After several long months of blogging with steadily increasing results, I’ve encountered some bumps along the road. I thought I’d post some mistakes that I now regret and am working to rectify in my quest to improve this blog. Save yourself some pain and frustration: avoid doing these things; I wish I had!

1. I got caught up in the technology at the expense of content. After you’ve chosen your blogging platform, there are hundreds if not thousands of cool blogging plug-ins, themes, and templates you can use to display anything from stock quotes to the weather in your sidebar. I’ll admit I got a bit too fond of a NetFlix plug-in that showed the movie I currently had rented. Then I discovered it was slowing down the loading of every page considerably.

Anyhow, I’ve probably spent too much time playing with these plug-ins and getting them to work and not enough time working on what readers really care about: the writing and the content.

The core of a blog is the written content. Ultimately, all the networking and promotion (which I’ll discuss later) is for one purpose: to get people to come to your blog and read it. So it’s critical to have something worth reading at the center of everything. Sounds obvious, but I’ve spent a lot of time obsessing over all the “other stuff” and not concentrating on quality writing.

2. I assumed: “build it and they will come” and forgot about the network. Once you get everything together and have written a few posts, it takes promotion and active participation in the community to get an audience. It’s not so simple as letting your blog get indexed by Google and suddenly you’ll have thousands of hits every day.

So learn about pings, learn about the blog aggregators, and read other people’s blogs based around the subjects you’re working on, and comment on them. Add a link to your blog in your email signature. Find forums based on your blogging subjects and become a valuable presence (this means don’t just post a link to your blog and leave!). Lastly, it doesn’t hurt to tell everyone in the real world about your blog.

All of this takes effort and is as important if not more than the content.

3. I’ve shot from the hip and asked questions later. I’ve fired off a few posts where I didn’t do enough fact-checking. I’d recommend not doing this for obvious reasons. Every post you make is worth reading over a few times and checking for accuracy, since that’s what you hope your readers will do. If you’re not sure about a factoid, do the research. Link to your source in the process. And if you’re still not sure, admit as such in the post.

4. I’ve posted on several subjects at once. Keeping a post limited to just one topic sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. Some of my earlier posts are fragmented into several subjects. These posts are hard to categorize and I think it leaves the reader with the impression that you’re unorganized or don’t have anything worthy to say about any one subject.

5. I’ve written generic, meaningless headlines. When I first started this blog I had posts with headlines along the lines of “Thursday” “Another Boring Monday” and the like, which in retrospect was really dumb. Headlines are very important since usually that’s all of your post that shows up in the blog aggregators. If the headline looks stupid and doesn’t say anything about the content of the post, nobody clicks on the link.

6. I’ve ignored or devalued my comments. It’s very likely that a fair number of comments on your blog will be of a negative or critical nature. After the initial instinct to blast these comments into the ether, I realized every comment meant someone actually took the time to consider my post. Which is good. Ultimately, each critical comment is an opportunity for you become a better writer and a better blogger.

A big advantage of blogging is the back and forth with readers, which isn’t possible in traditional print media. I’m now looking at comments as a check and balance to keep me honest and continually improving the content. You may also find interesting things other people have written about your post which again, is an opportunity to reconsider your point of view and improve your writing.

7. I’ve spread myself too thin. I’m starting to wonder if my attempt to cover technology, movies, music, and bottle caps is too many subjects for one blog. I might have had better luck with three or four separate blogs instead of one.

8. I assumed it would be relatively easy. I’m having to put real effort and man-hours into organizing my thoughts and even have come up with a schedule as to what I’m writing and when I’ll publish the posts. Plus the networking, reading, and commenting on other blogs takes time. I’m still enjoying it, but it’s certainly not a half an hour a day thing anymore.

9. I chose the main URL of my blog poorly. I installed this blog in a directory named “wordpress” since at the time I didn’t know any better. Now that it’s getting more traffic hits and is fully indexed by Google, I’m loathe to change the directory name to something more appropriate and destroy my permalink structure. Ugh.

10. I thought I knew enough about blogs. Although I have several years’ web experience I’m finding there’s so much I still have to learn. The whole world of SEO was new to me (here’s some resources in this area: SEOMoz, SEOBook, suggested by reader Dave). Same with all the strategies regarding Google Adsense and PageRank. There’s a whole grey area of information with advice that one can spend years coming through. And it’s constantly changing.

Anyhow, I’m still working hard on this blog and I hope some of these tips will guide others in a general direction of blog-nirvana. It’s a whole lot of fun and although at times I question my amount of effort with little return, I’m still at it.

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