Brian at Copyblogger has a nice post over at his blog titled Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Blog? in which he unpacks some common mistakes of bloggers and gives some ‘prescriptions’. His mistakes (he writes more under each):
5. Do you write for search engines instead of people?
4. Are you doing what everyone else is doing with their blog in your niche?
3. Do you agonize over writing a great post, only to slap on some hastily-concocted post title that all but guarantees hardly anyone will read?
2. Do you hope to make money with your blog, and yet rattle on excessively about your personal life, your dog, your goldfish, and your recent appendectomy?
1. Do you use user-unfriendly RSS options that you bury at the bottom of the page, and leave out an email subscription option altogether?
The post reminds me a little of mine on 10 Steps to Guarantee You’ll Never Make more than 0.14 cents per month with AdSense.
Talking about making 0.14 cents; I wish I could make 1.14 dollars in a month never mind six figure blogging amounts :)
I was disappointed that I wasn’t really making any of the mistakes he was talking about, but the cool thing was that his “prescriptions” (links to other articles) were great and useful for anyone.
Thanks for the new blog to read also, Darren.:)
“Do you hope to make money with your blog, and yet rattle on excessively about your personal life, your dog, your goldfish, and your recent appendectomy?”
I feel that this should have come in the no 1 position. Many people make this mistake and dream that their post about their dog will become the next biggest hit.
Razib, I debated the positioning of that one. Ironically, that’s the one that seems to rile people up as well… people love to talk about themselves, it seems!
Do you write for search engines instead of people? – This is truth, i see two many articles “generated” for SE, so when i read them it’s something like beta read!