Starting a new blog can at times seem a little daunting. Unlike working freelance for others, financial reward is certainly not guaranteed and you could find that regardless of how many hours you put in, you may not see any reward for your efforts. As new blogs continue to be created on an hourly basis, not all of them go on to become successful and many are left at the wayside without rank or traffic let alone income. Although success is never guaranteed, the chances of it are greatly increased provided you avoid a few key mistakes that almost certainly spell doom for any new blog.
1) Poor Content
It often surprises me how many people post rubbish on their blog and are then shocked to see it fail. Successful blogs have high quality and unique content. Your blog posts should be grammatically correct, they should not be copied or spun and they should tell the reader something interesting. It does not matter how good you are at marketing, SEO or design, people visit blogs to read interesting posts. If you don\’t have anything interesting to say or you cannot take the time to write grammatically correct and unique content, you sadly have no future as a blogger.
2) Lack of Definition
It may sound pretty obvious but before you start a blog, you need to decide what your blog is going to be about. The topic needs to be carefully defined, you need to illustrate this definition in both your design and marketing and you then need to stick to that definition. Many bloggers start out writing about one thing and then happily move from topic to topic with little forethought. Doing so makes it almost impossible for your blog to be successful. How can you hope to gain repeat readers when nobody has a clue what topic you are going to post about next?
3) Difficult Navigation
When visitors arrive at your blog, you should make it as easy as possible for them to read more than the posts on your home page. Many new blogs are difficult to navigate and this leads to new visitors just reading the first post and then clicking the back button. Remember that it doesn\’t matter how good your content is if your readers cannot find it. Your homepage should contain easily identifiable links to both your latest and most popular posts. You need to encourage new visitors to read your other posts, if you do not, why would they ever bother to return to your blog?
4) Lack of Even Basic SEO
You do not need to be an SEO expert to run a successful blog however neglecting basic SEO guidelines will always leave you a step behind your competition in terms of Google ranking. Basic SEO guidelines can easily be researched and understood within a matter of days and neglecting to do so greatly increases the chance that your blog will remain at the back of the search engines never to be seen again. Excellent content is indeed key but you also need people to be able to find it in Google. This is where SEO comes in.
5) No Social Media Buttons
One of the easiest ways to increase the number of repeat readers to a new blog is to get existing readers to recommend it to others. While for many bloggers, Facebook and Twitter marketing may be a little bit beyond them, there is no excuse for not incorporating simple share buttons into your blog. Such buttons are available as WordPress plug ins and allow your readers to share what you post with their friends with a single click of the mouse. You are greatly hindering your chances of blog success if you fail to incorporate them.
6) Too Few Updates
Finally, there is the timeliness of updates. Even if you start off your blog with fifty posts, you need to continually add new content if you want your blog to get and remain popular. This can of course be easy when you first start a new blog but after a few weeks, perhaps you start to get bored and move onto something else. Successful blogs have new content at least on a weekly basis and it is the anticipation of this content that brings repeat visitors.
Guest blogger, Althaf Ahmed, maintains his own blog at http://www.socialhacks.com