5 Blogging Mistakes that Make You Look Dumb

Dumb might be putting it strong, but these mistakes can leave readers the impression you’re an amateur, not a seasoned professional. Worse, readers might click back the minute they land on your blog, making your hard work meaningless.

Blogging Mistake Number One: You use a free blogging platform instead of owning your domain.

There are exceptions, but in general, you’ll be taken more seriously if you’ve made the tiny investment of buying a domain and paying for hosting. It can cost less than $100 a year to host your own blog and you’ll have a ton more options for customization and features.

Many beginners tell me that they want to start with a free option like Blogger first to make sure they will stick with it before spending any money. I understand that reasoning, but be aware that if you change your mind later, it can be tricky and time-consuming to migrate your blog to self-hosted.

Blogging Mistake Number Two: You write impenetrable walls of text.

When writing for the web, white space is your friend. It’s not enough to throw your words on the screen, you must use intelligent formatting and spacing to make it easy for your readers to scan and digest your copy.

Subheads, bullet points and judicious use of bolding are important tools in our writer’s bag of tricks. Used well, they can help your reader comprehend and retain the information presented.

This doesn’t mean you should only write short blog posts; a well-organized 2,000 word post is easier to read than 500 words smashed together. Use as many words as you need make your point, but be ruthless in editing the rambling and make wise use of formatting to keep flow in the copy.

Remember – readers scan first to see if the post is worth reading and if they can’t easily pick out the points of the post, more often than not, they’ll look for something else to read.

Blogging Mistake Number Three: You don’t ask yourself “who cares?”

I’ll never forget the person who sent me a guest post titled “10 Things About Me” including fascinating tidbits like “I love coffee!” If I or my readers were friends of hers, sure, we’d care (well, maybe not about the coffee) but I can’t see a reader landing on that post and thinking “Wow, I must know more about this dog person who doesn’t have anything against cats, she just likes dogs better!”

Good bloggers know that almost any subject can be made compelling if you can think of the right angle. You can’t just throw any story out there and expect people to care without making the effort to tie it in to your niche or theme, particularly if you are relatively unknown to your audience and haven’t established a rapport.

Blogging Mistake Number Four: You don’t make it easy for your audience to communicate with you.

There are a lot of little mistakes that fall under this umbrella:

• Not placing links to your feed, Twitter profile and/or Facebook fan page and newsletter sign up in a prominent, easy to find place.

• No “contact us” link to find your email address or contact form (we recently made this mistake at GWD after a site redesign. Ouch.)

• You don’t want to go overboard with the social media buttons, but a couple of well placed buttons for Twitter and Facebook make it easy for your audience to share your posts.

• Readers have to make an account or fill out a captcha to comment. Akismet will take care of most spam, so requiring registration or captchas is going overboard.

Blogging Mistake Number Five: You Refuse to Care About SEO.

Done right, SEO helps your readers as much as it helps you. It is not about writing for machines, it’s about making sure that your material can be easily found by those who need the information. You put a lot of effort into your writing, why not make it easy to find?

Clear, focused writing is the backbone of SEO. I’ve found that many good writers naturally produce articles that have the perfect keyword density and placement. Other simple tweaks bloggers can make include:

• Installing a plugin like All in One SEO Pack for WordPress to make SEO friendly links and meta descriptions.

• Choosing a theme or site design that incorporates SEO-friendly features.

• Learning how to use anchor text when linking and capitalizing on every opportunity to use internal links.

• Making an effort to build high quality back-links to your blog.

For most bloggers, SEO is merely making the extra effort to do the things they would normally to promote their blog and give their readers a good experience in a way that also makes it easy for search engines to parse their sites. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Are you making any of these blogging mistakes? Do you have any to add to the list? Please share in comments!

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Tracy O’Connor is a phenomenal ghostwriter and potty training specialist. You can (and should) follow her on Twitter.