When I started out blogging I made a lot of mistakes. However, overtime I learned to improve my blogging from established bloggers. Consider what my mistakes were so you don’t make the same mistakes.

Don’t Monetize When You Start
About 97% of all bloggers want some revenue coming in as they add content to their new blogs and they do their best to extract as much money from their blogs as they possibly can.

What is to monetize?
I never knew what “monetize” meant till I looked it up, and here it is. Monetize means to turn anything to currency so, when a person monetizes his blog, then he is actually making money out of it.

Beginner bloggers want money ASAP after they write their first post, which is a big NO NO; I know I did and that was one of my mistakes. As you can see I hardly have any ads up from the last two post on my blog. I figured I should make a strong reader base first, then when I have enough readers I’ll start adding ads. When new blogs are created with ads on it, new visitors leave often unless the post really catches their eyes. So if you are a newbie, don’t quit your day job and put ads on your blog yet, give your blog time to be established.

Messy Sidebar
This is one thing most expert bloggers are discussing lately. Bloggers get all hyped up about having a new blog and they add all sorts of junk to the sidebars, such as bookmark buttons, and affiliate banner ads, etc. The best blog is a simple blog, my readers love the templates I choose, because I keep my blog neat and simple.

Blogging for Search Engines and not for Humans
Bloggers, who have read about Google search bringing tons of traffic to blogs, make their blog optimized for search engines without considering the user experience on their blogs. When you create your blog do your best to enhance the user experience, if you don’t then you won’t have loyal readers.

One of my friends, Sean, created AskShia.com, and he optimized his blog to be full of keywords that he wants to target without considering the user experience. It would be better if he just concentrated on his content than to have bolded keywords everywhere. If you look at his site I think he has overdone it with keywords. I’m sure he’s reading this right now and I hope he takes my advice.

Showing Blog Stats Too Early
I know it’s very exciting when you have one subscriber to your RSS feed but showing others that number will not get you to increase it. I learned over time that when you have stats showing below than average results such as how many people visits your site every day or how many subscribed to your feed, then your loosing readers. It’s human nature that people will follow what others do so, if many readers subscribed to your feed then more will subscribed as well.

John Chow said not to show how many people subscribed to your feed till you reached 50. That number is very appealing to many blog owners but I suggest you wait till you reach 100. When I recommend 100 readers, I suggest it from a blog reader’s point of view. Bloggers with 100+ subscribers show a great deal of credibility and that’s what attracts me to subscribe to their feed. However, if you don’t want to wait till it reaches 100, then wait till it reaches 50, like John Chow said.

Too Many Categories for One Post
This mistake is minor, but it shouldn’t be ignored. When I started out blogging I made a lot of categories and I would place my posts in multiple categories. This seems OK, but the fact of the matter is it doesn’t help you when it comes to Google search. If you categorize your posts to be under one category each, then it’ll be easier for Google bots to index. If you wrote about Hollywood Movies and you placed the post in Entertainment and Film categories, then it’ll be difficult for Google bots to organize your post to the right category. Stick with one category per post for easier Google indexing.

Comments
When I surf around other blogs I see a significant mistake that some bloggers make. Either they turn off commenting on their blogs or they require their readers to register and log-in to comment. What makes a blog good is the interaction the readers have with the content author. If you don’t let your readers have a voice and comment on topics you wrote then there will less likely come back to your blog. If you’re worried about spammers spamming your comments then turn on Akismet Spam (comes with WordPress) filter plug-in, and it should help stop the spamming.

Also, another thing that bloggers make a mistake on is not commenting on other blogs. If you want someone commenting on your blog then you have to comment on their blogs first. The more you comment on other blogs the better the chances you’ll have having returning readers to your site.

So, consider the mistakes I made so you can avoid from making the same ones.

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