Recently I talked to someone who’s setting up his first blog. He has awesome content and a host of fans all set to follow him. But he made these 3 common mistakes (I did too, when I started!):
Mistake #1: Starting with blogger.com. There are 3 major problems wth using blogger.com. First, your blog can disappear at a moment’s notice. That happened to me! I wasn’t doing anything wrong; I just happened to use a link to my own site more than once. It took days of anxious nail-biting to get my blog back.
Secondly, your blog won’t get taken seriously. For one thing, viewers can hop to another blog just by clicking “Next Blog” on top of your page. Who knows what that next blog will be?
Finally, you have very limited options for using your blog as a marketing tool. No widgets. No plug-ins.
Mistake #2: Long, long posts. Keep your posts at 250-500 words. When you have a long post, break it up into smaller posts. You don’t have to remember to post: systems like WordPress let you set up posts far in advance.
Mistake #3: No links from blog to google, facebook and other sources. Your blog won’t work effectively as a stand-alone.
If your blog is just for fun, no worries. Go ahead and use blogspot or even wordpress.com. But to be taken seriously by the blogosphere, and for maximum marketing, get thee to a WordPress.org site. I recommend WordPress over Typepad because (a) WordPress has more options (b) you can get lots of inexpensive support for WordPress.
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Thanks, Kathleen. That is SO true! I did the same thing myself when I started. Even now I sometimes have to stop and force myself to cut up a big piece into 2-3 smaller ones!
Thanks for this post! I think many beginning bloggers do not understand point number 2 especially. They confuse a blog post with a standard article, which of course makes it too long. Thanks for emphasizing what I keep trying to explain to clients.