Blogging Discussion: What Blogging Mistakes Have You Made?
October 10th, 2007
Today I ran across a great post over at Performancing entitled 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks: Common Blogging Mistakes. I bring it up here because reading this post sent me on a trip down memory lane.
Kyle’s Cove has served as a great way for me to document my experiences over the past few years, and included in those experiences are a few failures. I really enjoyed this post because it reminded me that mistakes come along with success and it’s how we grow and learn as human beings as well as bloggers. I decided it would be fun to cover some of my blogging mistakes, then open up the comments to hear from others. Here are a few mistakes I’ve made over the past two years that stand out in my mind:
- After originally blogging for almost a year (first on Blogger, then on Typepad), I decided to call it quits because my second son was about to be born and I had a lot of other things going on, as well as some financial concerns. Unfortunately after posting my goodbye post, I canceled my Typepad account and lost close to 500 posts. I was fortunate to have a couple of my readers who liked my site offer some web-hosting for me to hop over to WordPress and keep blogging, no strings attached (Thanks Jason and Garry!). Unfortunately, I couldn’t really recover much of my work, so I had to grab a few of my popular posts from Google’s cache and repost them.
- When I first started blogging, I made the common mistake of mimicking successful blogging trends, instead of sticking to my own unique style that I’m comfortable with. This blog had quickly become an echo chamber, so I was having trouble growing the blog and getting traffic. Since I went back to blogging about whatever I felt was interesting, things have picked up again.
- The third mistake I made was spending to much time monitoring traffic/income. After awhile, I realized this was becoming distracting, so I now check them once a day during the week and twice a day on weekends.
So, those are my mistakes. What blogging mistakes have you made along the way?
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Great list. All the important ones covered. I've made my own Top 10 list at the following;
http://thatimportantblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/10-best-greasemonkey-userscripts-2009.html
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The mistakes that i made were closing 2 blogs too early because i felt they weren’t performing quickly enough. I have learned that the key to blogging, and building any network is persistence.
I also started the others on blogger, not on my own domain so that is a definite mistake from the start. But mistakes are how we learn i suppose.
Man that is a difficult question to ask. I have made so many… and still continue to. Well, this doesn’t really relate directly to blogging, but it has to do with my domain name, Garry Conn dot Com. This is my second time owning the name. I owned it once before and kept putting off renewing the name. Sure enough, it expired and someone immediately purchased it. At first it didn’t bother me.. at the time I wasn’t using the domain name, but then slowly it started to. I contacted the owner who was basically a domain shark, and explained that I wanted the domain. He tried to strong arm me for around $1200 dollar for the domain. At that point, I just called my loss and said forget it. About a year later, and a month before the domain was going to expire again, I put a backorder in for it for $20 dollars. About 90 days later, sure enough, I received an email from GoDaddy welcoming me as the proud new owner of Garry Conn dot Com.
I don’t know if this is truly my biggest blogging mistake, but I can say that I think it was my most stupid!
The thing I regret the most was not developing a theme the way I should have. I used to add bits and pieces to our theme as time went on, but the right way to do it is to spend a little while developing something perfect, and then putting it up. I just never had the patience to do that before. Blogging is all about patience.
One of my mistakes was with my personal journal, mentioning the name of my workplace.
Boy were my co-workers not happy when they found it
Lost my job that way.
I made a lot of mistaked when i started blogging . My posting frequency was not constant , i didnt use enough images on my blog , i implemented feed burner on my blog after 5-6 months . These are all i can think of right now .
Steve – Yeah, that is an important trap not to fall into. Blogs rarely pick up overnight and it can take a year or longer before they really start to develop a following. Patience is the most important thing I preach to new bloggers.
Garry – Yes, although my last name is not very common, it is important to have the domain of your own name. Eventually these will serve as a resume of sorts, so I encourage everyone to at least reserve it ($9.00 a year or so) so you have it for later if/when needed.
Ryan – That was your mistake? I do understand what you are saying though. I need to set up a sub domain so I can start working on a new theme. I’ve considered releasing a few to the public, so I will need this if I decide to go that route.
Crys – Yikes! Thanks for sharing your story, though, as anyone could make that mistake.
Madhur – Have you noticed a significant improvement since you added images? I used to use images, but since dropping them I’ve felt things have been better (unless I need an image to illustrate a point). Posting frequency is tough because you can just as easily post to much as to little. It can be hard to find the right balance of 1-2 posts per day that works for your readership.
Yes, that was my mistake. First impressions are everything, and you don’t want to give people passing through the idea that the site is just a work in progress.
Oh yeah, and one other thing that came to mind. I was always told that you have to plan for success if you want it to happen, and after just a few months of putting the site up we decided to go to a dedicated server. Our monthly income was barely covering the cost of the server, but knowing that we could survive Digg and Slashdot at the same time was a nice thought.
Ryan – All I meant is that didn’t really seem like a mistake, but after reading your follow up comments, I can see what you mean. Especially since you do this stuff full time =D
I think for your site, a dedicated server was a great idea and seems like it is paying off now. Hopefully someday I get enough traffic to warrant one!
I have a whopper of a mistake for you.
I spent over a year building a solid inventory of over 300 articles only to have my entire site highjacked because of weak security.
Now, I’m forced to rebuild at another domain.
Hopefully, it won’t take an additional 300 posts to recover my readers.
I haven’t done anything really bad yet other than trying to start a new blog when I can hardly find time to blog in one. As you said, we learn from our mistakes and that’s what makes us better!
I didn’t know that you had lost a year’s work! Ouch that’s gotta hurt, man! You have come a long way and have made great strides since. And, yes I still thank Garry for showing me to your blog.
My biggest mistake was that I deleted all of my older posts on an old Blogger account. I took about 3 months off from blogging about technology and at the beginning of it I decided (stupidly) to delete all of my older posts that had anything to do with technology so that the blog would only have posts focusing on my personal life. When I finally decided to get my own hosting and start writing about tech topics again it really would have been nice to have a large base of posts to start out with.
Reg – Yikes! Sorry to hear about that. You need to get moved over to WordPress so you don’t have to worry about stuff like that. Blogger is one of the few Google products I do not endorse!
K – Yes, I lost a year, but I didn’t technically lose it, I just cancelled my Typepad account. A couple days later a few readers offered some web hosting to get me back online and writing. I was very fortunate and owe any success I have had since then to them.
Michael – Yeah, I know what you mean, because that sounds similar to my situation. Glad to see you back and talking tech. I’m not much of an Apple fan except the iPod line, but I enjoy reading your work every day!