This is a guest contribution from Ali Luke.

Are you unintentionally sabotaging your blog’s chances of success?

It can be really tough just to keep your head above water when you’re blogging. There’s so much great advice out there – and so many things you could be doing.

It’s also easy to get things wrong. That’s a perfectly natural part of learning, and one that every blogger goes through. (I cringe to look back at my earlier, now abandoned, blogs.)

It takes time to build a successful blog. But you don’t want to end up taking years longer than you need to.

What not to do on your blog

Here are eight critical mistakes you need to avoid:

Mistake #1: Posting at Very Irregular Intervals

Do you go through phases of posting daily … only to exhaust yourself and run out of ideas after a couple of weeks?

This is frustrating for readers. They never get to know what to expect from you. One minute, they’re being overwhelmed with hastily written content – the next, you seem to have disappeared.

There’s no rule about how often you should post. Some successful blogs have daily posts, or even multiple posts per day. Others publish once a week (like Boost Blog Traffic) or even less. What matters is that you’re consistent.

I’ll admit that, after the best part of a decade blogging, I’ve been through a rather patchy spell of posting over the past three years. (I do have two very good reasons why. They’re small, cute, noisy, and have a tendency to wake me up in the middle of the night.)

Fix it:

If you also have or are about to have very young children, consider taking some time away from your blog. Let readers know that you’ll be gone for a few weeks or months. This gives you a breathing space to focus on family life – and to build up a stock of blog posts for once you start blogging again.

Mistake #2: Having a Broken or Amateur Design

When you’re taking your first steps into updated 2024 mobile phone number data blogging, you may well use whatever default design comes with your blog platform of choice, or a free one that you like.

As you start to grow your blog, though, remember that the way your blog looks will affect whether or not readers trust you – and your content. You may well be a fantastic writer, but if your posts are hard to read and your blog design looks sloppy (or doesn’t even work properly) then readers won’t stick around.

As Darren puts it:

The way your blog looks, what it makes people feel, what it calls people to do is vital, and it has a huge impact on your blog and how it’s seen.

Chances are, you’re not a photographer or designer. It’s worth saving up so you can get some professional design work done – and as your blog grows even bigger, you might want to consider a professional photo shoot.

Fix it:

Some of the key areas where blog design goes wrong are:

Sidebars: get rid of any widgets that aren’t See mitte ainult ei loonud kaubamärgiga emotsionaalset sidet pulling their weight, and fix any that are broken or look weird. See Mistake #7 for more on this.

Font types and sizes: I’m no expert here, but I’ve learned to avoid Times New Roman, Comic Sans, and Papyrus (thanks, designer pals!) and to make sure the font size is large enough for comfortable reading.

Headers / logos / banners: if you pay for one thing, make it this. You might be able to do a trade or find a talented friend to help (my fantastic cz leads sister created my blog’s new header, in return from the Game of Thrones season 5 box set).