistakes Bloggers Make

If you are a new blogger who just stepped into blogging shoes and wondering why there is no traffic to your blog, there is a strong possibility that you are also committing one of the common mistakes bloggers make.

1. Not focusing on Comment Section : Most newbie bloggers underestimate the power of comments on their blog which is a huge mistake. Never, ever ignore your audience. If they have taken time to come to your blog and commented on your blog post, you should respond to them. They can be your potential admirer. Responding to your audience and participating in dialogue shows your expertise on the subject.
   
   It is always beneficial when someone comments on your blog even if they don’t agree with your viewpoint, this always give you a chance to prove your point of view and you always have a win-win situation. Don’t forget to filter the spam comments which puts the credibility of your blog at risk. Responding to comments also leads to potential ideas and contacts.
2. Focusing on advertising and not writing : When you start a blog, don’t think of making money out of it right away. Your blog is not going to make you a millionaire overnight. Focus more on the content than advertising. Keep writing more meaningful content than to focus on the placements of ads. Too much sidebar clutter can make your audience ignore your blog posts and ultimately giving you a higher bounce rate.
   
   Having more ads on your blog may give a cheap feel to its appearance. Your audience may have ad blockers installed which means that you are missing out important spaces for your content to be displayed. Google adsense does not allow more than 3 ads to be placed on one page but it does not mean that you have to place all the 3 ads on your page. Your content on the page needs to be compelling and engaging rather than number of ads.
3. Posting daily but not regular : If you are bombarding your blog with new posts everyday, you are annoying the subscribers who subscribed your posts in their emails. They will be getting emails about your new posts everyday which may be annoying and you are again on the losing edge. Ultimately, you may get unsubscribed from them. Take time to post your blogs on regular basis. If you follow the regular pattern of once a week then stick to it. Most of the successful bloggers don’t post daily. Blogging 5-6 times a month is considered one of the genuine times to blog which never annoys your subscribers.
   
   Plan your posts and if you come up with ideas about your new post in the blog, draft it and spend some quality time on it rather than publishing it. In the end, content is the king. It does not really matter how many posts you write, all that matters is how better you write and how much traffic you drive.
4. Not using real keywords : Are you using “Click here” or “more” as keywords in your links? You are again making one of the common mistakes bloggers make.
   
   There are many reasons why “Click here” should not be used as text for the links. Firstly, to have good user experience, a visitor on the website needs to know the context of the link, instead of reading the context backwards. Also, if you have multiple links on the page/post, how will you distinguish between each link? This leads to bad user experience. Secondly, search engines like Google, don’t consider the links to be optimized if they don’t have context to the actual content. The text for the links are considered one of the best ways to establish the context what the page, post or the website is about. If you miss on those, you are definitely losing it to be on the good books of Google.
5. Inappropriate SEO : There is a strong possibility that if you have inappropriate SEO for your website, it is going to affect your ranking on search engines.
   
   Stuffing keywords to let them appear on the page more than once, broken links, poor content or copied content, not optimizing images (improper names and not providing “Alt” text), avoiding 404s – these all lead up to a bad SEO strategy and your website will fail badly at search engine rankings. In order to have engaged audience and better search engine rankings, monitor your website more often keeping the content updated.
6. Overly complicated : If your posts have too many complex words to sound more professional, this won’t let you connect to your audience. Write as you are speaking with them in a more conversational manner rather than delivering lectures. Using simple language will connect your audience with you and they will read your post till the end.
   
   Avoid using vague language, complex vocabulary and ineffective analogies. The content which is well-written with simplicity is easy to understand and easy to remember. You can retain your audience if they are engaged to the content provided to them in a way they effortlessly understand.
7. Not an effective About page : If you are keeping your identity ambiguous, you are not connecting with your audience. How can you expect them to trust your expertise when you are not trusting them and not telling them about you. As I said before, you need to make a contact with them so that they know whom they are investing their trust in.
   
   Tell people who you are, why you are here and why they should read what you posted. Making them believe in your beliefs is only possible if they know the real you.
8. Indulged in copyright issues : Sometimes, unknowingly, bloggers are indulged in copyright issues. Copying images from google or any other search engine and not citing the source lands them to the copyright infringement issues. Also, writing blog content from someone’s post is not a good idea either as long as you mention their information on it.
   
   Basically, everything on the web is subjected to copyright. In short, some people do not care when their content or images are copied but some people take it very seriously. In order to prevent yourself from any such legal issues, you can label it clearly and cite the resource. Using a royalty-free image won’t land you in trouble at all. So if you are doubtful about the copyright, I would encourage you to use royalty-free images only. Alternatively, you can use “Creative Common Images” on Flickr where you can copy, distribute, display, modify somebody’s images – only if you give credit to them. More information about Creative Commons on Flickr.
9. Not proofreading : Not giving enough time to proofread your posts may land your posts published with grammar mistakes or typos. Once you finished writing your post, don’t make haste to publish and let it go live.
   
   You may be too excited in posting your blog but not your audience. They are not expecting their inboxes to be crowded with some posts which have typos, grammatical errors or unfinished sentences. Get familiar with the frequent errors you make. Some words like there, their and they’re, your and you’re should not be mixed. It is quite probable that when you write your post, ideas keep flowing in and you don’t pay attention towards spellings or any other grammatical errors. That is why we need proofreading! Give some time to proofreading before publishing your piece of work. Again, not proofreading your work may affect your credibility and your connection with your audience adversely.
10. Forcing keywords : When writing a post, do not force keywords to make SEO work for your blog. Forced keywords can be clearly noticed when the sentences don’t make sense and ultimately, it lowers the quality of your content. Search engines have so many people working for them and they are paid hefty amount of salaries to figure out who is genuinely writing a post or forcing keywords in them. Nobody likes to be blacklisted and penalized by Google, right?
    
    Keywords can be placed appropriately in the title of the post, first paragraph of your post, meta description tag, alternate text of the images in the post or page title. If you overdo in stuffing keywords, they are likely to be noticed. It is advisable to focus on your content and not to worry about keywords. Let them flow naturally in your content.