If you are a person who has recently discovered blogging and planning to go seriously about blogging then you should definitely read this post. They say about acting that anyone can act. Similarly anyone can blog. All you need is the ability to write something about something in a coherent manner. So if you can write you can blog.
1. Not starting your professional blog on wordpress
Blogger is a great platform but only for beginners who don’t know anything about blogging. I started my first blog on blogger and the non technicality was great. Blogger is simple and there’s nothing much you can do with it or about it. But with wordpress its different. Amit agarwal of digital inspiration often says starting a blog on blogger was his greatest mistake. Shoutmeloud was born on blogger but then Harsh realised his mistake and migrated to wordpress. Every now and then bloggers light upon wordpress from blogger and realise what they wwere missing. What you are missing aare great seo optimized themes, the coolest plugins many of them free which have the potential of taking your blog to the next level, you are missing a great community, ability to design your blog and redesign it, detailed stats on all your pages and above google loves wordpress. The pain of migration from blogger to wordpress can sometimes be very bitter if you don’t do it right. Sometimes you lose all your existing traffic as it happened in the case of my friend.
Read What I learnt from 15 months as a blogger?
2. Not opting for custom domain
Have you heard the phrase ‘being penny wise and pound foolish’”. We all laugh at such nut cases but guess what, sometimes we end up doing it ourselves. You go for an additional .blogspot or . wordpress tail untill you get some traffic and then you decide to change to a custom domain. What happens is that yo lose a great deal of traffic from the loyal audience who had recognised you as the .blogspot guy. As an additional disadvantage you lose all the Facebook likes which you had painstakingly gathered one by one for your blog. Remember the first like which was not yours. painful. it costs as little as $5 per year
3. Free hosting has a limit
When your blog expands in number of daily visitors and page views and when you are incorporating data at a limit when your free host even it be blogger the great itself gets exasperated then boy its time to move out. If you had done it in the beginning you could have avoided the loss in visitors on the day you choose to migrate
3. Not having a plan
Not having a tangible well thought out plan can sometimes sound the death knell for your blog. Because if you don’t know where you are going then you’ll never get there. For no reason at all you will get depressed because you don’t know where you are heading and you do’n’t know what to expect from your blog. To set tangible goals entails in keeping realistic dreams and working towards them like getting into the top 10k of Technorati ranking, like achieving a page rank of 3 within 3 months, earning $5 per day with yu blog etc. You cannot break the one million dollar barrier within a month of blogging. It takes time and can only be done if you have patience and common sense.
4. Blogging only for money
Money is the driving force behind any blog. Passion doesn’t pay the hosting charges by the way. After studying many blogs I came to the realisation that many successful full time bloggers today started blogging without realising that money could be made out of it. They wrote their content for helping out people and not for search engines. After some months when they saw their huge success and crowd popularity they finally started monetizing it. Well knowing that we can money from blogging is not a bad thing but blogging only for money is bad for the longevity of your blog. Why? Because as soon as you start up on the blogger way you expest money and fame but blogging is so slow and shitty job that even before traffic came to you you may call it a quit.
5. No pictures on your blog
Initially when I blogged I seldom used pictures but when I went around watching other blogs I would go wow! The pictures they used on their blogs made perfect sense with their posts and their ingenuity amazed me. Later I too started blogging with picture, used alt tags with my pics which added to the seo benefit and somehow posts with pictures brought more traffic. You are not writing content for robots but for people. They are the ones who make or break you. When I write this post what I think is how it can help, how it can save you from the mistakes which hindered me and other bloggers from success.
6. Not building an e mail list
I cannot emphasize more upon the importance of building a list. Its a medium of earning for you and even if your blog goes under one day you would still earn if you had made a list starting from the first day of your blogging career. For those who don’t know a list is a collection of e mail addresses to whom you send e mails regarding your products. Many successful internet marketeers build their lists by giving away something for free when they ask someone’s e mail id. It can be an e book, plr products( e books which you can give to others for free), a marketing course anything which can be useful or related to your niche. Giving away something is the greatest marketing strategy used effectively since ages.
Mohammed Abdullah Khan
Hi George,
All the above mentioned things are MUST to have before someone becomes blogger and ofcourse Newbie should follow these steps to become a successful blogger.
As mentioned SEO does matter 🙂
George
thanks. You are the first commentator here
Holly Jahangiri
“If you have recently discovered blogging, and you are seriously planning to start blogging, yourself…” Sorry – I’m not trying to be mean. Your comment to Ammar – with it’s very kind compliment to me and my writing – brings up an interesting point I’ve noticed among bloggers and writers in general. When we critique others’ grammar (particularly in public), we tend to make more errors, ourselves! And I’m not immune to this, either. It’s the old, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to be helpful, on that score, behind the scenes.
1.) You can actually do quite a bit with Blogger, but in trying to simplify (dare I say, “idiot-proof”?) the interface, they make it a bit harder to customize it than it really needs to be. And being a free platform, you’re a bit limited in how and where you can store your own images. You can schedule posts, but that feature is a bit buggy. It supports multi-author blogs, widgets are plentiful and easy to install, and I know a number of pros who do use Blogger (as it allows commercial use, unlike WordPress.com). Unfortunately, this also means it’s plagued with spammers and sploggers. It doesn’t LOOK as reliable and reputable as a solid WordPress blog hosted by the blogger on his own domain (though even that can be done – Blogger, owned by Google, can be set to use your own domain).
2.) Having your own domain is like…having a house, rather than renting an apartment. Doing business from a store, rather than a P.O. box. I’d agree that it’s a nice, professional touch. It probably matters more to your fellow bloggers than to the average customer, though. (Not sure about that – everyone’s getting more web savvy these days.)
3.) Paid hosting has limits, too – especially for the blogger who can only afford a very basic, shared hosting plan. And it helps to understand the terminology and the limits before committing to any contracts.
4.) Having a plan – having GOALS, too – is really crucial for any undertaking. Otherwise, you might just be happily wandering around in circles. (Hang on… oh, you’re tricky – you have TWO #3’s in this post!!!)
5.) You write, “Money is the driving force behind any blog.” That is simply NOT TRUE. And I think it’s important for business bloggers to realize this: Blogging was around long before the “monetized” or “business” blog. It may outlast blogging as any sort of business model, frankly. Ask yourself: Who are my customers? If the answer to that is, “Bloggers who want to make money blogging,” then find – insulate and isolate yourself and ignore the bloggers who are NOT in it strictly for the bottom line. But if your customer base is broader than that, don’t discount the personal bloggers who are not primarily out to make a buck on a blog.
ON THE OTHER HAND… as I read on (and it took me two readings to get over that assertion and get that out of my system!), I see that you and I actually agree. 🙂 Sorry. Blogging ONLY for money is not the way to success.
6.) Pictures are so problematic. I don’t trust most sources of “free images” and so I not only have to write my blog, I have to create images for it or hunt down safe sources. I take my own photos, do my own graphics, or seek out “Creative Commons” licenses that are sufficient to my purposes. I no longer trust “free” unless I know I’m getting it directly from the person who made it.
Regarding ALT= tags, keep in mind that these are meant to assist the visually impaired. Do not stuff them full of keywords, but rather use them to describe, in words, what the picture shows.
7.) Okay, so say I’ve built my email list. Now what? (Okay, so maybe I do know “Now what,” but for all the talk of list-building, there’s precious little written about what to do with that list once you’ve built it up. Given the level of marketing expertise in your apparent target audience, I think “now what?” is a fair question, and a good idea for a next blog post, don’t you?
George
Hi thanks for the comment. Its almost like a post in itself, but forgive me i did not understand what wrong did I do? I heard from Abhi that you were his mentor on grammar. I was only trying to help and not criticize. Is my post wrong or my comment wrong?
George
Hi. Because of so much content that you wrote I did not understand what you were trying to say. Thank you for correcting me. I will never do that again. I have also written an apology to Ammar.
Holly Jahangiri
🙂
Not such a terrible thing, really. But we all make mistakes–even me, and I earn my living writing! Just illustrating a point. Glad you got it, despite my wordiness–another flaw on my part!
I think it’s great to have some disagreement on the content of a post, sometimes; after all, without a little quibble here and there, there’s not much room for conversation after the first, “great post!” comment! I hope you didn’t mind mine. This is a good post. Just offering additional points for consideration.
As for the grammar, it’s like telling a woman her slip is showing or a man that his fly is unzipped – best done in private so that it can be fixed before 500 other people see it. 🙂