Mistakes Every Blogger should Avoid

Mistakes happen, by everyone and that includes experienced people too. I am going to try and point out top 5 mistakes that every blogger does, intentionally or unintentionally.

Let me summarize them first and then explain in detail.

• Wrong Mindset
• Choosing a Blogging Platform
• Lack of Blog Updates
• Copied Content
• Blogging for Money

1. Wrong Mindset
   I know a bunch of people (both in personal life and internet life) who came to blogging just to get rich quickly. Most of them vanished from the scene after getting frustrated and disappointed in a month or two. Few of them learn the fact in a hard way and still in blogging making their living from it.

   Well, the truth is blogging is NOT any kind of get rich quickly scheme. Like all other offline business, it also requires hard work and dedication from the blogger. If you want to make quick money, go buy lotteries.

2. Choosing a Blogging Platform
   This is the common blogging mistake that every new blogger do. They go for a free blogging platform like blogspot or wordpress.com. I am not saying that blogger or wordpress.com is not good, but they both have some limitations. You cannot go too far with a free blogging platform unless you have your own domain and hosting.

   In my opinion (or may be yours’ too), the web’s best blogging platform is self-hosted wordpress. You can customize it any way you want. The platform is backed by a community of more than millions of userbase.

3. Lack of Blog Updates
   People like to start with a bang and indeed most of the bloggers start with a flood of posts. I saw people posting 10 to 12 posts a day for first few days then the frequency dropped to 1 post in 10 or 12 days. This is not good. Start with a posting frequency you can keep. This may be once a day or once a week, but keep up with it. I found that John made a post only on this at Creating Content – Post Length & Post Frequency.
4. Copied Content
   Perhaps we all did it over time. When there is no time or nothing to write about, new bloggers just copy some other’s post. This is a bad practice and I, myself, learned it in a hard way. There’s no way you can rank higher than the original source in search engines and that makes copying a waste of time and energy.
5. Blogging for Money
   Blogging for Money, or Money for Blogging? Most of the people will choose the first, but I’ll go with the second. I blog for people and I am making quite a bit out of it. The fact is, when you blogging for people, search engines sends you peoples to your blog. More and more people know about your blog, you earn more and more money. Simple as that.

So, these are the top 5 mistakes a blogger should avoid.. What’s your take on this?