Bloggers have a tendency of cultivating bad habits. We might not eat on time when we get into a topic. Some of us act like the worlds foremost procrastinators. We do all sorts of things that can be considered bad habits but in our personal lives, they really don’t do much to affect our blog (aside from getting it done on time). The bad blogging habits that infiltrate into our posts and our branding can make it extremely hard to get our blog going.
A lot of the bad blogging habits that you should cut out you may not even know you have! Blogging requires you to be on top of your game, and once you’re cultivating the same bad blogging habits over time, it becomes extremely difficult to produce a great, interesting and engaging blog. Have you fallen prey to any of these blogging bad habits?
1) Plagiarism : Bad Blogging Habits
Stealing others work is wrong. The problem is that its so easy to simply borrow an image or an info-graphic from another site without referencing it or giving the source for your information. The most important ingredient for having and maintaining a successful blog is coming up with your own content.
Your own style is unique and no one else can hope to copy it. By taking someone else work and passing it off as your own, you not only create a problem when the original author finds out that you’re using his or her work as your own, but creates a system of dependency on stealing of others content. It gets easier after the first time, so the best thing to do is to simply avoid there being a first time. Ask the owners of external content for their use and give credit where credit is due. To be truly successful your content must be your own.
2) Aimlessness: Bad Blogging Habits
Do you know why you created your blog? Was it for a particular purpose? Do you know what that purpose is? The very first thing you should do when developing a blog is to have a reason for the blogs existence. Without a goal, your blog is aimless and can go wandering from topic to topic, not holding the attention of any audience for any length of time.
Also read: 4 Best Blogging Habits to Cultivate for better Productivity
Whilst having a personal blog to share your thoughts is not a bad thing, even these personal blogs have an aim: spreading your ideas with others in the hopes of influencing them. If you just have a blog because its what you’re supposed to do, then you should critically examine what your blog is doing for your business and what you want it to do for your business. Setting concrete goals gives you something to work towards and something for your blog to aim at.
3) Inconsistent Posting: Having a schedule for your posting is necessary to ensure that you keep your audience entertained and informed. The timing of your posts should be relatively consistent. If you have a scheduling tool (something most blogging sites incorporate these days into their standard posting features), you can easily set up a schedule to post previously written entries at a particular date and time.
Ideally, you should look at having a system of timed posting releases, like every day, every two days, every week, etc. The best way to set up a posting schedule is to create an alarm that goes off each period that tells you that you need to write a post now. It stops procrastination and allows you to be more productive and get your posts written and posted on time.
4) Proofreading: Bad Blogging Habits
Nothing is more unprofessional than having a blog that seems as though it was written by someone with a tenuous 5th grade grasp of English. For many readers, this is the breaking point where they stop reading and navigate away. The Internet has made it very difficult to get away with simple grammatical and spelling errors. You should not even have these types of errors. Check best grammar checker to improve grammatical errors.
I can understand that developing a post may take you a lot longer if you have to spell-check every word and then run it through for grammatical consistency, but that’s what needs to be done. There are smarter ways to do things like this though. Many word processing suites come with a built-in spelling and grammar check. By developing your post in one of these and fixing the errors before you post it to the blog, you can eliminate most of the errors. You still need to proofread carefully since these automated checkers can miss things.
5) No Interaction: Bad Blogging Habits
When you complete a post, you send it out into the world and leave it open for people to comment on it. In many cases, depending on the size of your audience, the comments section may be a lively and engaging place. At other times, it can be a virtual ghost-town. In order to keep your comments section somewhere that readers might find themselves in a discussion, it is important that you engage your commentators.
Make them feel welcome and they are likely to return to read what else you have to say. You don’t have to agree with all of the comments, but you should be civil when dealing with your audience since they are the ones you should be writing for. Engaging them in discussion gives them encouragement to comment again.
Also read: 6 Common Blogging Myths Debunked
Bad blogging habits will always crop up, but these are the most common offenders. You would think that experienced bloggers would be immune to these faux pas, but you would be wrong. Any blogger, no matter how long you’ve been blogging, can fall prey to these snafus.
You can correct them easily enough, but trying to develop them in the first place is the best way to deal with them. In order to avoid problems like this completely, you can check out City Web Company, well-known for blog management packages that can suit any type of blog from any niche.