How to fix these 100 blogging mistakes and build a successful blog

Blogging can be a very powerful traffic generation tool.

In today’s marketing, people talk about content marketing and one of the best place to implement content marketing is to have your very own blog.

However, such powerful tool can be totally useless if you do not know how to make full use of it.

Blogging seems to be something really easy to start, but not that easy to master.

As a result, today I’d like to present to you these 100 blogging mistakes that you should fix which will eventually gives you a successful blog.

Here you go.

HINT: Do grab a cup of coffee before you start as this gonna take some time to finish.

 

#1 – You don’t start with an introduction

A common mistake when someone writes a list post is they start straight away with the points.

Just because that you are going to read something in a point form (and expecting your readers to know that it is going to be a point form already), you don’t have to start in that way.

Even before you do any heavy exercise, you always start with a warm up.

Therefore, don’t forget to start with an Introduction.

FIX: Write an introduction!

 

#2 – Your writing is lack of research

You can’t just hop into your writing area and start writing blindly.

Whatever that you want to write, you need to research and ensure that your post is fruitful enough to impress your readers.

If you are going to write a guide, it has to be a detailed guide.

If you are going to write a resource article, it has to have all the resources in.

FIX:

Before begin writing, do some research and write down all the points that you want to mention in your article.

Reference those sites if necessary.

 

#3 – You are being too complex

Back in the high school, it is always a plus point that you can demonstrate complexity because it shows how intelligent you are.

But in the blogging world, this is not the case because the simpler you are, the wider your audience is.

If you had been writing super high tech articles just for intelligence like Albert Einstein to read, you probably ended up Zero visitors.

FIX:

Simplify your sentence.

Never ever use jargon and always use simple and plain language.

 

#4 – You write too much about yourself

Your readers are not interested with what you do or eat daily and where you go.

Unless you are Justin Bieber, you are free to blog that.

But if you are a blogger in a specific niche, stick to your topic.

FIX:

If you really need to blog about yourself, ask yourself first.

Will your blog post about yourself helps your readers about the niche that you are blogging in?

 

#5 – You try to publish on a daily basis

Setting a schedule to yourself to publish a blog post on a daily basis will only stress you out.

Remember that in today’s content marketing, it is quality that matters and not quantity.

Even if you have 100 low quality posts makes nothing to 10 high quality posts.

FIX:

Set a reasonable publishing schedule.

Even if it is once a month, that is fine but you need to ensure that it is the best ever article of the whole month.

 

#6 – You are not publishing consistently

Google loves fresh contents.

In fact, it is not just Google but your readers love fresh contents as well.

If you stop publishing new contents, the chances are your readers might just think that you had already stopped blogging and will unsubscribe from your blog.

FIX: Same as above, set a reasonable publishing schedule and stick to it.

 

#7 – You are writing for SEO

Your readers are not search engine. They are humans.

And on top of that, search engine no longer read articles like before.

All those tricks like keyword stuffing don’t work anymore in today’s SEO.

As a result, there is really no point writing for SEO anymore.

Human don’t understand and search engine don’t buy you writing.

FIX:

Throw away all you know about keyword density and SEO writing and start to write as you speak.

They don’t matter anymore.

This will not only enable you to write like a human, but also bring out your personality.

 

#8 – You count your words too much

Blogging is not a competition to compete who write the longest article.

You might had stumble upon articles that said long articles perform better in SEO which I strongly agree is true but not all the time.

Short post can do a good search ranking as well and I experience that first hand before.

Thus, don’t stress yourself too much in your word count.

FIX:

Stop counting your words. It is a complete waste of time.

Do your word count only when you had completed writing your article. Counting words when you are writing reduced your productivity.

 

#9 – You don’t simplify your writing

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

– Albert Einstein

And, if you can’t explain it simple enough, your readers will not be able to understand you.

So, if yo can’t write your article in a simple manner, it is because you don’t have the knowledge to write that and it will result your readers not be able to comprehend your content.

FIX:

Go back to point #2 and do your research.

Once you really understand that topic, explain in your own words in simple language.

 

#10 – You don’t have a conclusion

I see some list posts basically just end once they reach the last point.

This is not a good practice.

A proper article should start with an introduction, contents and end with a conclusion.

The reason being is because it makes your article scannable right from the start without reading the actual contents.

FIX: Write a concluding conclusion.

 

#11 – You write for the wrong audience

Don’t bring the wrong audience to your blog.

If you are a web designer blogger, you can’t go around health blogs or forums to promote your web design contents.

Even if they are interested, that will probably be 10-20% of your contents.

Hence, if you try to promote your service or products to these un-targeted audience, your conversion will fail miserably.

FIX: Find the right audience. Know where the people within your niche usually hang out and promote your contents there.

 

#12 – You don’t care about your topic anymore

Sometimes, bloggers go crazy and start publishing articles that has nothing to do with their niche on their blog.

I personally had done it myself as well and it is not fun.

When you don’t care about your topic anymore, you might had upset some of your readers on the content that you are publishing and they might just unsubscribe from you.

FIX: Don’t write something that is not related to your nice. If you really want to write that, start a new blog.

 

#13 – Your niche is too narrow

If you had planned for a too narrow niche, it is very easy for you to stop generating new contents as there are not much things for you to write anymore.

When you are in such situation, there is a high chance that you will stop blogging consistently and will eventually cause your blog to fall.

It is highly advisable (or mandatory) to focus in a niche on your blog but you should not narrow it into a very narrow manner.

FIX: Have a broad niche. If you want to have a super narrow niche, ensure that you have sufficient content to produce.

 

#14 – You are editing  your post every minute

One of method to write fast is to stop editing your post as you write.

The lesser you use the backspace, the faster you write.

Editing your post every minute does not help because eventually at the end, you still need to proof read and edit it.

So, why not wait until you complete the article then only start editing your post.

FIX: Stop editing as you write. Make a habit to only edit at the end once your writing is complete.

 

#15 – You don’t have your personality

You don’t have your own voice or opinion.

What you write all the while is only what people say or what people quoted.

This makes your contents are easily available on the internet and doesn’t make you stand out.

In order to really stand out in front of all the common bloggers blogging common stuff, you need to include your own voice.

FIX: Write things like your personal experience and case study and try to view things from a very fresh (first time) point of view and blog it out.

 

#16 – You write badly

You don’t proof read your own article before publishing it.

Your poor grammar, jargon, poorly structured sentence make your reader annoy about your article, unsubscribe from you and leave your site.

Even if you are trying to present the most innovative invention from you doesn’t work as long as you keep writing poorly.

FIX: You don’t need to have a super good English. Always read what you write. Install the Jetpack plugin and use the Proofread Writing feature to auto correct your mistakes.

 

#17 – You don’t respond to comments

Your readers left a comment to you because they love what you write.

If you simply don’t respond to them, means you don’t appreciate them as your reader.

Even if you had grown to a very high traffic blog, you should never fail to respond to comment.

FIX: Reply to every comments. A good example is Neil Patel from Quicksprout who attended almost all the comments within the first 24-48 hours when his article is published.

 

#18 – Your are just too boring

This point relates back to point #15 a little.

If you simply just present your writing in a very normal or ordinary manner, it is very easy for your audience to get bored with you.

Boring audience will leave your site easily even if you wrote an extremely good content.

FIX: Add some fun stuff like jokes to your articles, include image or use infographic.

 

#19 – Your headline is not attractive

If your headline is just like another headline from another article, no open is going to read your article.

They will have the thought of “Hey, I read this before” and no one likes to read the same content over and over again even if it is from a different author.

So, write an attractive headline whenever you publish an article.

FIX: It is difficult to write a good headline but not anymore for me ever since I know this headline writing formula from Copyblogger.

 

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#20 – You don’t ‘ call to action’

Call to action is a method to call your readers to perform some action.

Marketers normally use this method to increase their conversion rate using phrase like “Buy this now” and etc.

However, this doesn’t mean that it is not going to be useful for bloggers.

You can make use of ‘call to action’ for scenario like asking your readers to leave comment after your post, to subscribe to your mailing list, tweet your article, pin your image and etc.

Take a look at Derek Halpern’s blog at Social Triggers. At the end of every video or blog post, he will ask his readers to leave a comment and he usually generate lots of comments.

FIX: Don’t be afraid to ask for anything. Try to practice at the end of every post, ask your readers to do something. It can be leaving a comment, tweet, Facebook like or Pinning your images.

 

#21 – You don’t have a publishing schedule

You simply just publish your blog post blindly.

Once you publish a post, you don’t know what else to write and publish.

Overall you don’t have a content publishing plan.

Having a publishing plan is a great help because when you want to start writing, you can just look at the schedule and you know what to write.

One way to manage your publishing schedule is to make use the Editorial Calendar plugin.

FIX: Allocate time to plan for your content. Darren Rowse of Problogger has some great tips in generating content in his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog book.

 

#22 – You write in long paragraph

It is not wrong that you write in long paragraph but this is not essay in high school anymore.

Short paragraph works better in blogging.

It is easier to scan and it makes your blog post neat and tidy.

FIX: Start breaking into paragraph after 2-3 sentence.

 

#23 – You are not writing list posts

There are quite a lot of arguments out there that list post is not a good type of post because it usually demonstrates low quality as it is easy to write.

That’s what they claim but data shows that list post is the second most shared article type after infographic.

And in fact, this post that you are reading is a list post and I hope it goes viral.

FIX: What are you waiting for? Start a list post now but hey, don’t make these 10 mistakes if you want your list post to do well.

 

#24 – You are not writing how to posts as well

How to article probably don’t perform so well from the data given above.

However, do note that a how to article is the kind of article that people will pay attention to every detail that you write.

This is because a how to article provides a detailed guide on how to do something and even though it is not the most shared, but probably the most bookmarked article.

Writing a how to article also shows that you are really good in the domain that you are dominating.

FIX: Write a definitive & complete tutorial on something that you are really good at. Find out as well how to write a good how to article from my eBook.

 

#25 – You are not moderating comments

It can be annoying at times when you receive tons of comments which are all human spam and robot spam.

Sometimes, you can’t even tell if that comment is genuine posted by real human.

For me, I implemented a strict comment policy and I only let comments that are really related to my article, with proper image and proper name.

Comments that don’t come with the above criteria will be rejected immediately.

FIX: Read my comment moderation framework.

 

#26 – You give up learning

You can’t know everything and in the knowledge world, there is no such thing that you had already knew everything.

There is always something to learn in your nice and the moment you stop learning things, that is the point you stop getting new ideas for your blog post.

FIX: Don’t give up learning. Start following blogs within your niche and learn from your competitors.

 

#27 – Your content is not scannable

Blog readers like me who has a lot of articles to read everyday will first scan an article to see if it is worth reading.

If your content is not scannable, not only me, but many people out there as well will not be reading your full content.

FIX: Start with a good introduction, end with a conclusion that wraps up everything and finally break long paragraph into short paragraph.

 

#28 – You don’t format your post

You simply publish your blog post without caring how it looks.

You don’t bold, italicize or underline your content.

FIX: Bold, italicize and underline whenever necessary (not your keywords). Ensure as well your font size is big enough and your links are colored differently from your ordinary text.

 

#29 – You don’t make use of headers

In HTML, they have H1, H2, H3 and etc for you to make use of when you need to do sub heading.

When you write your post, plan for sub heading as well because that helps your readers to scan your content.

FIX: Start using headers tag. Break your articles into sub section and put a sub heading into each.

 

#30 – You don’t use images

Using images can increase social sharing.

On top of that, by SEO optimized your image, you probably get a chance to receive traffic from search engine.

Using images can on your blog post can help your post in many ways so start using images for your post.

FIX: Include at least one image into every blog post. You can get free image from sites like Free Images and Flickr.

 

#31 – You don’t have an About page

Do you know that, the about page is one of the most viewed page in most blogs?

And the best part is, it is also the page where people put a lot of opt-in box to gain email subscribers since that page is one of the most visited page.

If you are not, that’s because you don’t have an about page or you have a poorly written about page.

FIX: Here is the formula for your About page. Who are you? Where you from? What you do? And finally, call to action to follow you on Social Media or subscription box.

 

#32 – You don’t show yourself

No matter how ugly or handsome you are, your audience wants to know how you look like.

They don’t want to know how good-looking you are but by showing your face, it shows people that this blog is maintained and written by human.

This should come together with your About page above.

FIX: Pick your best photo of yourself and attach one now. Or take a selfie if you don’t have.

 

#33 – You don’t have a landing page

Landing page is the kind of page where you get all the distractions like sidebar, advertisements and unnecessary navigation link away and let your reader only focus into one single thing.

If you sell a product, you should have a landing page that only talks about your product.

If you are not selling anything, then you should also have a landing page that collect email subscribers.

Hence, whether you are selling or not, landing page is a must.

FIX: Start building a landing page now. I use the landing page template from Studiopress theme although it is not the best out there.

 

#34 – You flood your blog with advertisements

Making money from blogging is definitely an end result from most bloggers.

By far, advertisement is one of the easiest way to monetize a blog.

However, even though it is easy to implement, it doesn’t mean you have to over do it.

Some can advertise in the way that I can’t even read the article.

FIX: You can advertise but limit to only one ads per scroll of a web page. This means that as you begin to scroll the page vertically and the existing ads begin to move away from the screen, start filling with the next one if needed.

 

#35 – You don’t have a domain name

When you use third-party blogging platform like Blogspot, WordPress and etc, you can use their domain name for FREE.

But that is not the best idea. Why?

You don’t get to control it and you don’t own it.

One day those blogging platform take your blog down and you are left with nothing after that.

You can’t migrate and the things that you can do are either to beg them to give you your domain name back or start a new one.

FIX: For about $10 a year, you can get a domain name for yourself. Find a good one and get yourself a domain name.

 

#36 – You don’t structure your URL properly

Remember that we talk about SEO optimized URL back in our On-Page SEO post.

This is a crucial setup where most WordPress blogger simply just don’t realize that their URL is not SEO optimized.

FIX: Setup your permalinks now.

 

#37 – You don’t have a logo

Still using the default Text Logo?

C’mon, you need a logo design.

Even your blog is not some big business, you need a unique logo to really stand out.

FIX: Get a designer to design your logo now. You can find sites like 99 Designs, Design Crowd or 48 Hours Logo to get your logo ready.

 

#38 – You don’t have favicon

Favicon is something some webmaster will forget when setting up a blog.

What is a favicon?

This is a favicon

FIX: Ask your designer to design to design one for you as well or use your logo as the favicon.

 

#39 – You are not using the correct font size

Font size is important because it affects your reader’s user experience.

First, ensure that your font size is not too small and remember to not over-do the size as well when you enlarge.

FIX: Font size from 12-16 should do it. Fix it now.

 

#40 – You are not using the correct line height

Don’t keep all your sentences close to each other.

Give some space so that your reader can separate out the lines and  read each word & letter clearly.

FIX: There is no magic number here but the direction here is to ensure the lines are properly spaced out.

 

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#41 – You are not giving your readers a chance to subscribe

What?

You don’t collect email subscribers?

There is a saying:

The money is in the list

As far as I know, there isn’t one successful marketer that don’t use email marketing. Probably there are few but I’m safe to say at least 90% are successful because of a good email campaign.

You know the benefit of your email list?

The key benefit is you are not affected with any of the search engine algorithm because anyhow, you can always reach your readers to read your articles.

On top of that, when you send an email, you make it very personal to your readers and that actually creates a strong relationship between you and your readers.

FIX: Get an autoresponder now and start collecting emails. Follow these tips from Social Triggers in placing your opt-in forms.

 

#42 – You are not enabling your social buttons

Imagine this.

Your reader stumble upon one of your best writing and would love to let his/her friends know about it because it is extremely helpful.

He/She probably has like tens of thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends and Google+ connections.

But due to the reason that when he/she tries to share it right from your blog post which you don’t have the feature to let him do so, he/she gave up.

You probably drive 5% of his followers traffic and that’s like at least 500 views but you really screw it up because you don’t have anything for him to start with.

So, don’t make this mistake

FIX:

Install a social plugin to your blog.

Follow this guide if you need one.

 

#43 -You messed up your blog’s colour theme

Can’t comment any further if your site is made up of all the colours like the above.

Regardless of how good your content is, the colour theme above definitely drive me away from your site!

FIX:

If you are poor in matching colours like me, pick a good theme and stick to the colour theme.

Otherwise, match your colour properly.

 

#44 – You have cluttered designs

Sometimes, small business tend to cram all their services into a single page.

For instance, they will sell web hosting, content writing, SEO, CRM software and etc in a single page.

So, what should the visitor do? Nothing!

Because that is crazy and you give the visitor so much option that they don’t know where to go anymore.

Selling more doesn’t give you any plus point. I’m sure you heard of this saying, “Less is More”.

FIX:

Have one single page for one purpose.

Never ask for more than one thing in one page.

But you can ask for the same thing twice or more in a single page.

 

#45 – You blog on the wrong platform

I first started blogging on the Blogspot platform.

Apart from that, I have friends who wrote their own web application using HTML, PHP and CSS to blog.

All of us suck big time when we gain more blogging experience and start to demand for more.

The lessons I learned from blogging on the wrong platform are:

• Migration will be painful.
• SEO Optimization will be tough.
• Lack of control if it is hosted by 3rd party.

FIX:

Download and install WordPress into your web hosting.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platform used by most of the top internet marketers today.

 

#46 – You don’t host your own blog

Two things will happen if you don’t host your own blog.

First, you don’t get full control of it.

Second, if the person who host your blog decided to terminate you or terminate themselves, there goes your blog.

Backing up doesn’t make any sense at that time because if they are completely shut down, you can’t restore your content into the platform that don’t exists anymore.

FIX:

Get your own web hosting.

Backup your contents locally into your computer or cloud as well instead of just to your web hosting.

This will ensure that you can always restore your contents whenever you need it.

 

#47 – You over host your blog

I’m not trying to be your money manager here but you should not pay for what you don’t use.

If you just need 10 GB of storage space, then don’t pay anymore extra for 50GB or unlimited.

In this internet marketing field, you have more place that you can invest apart from a bigger web hosting space.

FIX:

Always start by purchasing the most basic package.

Until you had maximize or about to maximize the given usage, then plan for an upgrade.

 

#48 – You are hosting on a cheap web hosting

Cheap web hosting mostly fall into one or more of the below categories:

• Slow
• Inconsistent
• Unreliable
• Poor support
• Often give technical issue to you

At the end of the day, you spend your time fixing their problems rather than focusing into what you are really good at such as updating your blog.

So, why not get a reliable web hosting and sort all these problems out once and for all.

FIX:

Use the web hosting that top internet marketers are using such as Bluehost, Hostgator, Liquid Web, InMotion and etc.

On the side note, if you ever want to host on Hostgator, do check these reviews out first.

 

#49 – You don’t backup your blog

Many bloggers simply just don’t backup their blog.

There are two backups that should always be done.

1. Backup on your web hosting. This can be automated by most web hosting.
2. Backup locally on your computer or to your cloud hosting. This might need some manual job.

Backing up your blog is not a big job and it is a life saver when you really need that.

FIX:

Go to your web hosting and run a backup now.

Schedule a routine backup on a daily/weekly basis.

Download that backup file into your computer.

Set a repeating reminder on your calendar to download this backup file weekly/monthly.

 

#50 – You ignored updates

Whenever there is an update from your blog or WordPress plugin, there could be two possibilities:

1. A new feature
2. A vulnerability to fix.

If you are ignoring the update because of point #1, that is still fine because you might not need that.

But if it is because of point #2, then your blog might be at security risk.

You can’t ignore a security update because there is a reason why there is a patch for it.

Some security risks can harm your blog in the way that you cannot imagine such as completely remove all your contents away from your blog.

In fact, you should not even check whether it is a feature or security fix update because whenever there is an update, you should just update everything.

FIX:

Go to Dashboard -> Updates on your WordPress Admin area. 

Select all the possible update that you have and click on Update.

 

#51 – You have too many categories

The point of having categories is for you to be able to categorize things in an organized manner.

If you create a new category every time you publish a post, this is not categorizing things.

This makes your readers difficult to find related content on your blog.

FIX:

Plan your blog well by creating a maximum of 5-6 categories.

Stick to it and only create new one if necessary.

 

#52 – You don’t care about your site speed

Do you know that 40% of your visitors will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?

Don’t believe me, check this infographic out from KissMetrics.

A slow site means poor user experience and poor user experience leads to bad SEO.

This does not mean you need to load blazing fast but the important thing is, you can’t be that slow.

Visitors normally don’t have much patient when it comes to waiting.

FIX:

First, ensure your web hosting has no issue with site speed by subscribing to a reliable one like I mentioned in point #48.

Second, install cache plugin to speed up your WordPress site.

You can further speed up by using CSS Sprites.

 

#53 – You use cheap or free bad theme

I’m not saying that you have to pay for a Premium theme but there are lots of faulty themes out there which are free or some even you have to pay.

A good WordPress theme surely doesn’t come cheap but if you see it in long-term, it is always good to have one.

One thing about cheap or free theme is they don’t provide regular updates to support the latest version of WordPress where WordPress is a platform that consistently upgrading from time to time.

On the other hand, a good WordPress theme can give a better site loading speed.

FIX:

Use only the default WordPress theme. It might provide less feature but at least I am sure it is a theme that works.

Once you have the budget to upgrade, go for the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.

 

#54 – You don’t have a contact form

Don’t make it so difficult for your visitors to contact you.

Put up a form, let your visitors to fill up, and be notified via email.

Who knows they might just be contacting you for a sale or advertisement opportunity.

FIX:

Put up a contact form.

Avoid using complicated Captcha to ensure they don’t get annoyed trying to reach you.

 

#55 – You don’t use web traffic Analytics

Do you have any idea how many visitors visited your page daily?

No?

That is because you don’t have any analytics installed.

If you don’t track your traffic performance, then how you know that you are doing well or not?

Furthermore, one of the most popular analytics, the Google Analytics is free to use.

FIX: Sign up and setup your Google Analytics now.

 

#56 – Your blog tagline is ‘Just another blog’

The tagline above is the default WordPress tagline.

If you have this tagline, this means that you still have not configured your blog yet.

This is so embarrassing.

FIX: Go to Settings -> General, look for the Tagline field and change it.

 

#57 – You are still keeping the sample page

It is not a crime to show your readers the default sample page but is it useful?

Or it just shows that you are clumsy enough to forgot to remove that.

Since it is not useful, why keep it?

FIX: Go to Post -> All Post, look for your very first post and Trash it.

 

 

#58 – You are not storing your images locally

Have you been to sites where you see the phrase “Image is not available”?

That’s very common in the old days because web master tends to host their images externally to some image hosting company.

Storage is cheap today and most web hosting even provide you unlimited storage for a very low price.

So, why not host your own image to prevent yourself from losing the image?

FIX: Upload all your externally hosted images into your WordPress media.

 

#59 – You are not optimizing your images

A very big size image can harm your site speed if you are not needed to display such image quality.

This is because your site will take longer to load due to the file size is bigger.

As a result, if you don’t need the image to be this detail, scale it down to a smaller file size.

FIX: Install WP Smush.it plugin to optimize your image.

 

#60 – You are ignoring the security of your blog

WordPress might have constant upgrade to patch all their security flaws but some of it, are not part of their responsibilities.

Things like limiting number of login attempts, IP filtering and etc, they are value added feature which WordPress don’t provide by default.

Adding these features will enhance your security and this is how you do it easily.

FIX: Install iThemes Security plugin to enforce a stronger security of your blog.

 

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#61 – You are using the default username and password

If you are still using the default user ‘Administrator’ or ‘Admin’, then there is no need to hack your username anymore because they only left your password to crack.

In security best practice, it is always good to avoid such username and use something unique instead.

A username does not need to be complicated like a password but it has to be unique.

As for password, you really need a strong one with:

• Upper case and lower case
• Alphanumeric
• At least 11 characters long
• Mixture of symbols

FIX: Start with creating a new username and set a strong password for it. Delete the ‘Administrator’ or ‘Admin’ user account if possible.

 

#62 – Your blog is not mobile responsive

Do you have problem reading your own blog on a mobile phone?

Don’t blame the size of your mobile if you can’t.

Blame you for not making your blog responsive enough.

On top of that, mobile users tend to be more on weekends compared to weekdays.

Therefore, having a mobile responsive site is a necessity today.

FIX: Get a mobile responsive WordPress theme. Studiopress a bunch of them for you to choose.

 

#63 – You kept refreshing your web page statistics

Do you refresh your analytics every 5 minutes?

Does that make any difference?

You need to check your stats but you don’t need to do it on a minute basis.

That’s a big reduction in productivity.

FIX: Stop checking your analytics and limit yourself to only check it 2-3 everyday at most.

 

#64 – You never test your stuff

Often, I put up an opt-in plugin and it doesn’t work when I insert my own email address.

For some reason, I will make mistake somewhere but I’m glad that I test it before my visitors start reaching to me and complain about it.

You might not be a good tester but at least run some basic test to ensure that they are working fine.

FIX: Every time you activated a new plugin or widget, do a test by your own first. Make sure at least the basic usability works.

 

#65 – You install WordPress into a sub folder

When you first install WordPress into your web hosting, they will often recommend you to put it to “/wordpress” sub folder.

Don’t get trick by that.

This means that your blog home page will be “http://www.myblog.com/wordpress”.

That is not cool because you really don’t need the ‘wordpress’ to be there in the first place.

Even though you could use the .htaccess to rewrite it but that is too much of work.

Why not get it fixed in the first place?

FIX: When you first install your WordPress, don’t put it into a sub directory. Use the root directory for your installation.

 

#66 – You are still keeping all the unnecessary plugins

If you had tried all kind of site speed optimization techniques like caching, CSS sprites and etc, try this.

Take a road down to review all your WordPress plugins.

Identify whichever plugins that you are not using and remove them.

WordPress plugin is also another element to look at when optimizing your site speed.

FIX: Go to Plugins -> Installed Plugins and Delete the unused plugins. Note  that you need to first Deactivate them before you can delete them.

 

#67 – You have broken links

What is a broken link?

A broken link is a link from one of your articles linking to another site or page that does not exists anymore.

It can be the site owner no longer hosting their site or the content probably moved to a new URL.

So, find these broken links because broken leads to poor user experience and that leads to bad SEO.

FIX: Install the Broken Link Checker plugin and start monitoring your links.

 

#68 – You don’t have a sitemap

As mentioned here, a sitemap is the blueprint of your site or the structure of your site in another words.

This sitemap needs to be submitted to the Google Webmaster Tools so that Google will know what are the contents that you have on your site and index them.

Without that, it is very difficult to get your site indexed not only on Google, but most of the search engines.

FIX: Follow this guide to generate a sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tool.

 

#69 – You don’t do internal linking

By not doing internal linking, you are missing out two benefits.

First, is for a better SEO because even the link is internal, it counts as well.

Second, is or a better bounce rate because by internal linking, you are telling your visitors that you have something relevant to this content that they should check out.

You won’t run into trouble if you don’t do internal linking often but I’m sure the two great benefits above will be left out.

FIX:

Go back to the contents that you seldom link internally.

Mostly, the content that has less internal linking are the older content.

Review them and link them to your newer post.

 

#70 – You are indexing pages that shouldn’t

I remember when I first wrote an eBook for my first blog, I wanted it to be only available for my email subscribers.

So, I attached the eBook as a media in the WordPress blog.

Without realizing that the Google indexing is so good, my eBook is actually searchable through Google.

This means that by typing “Blog Name + ebook”, you can see my eBook link and when you click on it, you get to download it.

WITHOUT EVEN SUBSCRIBING TO MY MAILING LIST!

I was lucky to realize it within 24 hours and learn how to de-index that page from Google.

The lesson here is, there are times that you might not want to index all your pages.

Hence, watch for scenario like mine above.

FIX:

If you ever need to not index a page, configure it on your Robots.txt.

What you are configuring over there is to disallow web crawlers from crawling into that page.

And if the page is already indexed, use the Google Webmaster Tool’s URL Removal Tool and remove your URL away.

 

#71 – You are still posting with admin

This is another common mistake as well.

Since normally the first user in WordPress is ‘admin’, bloggers tend to use the default user straight away start writing and publishing.

They don’t realize that the default name is actually admin as well and until one day they find out themselves or somebody informed them.

It is kind of embarrassing as you are publishing the post but not your name credited for that post.

Hence, don’t make this silly mistake.

FIX:

Create a new user for yourself.

Use proper First Name, Last Name or even Nickname.

When you publish or preview your draft, double-check that proper name is being displayed.

 

#72 – You enforced a complicated forms

Have you gave up sending a form before?

I did and it was mainly because I was in an endless loop of solving Captcha.

The form wasn’t complicated at all where it only requires my name, email, and message that I wanted to bring to the webmaster.

However, the solving the Captcha is a nightmare.

It is super long and the worst of all, it is in thin italic (or rather cursive) writing that had given the best stress ever to my eye.

I gave up contacting the author and the next minute, I remove Captcha completely from my very own contact form.

FIX:

Don’t implement complicated Captcha.

If you really need to fight off spammers, follow this guide.

 

#73 – You enforced background music on your blog

I’m not gonna talk about site speed anymore because you probably will get bored with this phrase.

So let’s go back to user experience. (Hate me if you want for looping this but this is the fact)

Have you been to blogs that auto play music by default.

I have a habit of not muting my speakers but at the same time, I don’t play any music on my laptop.

Sometimes, the volume is max despite not playing any music or watching any movie.

I realize I have this habit when I visited some blogs that automatically play music by default and that freaks me off.

You know what’s the worst part of all?

I can’t turn it off!

I was like scanning the whole web page hoping that I can find the volume icon but I failed.

So, I leave that page and if there is anyway I can blacklist these sites from my computer, I would love to do that.

FIX:

There is no fixing here.

Just don’t implement any music on your blog.

 

#74 – You use pop-up ads

Placing ads on your blog can be a little annoying at times especially when it blocked certain part of your contents.

What make things worse is when you use pop-up ads where that completely block the entire content.

On top of that, you don’t really benefit in long-term from showing pop-up ads.

FIX: Just don’t use pop-up ads. That’s annoying. End of story.

 

#75 – You don’t use pop-up

I’m not hitting myself and not driving you into confusion here.

You shouldn’t use pop-up ads but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use pop-up at all.

If you are going to use pop-up, use it wisely and make sure it benefit in long-term such as collecting email subscribers.

Do you know that using pop-up to collect email subscribers can double to triple your sign up rate?

If you still have doubt with me, why not watch this video from Social Triggers regarding showing pop-up on your blog.

FIX:

Install pop-up plugin for your blog.

You can use Optin Monster, the plugin that I use for this blog for pop-up.

 

#76 – You have confusing navigation

I have seen blogs that gives too many navigation options at the top header.

They have like categories, tags, pages, posts, RSS, Social Media profiles and etc in a single foul.

Giving too many options on your site will only leave your user not knowing what to do further.

FIX:

Start off by removing all the navigations link.

Insert only what you think is necessary or important.

Remember not to remove your About page and Contact page from the navigation because they are extremely important.

 

#77 – You are using too many social sharing buttons

Social sharing button takes time to load.

This means that, if you have more social sharing buttons, the longer your site will take to completely load.

On top of that, you shouldn’t give your visitors too many options as mentioned above.

FIX: Limit yourself to only 3 social sharing buttons. Pick the top 3 social sharing platform that is popular in your niche.

 

#78 – You are still using blinking text

If your target audience is people from the 70’s, then keep up your blinking text.

Otherwise, take it down.

FIX: That’s pretty obvious. Take down your blinking text if you are still using it.

 

#79 – You are flooding your footer

I had seen bloggers who tend to show a lot of things in their footer.

It is like showing off how many pages you have on your blog, categories and social media profiles.

Well, somehow that doesn’t work so well I personally feel.

I prefer a clean design where you really get rid of these stuff completely.

On top of that, how often you go to a blog’s footer and start clicking all the links?

FIX:

Clean up your footer.

Avoid putting any widgets there because they will not do any good.

 

#80 – You enforced horizontal scrolling

Was that a new feature that I didn’t know of?

Up to now, I don’t see any benefit of having a horizontal scrolling.

Even though I know that by using shift + scroll, I can easily scroll horizontally but how many people know that without being told?

As a result, you are just reducing your user experience score by implementing horizontal scrolling.

FIX:

Ensure your pages fit into the page nicely without the need to scroll horizontally.

If it doesn’t contact your WordPress theme support to fix it.

 

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#81 – You are making your blog difficult to comment

Blog commenting increases engagement of your blog.

This means, it helps you build a good relationship between you and your readers.

That is why it is important that your readers are able to leave comment on your blog easily.

FIX: Don’t make it anymore difficult to comment. Captcha especially should be removed.

 

#82 – You automatically open a new window for internal links

I do automatically open a new window for external simply because I want them to know that they are still reading my blog while they are reading some materials that I linked out.

However, when you do it for internal link, it will start to get really annoying.

Since no matter where your readers go to internally, it is still your blog and there is no need to ‘automatically open a new window’ for that.

FIX: Stop automatically open a new window for all internal links.

 

#83 – You are using Flash Player for a blog

I’m not sure if you really need to use a flash player, but if you really need it, limit that.

Flash will take some resources from your visitor’s computer to fully functional and if your blog is purely about text content, you can avoid using flash completely.

FIX: Reduce or stop (even better) using Flash on your blog.

 

#84 – You have too many widgets on your sidebar

Your sidebar can be very useful only if you make full use of it.

By flooding your sidebar with tons of widgets, you ended up giving your visitors too many options and they don’t go for any of them.

Hence, limit the number of widgets and only place those that are really important.

FIX:

There’s a formula for sidebar which works quite well for me.

It is not invented by me but I borrowed this sidebar idea from Social Triggers again.

Check out the sidebar formula here.

 

#85 – You don’t promote your blog

I categorized blogging as part of internet marketing.

So, the word marketing is there and you can’t escape it.

By just writing great contents and hope that someone picks up your article and share it to go viral is just not going to really happen.

Even if it could happen, the percentage is very small.

As a result, if you are going to blog and especially making money out of it, you need to promote it.

FIX:

There are many ways to promote your blog such as SEO, blog commenting, social media and even word of mouth.

In fact, you can do all of the ways mentioned to promote.

 

#86 – You over promote your blog

On the other hand, you have jackass that simply just promote their blog wherever they go.

They promote when they go social media.

They kept promoting their stuff on their newsletter.

They go to other people’s blog  to leave comment and promote their blog & products.

Overall, they just keep promoting only until people get annoyed by them.

That’s not how you promote your blog.

The objective to promote your blog is to build trust and relationship.

With strong trust and relationship in place, it will be easy for you to sell things to them.

By just doing promoting itself, you are not going anywhere with your blog.

FIX:

If you are one of those jackass, reduce all your promotion thing.

Do it as often as only probably 20% of the time.

This means, if you tweet 5 times a day, only one tweet should be about promoting.

The rest is useful and educational stuff.

 

#87 – You are doing things alone

Blogging requires interaction with people.

You can’t just blog alone.

If whatever you write is all what you think is important, then the people who is interested in reading your blog is only yourself.

As mentioned, you need interaction and you need to know what your readers need.

Sometimes, reading comments from your readers give you some new writing idea that actually gives better attention.

FIX: 

Start talking to your readers either by email or blog comment.

Try to get what they really need or the problems that they are facing.

Research, find a solution, blog about it and tell them that you had found a solution for them.

 

#88 – You are not reading other people’s blog

You should always read another person’s blog especially you guys are in the similar niche.

Sometimes, they might have a better idea and you could use improvise that idea and make it even better than before.

Not only that, since you guys fall into the same niche, it is also safe to say that their readers will most probably have interest in your blog as well.

So commenting in their blogs with useful and helpful comment can demonstrate your domain expertise in that niche and you stand a good chance for their readers to read your blog as well.

FIX:

Go to Google now and type the “keyword + blog” of the niche that you are in.

Go to Feedly, and subscribe at least 20 of those blogs into your Feedly reader.

Everyday after you are done with your emails, go to your Feedly reader and start reading other people’s blog.

 

#89 – You ignored SEO

SEO can be tough and complicated to understand.

Optimizing SEO will be even tougher where some bloggers basically just drop this topic off their promotion strategy.

Dropping SEO is a big mistake and you shouldn’t do that just because of the complexity.

In fact, SEO is not a tough thing.

The only reason you are failing is because you tried too hard and you start performing black and grey hat SEO.

Once you take that path, your SEO effort will be killed by the Panda and Penguin algorithms and eventually gave up doing SEO.

FIX:

Don’t stress yourself too much in SEO.

Remember that SEO takes time.

First, ensure you had done a good job optimizing your on-page SEO.

Second, build quality links from high authority sites.

Don’t go for quantity unless you have a bunch of quality sites to link from.

 

#90 – You ignored Social Media as well

Social media is the next big thing after SEO in my personal opinion.

There are a lot of social media platform out there today but that doesn’t mean you need to focus into all of them.

You can always pick up to 3 popular ones in your niche.

In my opinion again, if you want early traffic to your blog, Social Media is the way to go because SEO takes longer time to see the result compared to Social Media.

So, never ignore this source of traffic.

FIX:

If you are new to Social Media, why not just pick one platform and become an expert in it instead of focusing into several platform.

Start following and engaging people within your niche to show your social media presence.

Once you start to get followers, then you can begin to promote your blog slowly.

 

#91 – You have no patient

In blogging, you really need patient.

Doesn’t mean you spent days crafting a post, you expect it to be popular.

Doesn’t mean you have a 10,000 words of post, it will go viral.

Doesn’t mean you tweet everyday, followers will click on your link that you are promoting.

Instead, give yourself some time on whatever that you are doing.

Don’t rush into the conclusion that everything just doesn’t work and gave up there.

FIX:

Don’t give up easily.

My first 3 months of blogging’s revenue is $0 but that is not what I look like 6 months after that.

So, be patient.

 

#92 – You sell links (especially dofollow links)

When your blog gets slightly more popular, you will have black hat link builders approaching you to buy links on your site.

They will probably tell you that they need to place a backlink with certain anchor text at one of your content page that score well in Page Rank & Page Authority.

But the ugly truth is, Google will eventually find out and when they do, your page or site, will probably be de-indexed and there goes all your organic traffic.

FIX:

Never sell links, especially when they requested it to be dofollow.

Google clearly says that it is forbidden to do so.

 

#93 – You don’t offer incentives for signing up

If you still have less than 10 subscribers in your email list after couple months, that is because your sign up is not attractive enough.

One of the best way to improve this is to offer freebies or incentives that only people who signed up for your email list will get it.

My personal favourite strategy is to write an eBook and give it out to people who subscribe to my email list.

I had done this twice on two different blogs and they worked so far.

FIX:

Think of an incentive to giveaway.

If you can’t, spend few days and write a good eBook and give it away to people who signed up for your email list.

Boost it further with pop-up opt-in box.

 

#94 – You don’t use meta tags

The meta tags actually tells the search engine how your site should look like on search engine listing.

By writing and displaying a good meta tags, you will tend to get a good Click Through Rate from the search engine listing.

FIX:

Review back your meta tags.

Ensure your headline is correctly written

Ensure as well your description has this Call-To-Action element in place such as:

• Check out this article on <benefit>.
• Find out more from this article on <benefit>.

 

#95 – You duplicate content from somewhere else

Duplicating contents probably works before the existence of Google Panda.

Today, every content that you duplicate will easily get caught and penalised by Google especially.

Detecting duplicate content is not a big issue anymore so don’t duplicate any content.

FIX: I can’t fix this. Just don’t do it.

 

#96 – You buy cheap articles

You pay for what you get.

If you want a well written articles, you have to pay for the price.

Cheap articles will mostly lead to low quality articles where Google Panda is getting better now in detecting low quality content.

FIX:

If you really want to do well in blogging, only produce high quality content.

There is no use even if you have a bunch of low quality articles.

Your readers want quality, not quantity.

 

#97 – You spin articles

Articles spinner is quite a popular too couple of years ago because they can turn a great content into another piece of great content with similar information but presenting as a unique content.

How this can be done?

It replaced words with synonyms, restructuring the sentence and making minor modifications so that search engine will not be able to match the spinned articles with the original one.

Does it work?

Well, I would rather invest my money into something more useful instead of subscribing to an article spinner.

On top of that, what do you want to do with the spinned content?

Post it to article directories? Build another smaller blog and build low quality links?

These grey hat SEO don’t work anymore and even if it works, it won’t last long.

FIX: Don’t waste your money buying an Article Spinner.

 

#98 – You don’t link out to others

As been said, you can’t do everything alone.

If you obtained certain good information as reference from somewhere, link it out.

This shows that your content is well researched.

If you want to learn more benefit of linking out, check this article out by Rand Fishkin on the benefits of linking out.

FIX: Link out to other sites. Don’t be afraid of losing visitors as visitors are leaving your site or losing PageRank juice or even losing in the search engine ranking game.

 

#99 – You focus too much on keyword density

No one care about keyword density in today’s SEO.

All the information such as 3% of your article should contain your keywords do not make real sense.

The thing that make sense here is to write as natural as possible so that human visitors love your article.

FIX:

Don’t write for search engine.

They don’t appreciate your work.

Humans do and therefore, write for them.

Throw away what you know about keyword density.

 

#100 – You don’t subscribe to this blog

I know I am being a dick here but let me continue this first.

You are making a big mistake for not subscribing to my mailing list because I deliver quality blogging tips to your email that you might had missed out by not subscribing earlier.

If you want to receive contents like what you are reading now, you know what you need to do.

FIX:

Obviously, subscribe to my mailing list.

I offer multiple ways to sign up. You can:

• Do it from my sidebar. It is the first widget on your right.
• Do it at the end of this post.
• Go to my Newsletter landing page.
• Go to my eBook landing page.
• Go to my home page and there is an opt-in box at the top-fold of the page.
• Clear your cookies and cache, then visit my site again. Wait for the pop-up to appear.

 

Conclusion

Congrats!

By knowing these 100 blogging mistakes, I’m sure you know by now what a successful blog is made of.

From time to time, if you ever feel there is anything missing from this list, feel free to add-on in the comment below.

And if you really find this article useful, I could use your help to share it out through Social Media!