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 8^th 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!

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