It’s time for a reader discussion/open thread and today’s question is:
What is the Biggest Mistake That You’ve Made as a Blogger?
What in your time as a blogger do you look back on with regret, wish you’d not done or wish you’d done differently?
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Being a teenage blogger, I think it would have to be leaving a supposedly anonymous blog unattended on the computer monitor, for so long, that my parents eventually found it! Blogging hasn’t been the same since!
I just started out so I’m going to follow this topic very closely to find out what I have to be careful about and what to look out for. I guess there are always mistakes you have to make yourself before you understand the meaning of them, but a little education at this subject couldn’t hurt :)
1. Started blogging without a plan. I just jumped in and did it. While I admire my own dedicated and motivation, I regret having not wrote a plan. That’s why I took a couple months out, so I could start over (albeit with an established readerbase) but this time with a plan on paper.
2. Launching my blog and forgetting to add stat tracking code. I missed out on Google Analytics stats from my first 24 hours of blogging.
Hmmm, actually I would have to say not learning enough about it at first. I didn’t realize just how powerful WordPress could be until just recently. I love it, with the proper plug-ins etc.. But, we keep learning right.
Cheers
Davin
Waiting and watching other blogs instead of just starting my own.
Oddly, I think I spent too much time reading articles written by people on how to blog or manage a blog or make money blogging that were written by people who didn’t know how to blog, couldn’t manage a blog, and didn’t make money by blogging!
It’s a curse. One that I try to steer away from, but it keeps drawing me back! I guess, though a blogger grows up with his readers, too.
Kenneth
In a word: PayPerPost
Lack of consistency in my publish schedule. Not engaging the community enough.
Publishing regularly and participating is how I get traffic to my site. All the stuff I wrote before I did these things, as quality as it may have been, kind of fell by the wayside.
Another way of thinking of: if I want a return on my time investment, there’s a minimal amount of effort needed to keep (and hopefully grow) my readership. If I fall under it then blogging is no longer an effective use of my time. I wasn’t aware of that before…or at least I didn’t realize what the bar was.
The biggest mistake I made was choosing a website topic that I know little about. 2 Years back I created a website for GPS Systems (back then weren’t too may websites on GPS technology), at that time I didn’t know anything about GPS! I was hoping to learn the subject matter and add content to my website. But soon I lost interest on my website.
I think one should always go with a topic they know well. Otherwise you will run out of ideas to add new content. Also you have to spend a lot of time researching and learning the unknown.
Now I have just started a new blog (that provides tips and techniques on how to make your website successful). Even though I am not an expert on all areas of website development, I certainly know a lot on this area since it’s is part of my profession.
Therefore if you going to create a new blog, start with a subject matter in which you have some level of expertise.
My blog name is a bit … different. So I wish I had a more traditional name. It’s definitely memorable but I feel kind of weird saying it to potential advertisers and the like.
Still learning to make this a habit – producing great content instead of “learning” the blogging trade. If I spent as much time WRITING on my blog instead of researching SEO, StumbleUpon, design techniques, and the best WordPress plugins, I’d have weeks worth of content backed up for the future.
Learning that stuff is important, for sure, but what good is it if there’s no great content to submit to said blog?
Have not made a mistake yet..:)
The best thing I have done is find Problogger last year. Sort of got an inspiration to blog from him!
Heads up, not to make a mistake!
Worpress 2.5 may not be to the liking of some bloggers. Some people like basic is good, same like KISS! I am still on Win XP. If you are thinking of doing 2.5 upgrade, first backup your WordPress directory, if you have not done it yet, which you should be doing on regular bases, because of the widgets you upgrade. If you have a backup and do not like 2.5 you can reinstal the ol version. Oh, back up your database, which you should be doing often as well. ;-)
Bad choose of permalinks
Later is difficult to change without lost your old position in searchengines listings
I forget…
Other big mistake: not test my new design in all web navigators. i made a design that working good in firefox but not working in internet explorer
I made a LOT of mistakes with The Office Diet … and I thought I’d done my preparation before launching it.
Probably my biggest error was not using or understanding social bookmarking sites before I began.
Though, not installing Google Analytics until a month in probably ranks pretty highly. As does thinking than Jan 1st would be a good launch time for a diet-themed blog because “lots of people will be searching for ‘diet’ then” … it took me a while to accept the hard facts about search engine rankings!
Ali
Just .htaccess 301 redirect them. If you need help with the syntax, go visit Webmasterworld.
My first WordPress theme was a disaster. It was the dang twitter bird eating a branch or something. I changed it and my stickiness doubled.
Go figure.
Well there are many mistakes happened over the time.
The first one changing the name of blog thrice.
Changing labels for many posts has given hell out of web master curling problems with robots.txt.
I wish I had sold my web design related blog for more money. Looking back now, I let it go at a ridiculously low price considering the amount of effort I put into it.
I’ve made the PayPerPost and TLA mistakes that hurt my PR, but the biggest mistake I made was letting my blog on inactive for a week. Granted I had some unexpected surprises come up and couldn’t get some future posting done. But of all the things I’ve done that was the worst. It killed my traffic and my SERP’s. I fell off the 1st page in Google for some of my best keywords.
I own my domain, but it wasn’t showing up in Technorati, so I switched back to a Typepad subdomain. Really stupid, and now I’m stuck with it for fear of losing traffic.
Being accepted to do a guest post for a huge blog in my niche and not doing a superb job with that post. I didn’t include Gimp as an alternative because I had tried it out when it was new and hadn’t looked at it since. I should have tried it out again to see what improvements had been made. The Gimp fanbase really ripped my article to shreds. They had every right to.
Don’t ever criticize another blogger’s view point. You won’t believe the blog gangs that are out there.
Named my domain wrong. My blog’s name and its URL and completely different.
Try to spread myself too thinly over too many projects rather than just concentrating on the one.
Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up.
I found that once I started concentrating on the one objective it started coming to me much more naturally and it was a lot easier to do. Then taking on a second project was a little easier.
I think my biggest mistake would be not believing in my own abilities to produce content based on the knowledge i had already gained through study and practise…
The problem is with the assumption that everybody who wants to start a blog has the same knowledge and skills of the subject as i have but of course they don’t do they ?
Never take what you have already learnt for granted and never ever presume that everybody else has the same skills as yourself because they don’t!
John
I have only been blogging (writing) for about 3/4 of a year so I may not really know what mistakes I am making.
Probably the biggest is not starting sooner as I really enjoy what I am doing.
There are 2 other items that trouble me a little and one is not migrating to wordpress at the start. I now wonder if it will be difficult to have people follow to a new site as there is a fara amount of traffic through searches.
The other is my title, but not really sure it matters.
I don’t monitize my blog as I like the fact that my blog remains somewhat pure in my intentions to share my knowledge and passion.
Only the future will really tell..
Niels Henriksen
Wow! great input! The biggest things I focus on is consistency of updating. I try to post something everyday and I update twitter at least once a day. Be true to what interests you – I think when I started I tried too hard to write what I THOUGHT people wanted to read versus just writing what I thought was interesting.
A pervious reader mentioned that the big mistake he mad was “bad choice of permalinks” and he is unable to change them now.
But in fact there are plug-ins that will allow you to switch to new permalink format and get the old URLs re-directed to the new format. “Deans permalink plugin” is one of such plug-in. If you Google it, you can easily find it.
Using the Blogger platform for my first blog http://www,mytechopinion.com. I have since moved to WordPress using the Maintain Permalinks Plugin.
Not fully thinking through my blog identity (including URL) first. I started out with a blog not linked to my company web site. Made branding difficult – as in when do I link to my business site vs the blog?
I recently moved the blog to my main business URL. Life is much easier now, lol. I definitely made the right decision this time around, but I’ve of course lost a bit of subscribers and 6 months worth of links back to my blog, etc.
Definitely think hard about your URL first – it hurts to loose out on all your old traffic if you end up switching down the line.
Started my blog in 2001, and went strong for about 2 years with it. However, while I was in the perfect position to take advantage of the massive blog growth in 2003-2006, I let my domain sit unused with just a splash page.
If I would of kept on blogging, I could of been at a level where I may have been an authority in my niche. I realize this now, and I am playing catch-up. Luckily the search engines treat me well due to my domain age.
So my recommendation is always stay consistant, and your efforts will pay off! Post regularly, and just know in time it will all be worth it.
my biggest mistake was definitely not starting my own blog sooner.
I’d say my biggest mistake was trying to blog in too many places at one time.
That detracted from my blogging regularly on my main blog.
didn’t map my domain when i was using typepad. When I moved to WordPress (hosted), I lost alot of permalinks.
Also images.
In terms of actual blogging, personally I don’t feel like I’ve made mistakes yet. Then again, I’m not really ‘pro’, financially, so maybe I’m still making them….
Fantastic topic.
1) No nofollow tags in my sitewide outbound links, i.e to Amazon, etc for about a year.
2) Lived in a bubble and did not blog/post/comment anywhere else.
3) Ignoring some of the social media like twitter, etc.
My biggest mistake was actually small when compared to most.
I didn’t add photos to complement the post.
When I started adding photos, lots more people visited and stayed.
I have one blog where I post my newsletters that doesn’t include pictures, but the rest do. It’s made a big difference.
I was expecting a large amount of hits on a particular day, and instead of putting my blog down and creating a temporary page, i left it open and i exceeded my bandwidth.
My site was then down for three days. Those three days were the most important days of the year for my site to be up.
At least i know for next year!
I’ve certainly made mistakes myself. I’m very new at this so I’m still making them, and fully expect to make more. I hope they don’t hurt me too much, but the way i see it, mistakes are part of the journey.
In my mind though, I’m still forming my blog and have not attracted much of a following yet. So far, by best day is 20 views after all.
Mistake 1: Not having a plan or purpose. My purpose now is even a little vague, but it’s there.
Mistake 2: Starting with blogger.com. It’s great for a beginner, but lacks a lot of great tools. That said, I haven’t cracked but a small percentage of what wordpress can do.
Mistake 3: My blog title. Can’t seem to focus on one.
My biggest mistake was getting involved in an argument with one of my readers. That is, someone commented on one of my posts, I responded, and an argument ensued…for about forty exchanges, like the old UseNet.
If you feel that someone’s comments have the potential to cause controversy–and therefore take the focus away from your productive efforts–take it offline immediately.
I’ll discuss anything you’d like, endlessly…but offline!
Best regards,
Skip Lombardi
My biggest mistake was not defining my audience and my voice, so my first blog was all over the place.
Now I have an audience a voice and I stick with what I know.
Lee Rodrigues
Technology Coach
1. Same as Jared: Lack of consistency in my publishing schedule. I’m not a creature of habit. I hate schedules, hate deadlines – that’s why I work for myself. While I don’t believe that you really have to publish consistently 4-6 days a week either, I still would like to be more consistent than I am.
2. Not engaging the A-listers. I know that’s going to sound controversial, and people will argue with me about it, but it’s true. I have a couple of the longest-running blogs on my topics, great content (so I’m told), pretty good reader engagement. But my blogs haven’t been as “famous” as it seems like they “should” be. I think the reason is because I didn’t do more to engage the A-list bloggers in the space.
Now, that could be pure conjecture, except that I tested it. Went to SXSW, hung out in the Blogger’s Lounge, the b5media ranch, got on Twitter and started chatting it up with the Twitterati, and next thing you know, both of my blogs are on Alltop, my Technorati inbound links make a huge jump, I’ve got A-listers lined up for interviews, people I’ve never heard of are following me on Twitter and commenting on my blog, etc.
I’m not faulting the A-listers at all — just saying that this is a fact of life in the blogosphere that nobody really seems to want to admit to.
Ironically, I’ve always coached my clients to do this — I think I was just so arrogant I didn’t think I needed to do it myself. :-)
Commenting would be my answer.
Not working hard enough.
OH I guess I have to explain why.
Because all other errors can be fixed in blogging. You can get a new domain etc, but you cant delete comments.
Not securing one of my blogs sufficiently.
About 2 weeks ago, one of them got hacked and I ended up with an encrypted file dropped into the root of my server with thousands of porn links. Google indexed the lot before I noticed and was sending over 10,000 people a day that were looking for some really depraved stuff.
Luckily, a few quick emails to Google seems to be rectifying the matter, although a few are even now still coming through.
This caused me a major headache for about 7 or 8 days, and I’m still having to keep an eye on it.
Lesson learned? You bet. Apply the patches. Look at your server regularly looking for anything that shouldn’t be there. And make sure you secure your blog with the correct file permissions etc.
You really don’t want to go through what I’ve gone through over the past couple of weeks!
Mark
Something I didn’t do. I’m not which “something” it would have been exactly, but I’ve had plenty of ideas for things to do with my blog. No doubt there was at least one of them that I should have done.
I made a lot of mistakes. At first , i didn’t know much about Feeds and so didn’t consider it important at first. I also didnt give much thought about my blog design too.
My biggest mistake was probably starting my blog without a solid plan for going forward. My second biggest mistake is my blog covers a very large topic that I probably should have narrowed down to a niche. Oh well, live and learn, right?
I once changed my link structure in WordPress, forgot to change the htaccess file… SOOO many links weren’t working, it was total chaos. Google also got lost trying to index those old links… yikes~!~
Yeah… that was bad… very bad. *=O