30 Methods For Killing Your Blog Today

In the ever growing blogosphere, it can be difficult to keep your blog alive with all of the competition you face. In fact, it has never been easier to “kill” your blog with everyone striving for perfection.

I think you would be surprised how easy it can be to destroy a blog, I know I am. It got me thinking about some things, and some habits we all have as bloggers that may not be the best kinds of habits to have.

We haven’t had a good list post here in a while, so I thought it was time to bring one forward. I thought it would be a good idea to take the general idea we have here, “to make a better blog,” and flip it around. I think it would have been to cliche to write a list of “30 ways to make your blog better,” so instead I decided to write the opposite, “30 ways to kill your blog.”

I feel like many ideas in this post are ones that are pretty different than what you would normally see on these kinds of lists, so I think it would be great if you at least skimmed through the headings, and read only what really interested you.

1. Stop Preparing

You have to prepare for everything on your blog. Plan what your next post will be, brainstorm what marketing techniques you can use, and get ready for the unexpected. If you don’t prepare, you run the risk of falling behind on many different things on your blog.

2. Forget your goals

Goals are usually something we all set when we first start our blog. You have to keep those goals in mind always, and maybe even base some decisions around that goal. You can’t lose focus of completing that goal, because once you lose focus of just that one goal, more things will start to come out of focus as well.

3. Write for Search Engines

The audience you work for should ALWAYS be the human visitors on your blog! It is a huge mistake to write solely for ranking high in search engines. So don’t keyword stuff, or drop some things from your posts that a search engine might not like. Do whatever you can to write for humans, regardless of what stupid Google thinks.

4. Stop Trying New Things

If you think your blog is good as it is, then you’re wrong. Sure, maybe it’s doing fine now, but maybe somewhere down the line you will want to do something different. There is nothing wrong with trying some experimental things on your blog. Some things will work out greatly, but some won’t. There’s nothing wrong with trying though.

5. Ignore SEO

A lot of people say to ignore SEO, but I don’t think that’s 100% true. As long as you do some basic SEO techniques on your blog, I believe you will be fine in the search engines. The SEO stuff I pay attention to are the title tags, meta descriptions and meta keywords. But that’s because I have the SEO friendly Thesis doing everything else for me.

6. Monetize Too Early

I find that there should be zero ads on your blog when you are still new. Take it from me, I tried putting ads here om Blogussion and they didn’t do very well. That was when I realized my community wasn’t ready for ads, and how harmful they really were to the growth of my blog.

7. Monetize Too Late

There is also a good chance that you can monetize too late on your blog. On a past post here, there was a good discussion about monetizing a blog too late. Take Twitter for example, they are virtually ad-free. Do you know why? The Twitter community flips whenever new ads are put up there, and it’s Twitter’s fault for introducing those ads too late.

8. Be Afraid of What People Think of you

To so many people, both on and offline, they worry about what others think of them. This really isn’t the best thing for your blog. Of course, there is a difference between being hated and receiving constructive criticism, but you absolutely cannot please everyone who visits your blog. And if you try, you will never succeed!

9. Stop Replying to Blog Comments

You should make it a goal on your blog to reply to every quality comment on your blog. Replying to all quality comments is one way to really build your community up, which will in turn grow your blog up. It can be hard sometimes, but I have discussed tips for increasing comment productivity before.

10. Don’t Offer RSS Readership

RSS is very important to have on your blog. Not only does it show how many loyal readers you have, but the number shows how much quality you have in your blog. If you have a lot of RSS readers, you probably have a good blog going.

11. Don’t Add Pictures to your Posts

Pictures really spice up your posts. Long paragraphs of text are so boring, and will kill any interest your readers have in the topic because you are boring them to death. Try to have at least one picture in every single blog post. Shoot for more than one always, and just remember he more the merrier!

12. Don’t Add Personality Into Posts

I believe that if you add your own personality into posts, then they will become your most popular posts. Fact filled posts are great and all, but I feel like writers should inject a little of themselves into the posts they write and show the human side behind the blog.

13. Stop Listening to Readers

You have to listen to your readers. If they suggest something, do your best to implement it if it’s the best in your blogs interest, and a lot of people can back it up. This can get confused with my 8th point above, but make sure to really listen to what your readers have to say – both positive and negative.

14. Stop Reading Other Blogs

Reading is essential for bloggers! You don’t know everything you teach in your posts by magic, you learned all of that from reading. Just because you know some things doesn’t mean you know everything. Subscribe to some RSS feeds, and read blogs consistently to learn new things.

15. Don’t Write List Posts

List posts have got to be the most successful posts in any blog right now. Just look at the “Popular Posts” section in the sidebar here. What dominates that area? List posts! List posts can take some time, but the rewards will be phenomenal.

16. Focus on your Design More Than Your Content

This happens to me a lot, and many other people out there too a lot. I love messing with the design here, adding things that I think will improve the blog. Sometimes though, I can get too caught up in editing a pretty good design that I forget what the readers of this blog really want! Don’t do the same, balance out everything you do on your blog with content being first.

17. Don’t Worry About Promoting

Promoting is essential for your blog obviously. It goes like this. You write a blog post, you tell someone, they read it, they like it, they tell someone and the cycle will (hopefully continue). Take that theory, and show it to hundreds of people. Promoting is a way to go viral, and going viral will bring in huge amounts of traffic to your blog.

18. Making Friends Won’t Help you – Forget Them

You have to have friends online! You will undoubtedly make new friends through your blog (I have made quite a few myself), but get yourself out there and be known! One website a lot of bloggers use not only to advertise their blogs, but to make friends is Twitter.

19. Think Inside the Box

It’s like the expression “Think Outside the Box”, except the total opposite. Going outside of the box is basically doing things other people aren’t doing, and implementing them in a way that is both innovative and functional. Thinking inside the box is nothing but regurgitating the same ideas, and conforming to other standards.

20. Don’t Have a Role Model

It is important to look up to someone, and learn lessons from them. Usually someone you look up to is another blogger in your niche who has a “successful,” or very popular blog. Just remember to respect them, not envy them!

21. Think You Are the Best there is

I think it is really lame for someone to think they are better than another blogger. Sure, it’s possible to be numerically better than other bloggers, but I think just because someone starts a blog in your nice 4 months after you started yours doesn’t mean you are the better blogger.

Don’t see people as “better” or “worse,” but as “friends.” Besides, if you build up too much of an ego regarding that “underdog,” you might have some problems later on with it later.

22. Worry Too Much About Statistics (Numerical Data)

A lot of us stress way too much about our traffic numbers, comments to post ratio, how many blogs linked to our post, etc. We can get so self induced about beating yesterdays Unique Visitor count, that we fail to focus on what is really important. You won’t always have a great day on your blog, even the big bloggers have them I’m sure, and have learned to cope with them.

23. Don’t Keep an Extra Post or Two for Backup

I believe that every blogger should have one of the two things ready for their blog:

1. A couple fully written posts to be published only for emergency
2. A notebook, or list full of ideas for blog posts

You should always follow through on your posting frequency on your blog, and deliver when you’re supposed to. We all have days where we just can’t make it to the blog to write. That’s why keeping a backup post or two will save you! Even a notebook full of ideas can help a lot when you don’t feel like lounging around trying to think up ideas for posts.

24. Don’t Analyze Yourself

I think every blogger should take some time one day and analyze themselves and how they blog. One way I would do this is by answering a list of 50 questions I compiled to ask yourself. It may unveil some things about you, and can help you for the best.

25. Write Just to Keep up with Your Post Schedule, Not to Always Teach

There are two kinds of posts you can write. One being the post where you go all the way to teach someone something, and the other kind is writing just to write. What that means is basically you are out of ideas and are too lazy to write something good that you half ass your post and write something that may not really help anyone.

26. It’s the End of the World When You Don’t Post

Not everyone can write all of the time, and sometimes we skip some days and leave our blog with no new content. It happens here, and I just brush it off. Your blog will not die just because you miss a couple of days of writing, but many fail to realize that.

27. Write About the Same Thing Over an Over Again

I know, it sounds kind of hard to not write about the same things over and over again on a niche blog, but that’s why you need to learn how to diversify your blog posts. Write about all of the little things in your niche, there will always be something you can write about. Just check out the Writing Tips category here, there are some excellent articles in there for writing with diversity in mind.

28. Don’t Add a Unique Point of View to Posts

Besides personality, adding your own point of view into the topic you are talking about is very important. You can talk about something that has been talked about literally millions of times before, but if you can add your own unique thoughts to it, then that will make a hell of a post!

29. Don’t Keep Records

I feel that if you document your blogging process, you can really discover new things about your blog. You can figure out what works, and what doesn’t, and will make an excellent reference for future use.

30. Believe Your Blog is Perfect

No one has a perfect blog, and no one ever will. You shouldn’t think your blog is perfect ever, because then you can end up losing the will to want to improve your blog. I think my blog is pretty cool, but I know it’s not perfect.

How Do You Kill Your Blog?

What are things you have done on your blog that you believe may have harmed it? if I have not listed it here, then I want you to tell me a few of them in the comments section!

I hope you enjoyed this post guys!

Tagged as: kill your blog, successful blog