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.
Easy. I started way to late. I was online as of februari 1996 and I did not do anything at all ’till 2004! I then fooled around for about 3 years thinking every traffic would just be overwhelming for now particular reason *lol*
Only started getting serious like 6 months ago…
Now.. I’m starting to get the hang of it though… ;)
Started blogging 4 years ago, jumped around on LiveJournal, then blogger, then dropped those to run my blog on a company platform, a year into it the company switched platforms, started over then left the company and now finally have my own blog.
So basically my biggest mistake was not starting on my own hosted platform and sticking with it. Years of wasted content and link building.
@David Villarreal: just use a plugin like Dean’s Permalinks Migration.
My worst mistake was not starting blogging 5 or 6 years ago. I just started last year, and I don’t know how I used to learn and live before :-)
I always have that feeling of being in a hurry, you know.. but it’s not too late ;-)
Used year, day, and month in my permalink structure…
Too much time off!
I skipped a bit more than a full week while I finished my senior thesis and attended a family function – my traffic tanked, and I wasted a major traffic-spike from a repost on a major site.
I was pressuring myself to do more full-size, in-depth content when I should have just focused on staying active, even if that just meant short, fresh posts.
Not buying my own domain/address before someone else snapped it up.
Now I’m afraid to switch from Blogger because I’ll lose all my links.
My biggest mistake was posting about a feature I thought Google had included in Gmail that made it to the front page of Digg (it turned out to be a Firefox extension that had updated).
I was so embarrassed by the blog (and my lack of research) that I lost all desire to post there…even though it was making me money.
Whether its one or two mistakes, I’ll let you decide, although I have started other (more successful) blogs, but have kept the other one up as a monument to my failure and the reason why researching posts is a good thing. :-(
Not promoting enough.
Relying on someone else to make changes to the design, etc., instead of just learning to do it myself from the beginning.
Not having my own template designed.
Publishing a whole flurry of content in a short amount of time rather than using the slow-and-steady method. At the time, I wanted to get the content out there, but now I wish I had spaced it out a bit more.
For the first three years, I didn’t utilize stat trackers, social bookmarkers, blog comments, anything. This worked fine because I wasn’t looking for money or traffic. I just wanted an easily accessible space to showcase my work.
Today, I’ve changed my blogs niche, and am quickly trying to establish a presence in the blogosphere. Had I thought ahead three years ago, who knows where or what my blog would be!
Choosing wide topics rather than focusing on niches, and also switching niche midway.
Lacking focus. My first blog was well written and engaging based on the comments I received, but I was blogging about everything I was interested in, and finding it really difficult to identify a target market.
It took me that year to figure out what subject I was passionate about, and In 3 months I’ve already far surpassed my original blog in traffic, quality comments, and meaningful networking connections.
I do corporate blogging as well as my own personal blogs. At first, I did my blogging through a middle man who found “clients” for me. I was doing a lot, but getting paid at the end of the month. When the middle man crashed and burned on a drug addiction, well, clients were lost, and I wasn’t paid for an entire month’s worth of work. Now I negotiate my own contracts with corporate clients, and I make sure that I get a portion of the money up front at the beginning of each month.
Not starting earlier.
I didn’t tell my wife about my poker blog. You people are too serious.
Two big mistakes:
1. Being too cheap to buy a domain name right from the start.
2. Starting with Blogger instead of a hosted WordPress blog.
Being sucked into the idea that WordPress and your own domain name are the best way to go. Wasted a lot of time trying to get traffic to that site, that I mildly neglected the “free” site that gets 20 times the traffic and revenue.
I am currently living through my worst blogging mistake at the moment.
Migrating my blog to a new server, I set WP to No Follow, No Index and forgot to remove it when the new server went live.
I only found out when my good traffic levels plummetted and AS revenue disappeared overnight. A site: search on Google revealed that my index page and most of my flagship content had been dropped from the G index.
Currently waiting for each page to slowly creep back into the SERPS again.
Whatta Mistaka to Make-a
Rob
Not taking advantages of a LOT. Seriously. I’ve been featured on some of the biggest and best websites out there and been featured in UK national newspapers and still average 200 hits/day.
My mistake was starting my blog with no plan or idea how I would establish its own voice and identity. I already had a fairly successful site at the time I launched my blog and because my content was very similar to my website, I started asking myself “What is the purpose of this blog again?” I’m sure I confused my readers too.
Wrote my own blogging platform, but didn’t include all the benefits of wordpress in it…
qanews,wordpress.com – The Qatar academy student blog
I am the adminstrator for my school’s official student blog, which we are using as an alternate technique to a print.
My biggest mistake is that when I started the blog, it was planned to be an of the book talk about the latest date kind of thing. And then with the help of my friend we turned into community and service project and the school’s official publication.
I had to change the whole infastructure of the blog, and since the change was late in the year we also had to start advertising late.
But what I learned through this is that with patience and a few extra bloggers you can get something out of a blog.
I’ve made several mistakes! The first that comes to mind is Adsense, at least in my niche. It’s a known quantity for making money but is basically worthless if your working with other bloggers and readers with that same interest. The second worst mistake I made was reading tons of similar blogs and writing similar articles. Why would someone keep coming to my new site if it contains regurgitated news and tips? Since then I’ve started trying to be more unique and creative.
My biggest mistake is not doing enough research before buying any program or service. I bought service that guarantee visitors, it’s a total waste of money. They sent me visitors alright, but they didn’t send me ‘targeted’ visitors. I didn’t get any sales from it at all. It’s totally wasted.
Killing my old links when I switched from a traditional site to a blog. That cost me A LOT of traffic.
My biggest mistake was to shut down an established blog because I’d got bored with it. I took for granted the time it had taken to get the blog established, and now I’m having to do it all again.
I am confident that I am making lots of mistakes. But at this point it doesn’t really bother me.
When I started blogging I told myself that the number one thing I had to get right before I started worrying about seo and the look of my site is content, voice, and direction.
Without scoring a 10 or close to it on these 3 items most of the time then seo and blog design doesn’t really matter.
I’m fairly new to blogging so I am still working on all 3 items.
Darren, I dig the question — and you’ve obviously already received a great many responses — but I also believe that the best way to “get” is to “give.”
What’s the biggest mistake Darren Rowse has made as a blogger?
When my blog was about 3 years old, I got the “you’ve got to have a niche” bug, and split the site into four separate sites covering each of the major topics I tend to write about. I never really got any traffic on the three new ones, and somehow pissed Google off with my original one, and lost all of my traffic.
I’ve recently combined everything back together on a new domain, and my traffic is slowly (oh-so-slowly) coming back.
Live and learn.
Well… it would probably have been to use a free blog and not buying my own domain name… this just lessened my credibility level because a domain name tells everyone that you are serious and you mean business.
I waited 9 months before I started to promote my blog and actively start networking. Since then, traffic has risen steadily. I wish I had started on day 1.
I think that the biggest mistake a blogger can ever make is not blogging.
I’m fairly new to blogging, but I think my biggest mistake was not branding my blog in a particular niche early on. My blog grew out of a movie-related column I write, but I was mostly writing about video games and tech topics. Now I’ve made it more clear that my blog is about “Geek Culture”, which is a wide net that includes genre film, and that will hopefully help me retain more readers.
I also wish I had used a different permalink structure when I set it up.
Our biggest mistake was not creating a normalized tag taxonomy for posts with the appropriate rewrite rules from the start of our MT4 installation.
So, we ended up with non-standard, repetitive tags, and cruft in our tag-specific RSS feeds and URLs. Even though we were using a robots.txt file to block the old directory we still have duplicate URLs in Google’s index. The impact was low but it was lost time and a poor user experience.
The default movable type URL looked like this for the tag green building.
mt-search.cgi?tag=Green%20Building&IncludeBlogs=1
The new cruft free url using rewrites looks like this now (we dropped the adjective “green”):
http://earthandeconomy.com/tags/Building
Though the goal is to get indexed for terms that start with green (e.g green building), there really is no need to repeat the adjective green for every tagged term. Also, going back and renaming 400 tags in MT is not easy if you are trying to rename a two word tag to a single word.
To be honest I wish my LTD blog didn’t go down the first time, so I’ve learned never to depend on anyone when it comes to hosting your blog, at least then you will know that its your fault if you messed something up.
-Lamonte (letstalkdev)
I was inconsistent with the frequency of posting. I would skip 7-10 days sometimes.
My biggest mistake was not posting regularly from month 5-8. I burned out and almost quit because I was not seeing the results I had hopped for. Now I have learned blogging is more of a marathon than a sprint an I am enjoying the process. Bottom line: keep writing!
Not starting out on wordpress!
Not learning more about Google Analytics earlier and not researching niches a lot more closely when i first started.
My worst mistake was not doing a better job filing my photos. Now I have about twenty thousand photos and they are all messed up. And Picasa is not much help either. I have yet to figure out how it files stuff. It’s different from your regular filing system and sometimes it mixes stuff up without any help from me.
Photos are a very important part of my blog. And when i need one I don’t need to spend an hour trying to find it. Some day soon I’m going to start moving all my photos one by one to Flickr. And when all the good ones are moved out I am going to blow up Picasa and every out of focus piece of trash that’s left behind in it.
don’t take it so seriously :(, i regret that
I think that start a blog without a strategy is the biggest mistake I´ve made.
When we start blogging, the novelty Blogsphere offers and its youthfull scenario seduce us and we feel the impulse to do something at a sudden. Immediately we choose a blog site, and then create a title, and start writing something. Weeks later we discover that we are mixing different subjects, talking to different targets and… panic! What have I done?
Delete posts, improve features, learn some more on techniques, and maybe, maybe we do it right.
So, start really classy! Do your blog strategy plan. Check out Darren’s 31 Day project page. Read Skelliewag tips, go for Michele Martin and other pro bloggers articles before starting. You will get rid of a lot of useless pain.
Acting by impulse and not planning before was my biggest mistake at all.
Nadiva Olivier (brazilfactor).
Using nofollow in comments to not reward commentators that added valuable input to my blogs.
Also, not having a clear reason and purpose for blogging.
Not joining the blogging sites sooner. I met a lot of nice people and fun blogs along the way.
I’m far too young at blogging to have a long list of mistakes. The ones I’ve made have been made because I still don’t know better. :)
I have not been updating my blog regularly and that’s a bug mistake I am making.
I have not been updating my blog regularly and that’s a big mistake I am making.
Luckily my biggest mistake so far has been short lived but I failed to fully develop the idea for my first blog. I ended up trashing it and moving on to a blog I was passionate about. In hindsight – that first failed blog might have been a bust but I learned a lot about site design and promotion.