Once you have made the wise decision to start to build your own blogs, you are well on your way to claiming your valuable piece of “Internet real estate”. I am very happy that you have made the decision to head in this direction. I want to warn you to avoid trying to take some bad “shortcuts” or using questionable tactics that will do little more than get you very frustrated. I will cover a few major pitfalls to avoid below:
1. Using “Scraped” Content – If all you are going to do is take other people’s content and put it on your site. Don’t even waste your time. Building your blog with content “scraped” off of other people’s sites is an exercise in futility. You get no search engine “love” from this technique. You do not get people to know you, like you and trust you. You content will be a “hodge-podge” of other people’s ideas. This will not serve you well at all. Just don’t use this tactic. It will backfire on you.
2. Your Blog Is Nothing More Than A Sales page – There is a big difference between helping people and selling them stuff every day. If you only write thinly veiled sales pitches as your blog posts, your readers will see this very quickly. You do not want to sell, sell , sell on your blog. This is a very important tip, so please take it to heart. If you want a sales only site, set up a marketing portal or web store.
3. Staying Hidden Behind Your Blog – You must be available to your readership if you want to maximize your income from your blogging. You do not need to put your phone number on your site. You should have a good email address that you check often posted on the “About Me” or “Contact Us” pages. Make sure you allow comments to your site, and respond to the good ones. This will allow you to build a dialog with you and your readers.
4. Nothing On Your Blog Really Helps Anybody – If you don’t help your readers, they will go someplace that does. Share your experiences and learnings. Pretty much everything you know about your niche will be a valuable insight to some of your readers. You want to help people first and then sell your products. There really is no other order to take if you want to have long term financial success in your blogging.
5. Your Site Is Loaded With Many Diverse Sales Banners – You can have great content, but if your sidebars are loaded down with a large variety of banners, it still sends the signal that you are a “sales first” person. You can start with one or maybe two high quality banners for top level, established products or services. You can always add your banners easily by the use of the widget function when you have your blog better developed.
6. Your Posts Are All Less Than 400 Words – Google and other search engines are looking for fresh, relevant content. Many spammers put up 250 word junk posts to fill up their blogs and get content up. The search engines are rewarding 500 word plus articles with better positioning and relevance in their results. Always make your posts over 400 words and do your best to make 50% of your posts over 500 words. It is simply a matter of quality over quantity here. If you can’t write 500 words on a topic, spend a few minutes doing some simple research before you get started. This will help with your ideas and word count a lot.
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Great blog post and am just starting to learn about blogging – you really have some great info for people here and I have learned alot. I knew about some of the pitfalls here but not all of them – thanks for post and was going to share it on facebook but don’t see your share buttons but will tweet it for you .
Nancy
Skype: nancyradlinger
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