John Chow’s Top 10 Blogging Mistakes – A Closer Look Pt. 3

Wow, I’ve been at this a relatively short time, but with the support of John Chow, I’ve been getting a great boost in hits the past few days due to his “Showing some community love” post. I just wanted to give thanks and hope everyone enjoys my posts. So, let’s get to this.

The final part in my series on John Chow’s Top Blogging Mistakes, I will take a look at the last 4 mistakes that most new bloggers make:

Mistake #7 – Not Giving a Full Feed RSS

There are two sides to the argument whether or not you should provide your full blog entries for your blog posts. One side tells you that you need to tease your RSS readers by giving them just a little taste of your blog so that you can get them to come visit your site in order to best monetize your content and to also improve your traffic stats. The other side which I subscribe to is that you provide your entire blog entry into your RSS Feeds, so that your readers can get what they originally signed up for – fast, easy access to your blog’s content. I agree that by providing a short tease in your RSS feed, you will probably increase your chances of monetizing your content, but I feel this is a real short-sighted way of looking at it and in a way, sort of shows that you don’t trust your content to get visitors to come visit your site.

I also wanted to point out that Douglass Karr of Indianapolis, Indiana has created a great wordpress plugin called PostPost that makes it extremely easy for you to monetize your RSS Feeds. The plugin gives you the option to add advertisements or what not before your post, after your post, before your feed loads or after your feed loads. I’ve tested and as you may have noticed, I am running it right now on the bottom of my posts and feeds and it seems to be working great. I’m predicting that this is going to crack a lot of Top 10 WordPress Plugins soon, including my upcoming one.

Mistake #8 – Not Reaching out to Other Bloggers

This is the one mistake that most new bloggers make. Remember, the biggest reason Google and other search engines emphasized the importance of links between sites is to help with the verification process. By exchanging links between two sites, it shows the search engines that the content on each site has enough quality to justify a link exchange. Thus, the more links a site has exchanged with other sites, the more search engines believe the quality of it’s contents, thereby increasing the rankings in search results.

So, with that little bit of Internet 101, the best thing for all bloggers to do is to think of ways to reach out to their readers and other bloggers by using one of the best tools given to the human race – friendly social skills! I hate to use John Chow’s blog as an example again, but there’s a reason he has been one of the fastest growing blogs on the internet. Here’s some of the things he does to reach out to other bloggers and readers:

  • Participates in the Comments Sections of his Posts
  • Keep to his word by offering a link exchange program based on Reviews
  • Reward Frequent Visitors to site with the very valuable links
  • Incorporating Contests where his prizes range from TV Tuners to Ink Pens

So, put on your happy hat and start some dialogue with your visitors, starting with me =)

Mistake #9 – Writing for Google instead of People

A lot of SEO books and classes will tell you that keyword density is the key to ranking a blog post faster, but what happens when you get those readers and they never come back to your blog? Well, that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t write like a person who’s not trying to sell something to someone (that someone is Google if you needed to know). Repeating a word over and over and over and over and over again just gets really annoying, don’t you agree? (That was annoying just writing that out). Just focus on writing about the topic at hand and if you have competent writing skills, then your keyword density will take care of itself.

Mistake #10 – Not Reading John Chow dot com

Well . . . . duh!

In case you missed it, here’s A Closer Look

Part 1 & Part 2