10 Fatal Mistakes Bloggers Make—and How to Fix Them

I’ve found that a huge number of bloggers fall into one of two categories:

1. Aspiring writers who find every reason to quit writing before they even have the chance to succeed and,
2. Accidental successes who have grown a following but have no idea what to do with it.

That’s hardly an exhaustive list of blogger archetypes, of course, but it’s a good place to start.

The aspiring blogger makes perhaps the most common—and biggest—mistake of all.Usually it starts with self-criticism:

What was I thinking? No one cares about this stuff. 

Then it progresses to “being realistic.” They tell themselves, “Even if I do manage to write something interesting, no one’s actually going to find it.”

And finally it reaches its natural conclusion, when they announce, “Screw this! I quit.”

I shouldn’t have to say this, but that’s the number one mistake bloggers make: They stop blogging. For bloggers to succeed, they have to blog. A lot. Even when they don’t want to. Especially when they don’t want to.

Hundreds of successful bloggers (maybe even thousands) who make big bucks have written time and again that it took at least a year or two of almost daily blogging before they started seeing any really impressive results.

So take heart—and don’t stop blogging.

If you do manage to keep blogging, here are nine more extraordinarily common (but easy to fix) mistakes that bloggers make:

1. Don’t attribute quotes and links.

One of the absolute best marketing and networking techniques bloggers have available is the hyperlink. It might seem counterintuitive, but you want to link to your competition whenever possible. The more you link to people, the more they link to you. And the more links you have, the more traffic you get. It’s really that simple.

2. Don’t link to their own posts.

Google and other search engines love sites where people spend a lot of time. The more internal links you use, the more time people spend reading content on your site, the more search engines trust you.

3. Clutter their pages with eye candy.

Fancy Flash animations, huge graphics, and other plugins and gizmos that might make your site pretty also slow it down—way down. The slower your site loads, the less search engines like you and the more likely visitors are to leave before your page even finishes loading.

Google has actually studied the issue and found that every half second delay in a page’s load speed has a significant (10%+) impact on the site’s bounce rate.

4. Care more about SEO than their audience.

Yes, you should be smart about your keywords and try to use them in titles and headings. But don’t go overboard. Keyword density is so yesterday as far as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are concerned, and it’s a major turnoff for almost every reader. Write for your readers first and then see if you can finagle in a keyword or two.

5. Only use their site’s commenting system.

It’s tempting to turn comments on in WordPress or Blogger and leave it at that. That might be the easy way out, but it’s not effective. The most socially active blogs let users post by signing into their Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts or by using popular commenting services, such as Disqus.

6. Don’t sell stuff.

Everyone likes to pretend that money doesn’t matter and the sole reason for doing anything is self-edification and magnanimity. But let’s get real. Money might not be everyone’s primary reason for blogging, but a little extra cash never hurts. It’s also a great motivator to keep you blogging.

Whether it’s books through Amazon’s affiliate program, your own e-books, or a cute t-shirt, selling items of interest to your readers actually adds value for them. It also benefits you and provides a useful metric for measuring your success.

7. Submit their blogs to search engines.

Yes, you heard me: submitting your blog (as well as individual posts) to Google and other search engines is stupid. Really stupid. Search engines attach more importance to websites they find naturally (that’s via inbound links, in case you’re wondering) than they do sites manually submitted to them. As long as a website that’s already indexed links to your site, you’re golden.

8. Use cutesy fonts.

Unless you’re a calligraphy company, stay away from exotic fonts. Even then, stay away from exotic fonts. Half the time, people’s Web browser won’t support them. And even if they do, non-standard fonts are a major turnoff to some readers. No one’s going to leave your website because its typeset in Arial. But they probably will if it’s in Comic Sans.

9. Spend more time on their own blog than on others.

I like to follow the rule that for every blog post I write, I find at least four other similar posts on other sites and comment on them. If you can do 5, that’s even better. Or 30. That’s good too. The more people see your name in the blogosphere, the more likely they are to click on your sig link. (You do have a sig link, right?)

Bonus: Please, please don’t include an unnatural, forced conclusion to every blog post just because your high school English teacher told you to always write conclusions. If you don’t have anything more to say, stop. Something witty or memorable is always nice to wrap your blog up with—a call to action is good, too—but it’s not a requirement.

Whatever you do, don’t do this: The above are 10 of the most common mistakes I see bloggers make. Avoid them, and you’ve already made it through half the battle. Remember: Blogging is fun. It can also be rewarding, both financially and existentially. Just keep with it and you’ll do fine.