Posted by
ChrisR on Wednesday, November 07, 2007 3:00:24 PM
Originally Post July 24, 2006
I've been offering tips and tricks on what m akes a great blog, but now, if you readers will endure, I would like to offer the most common blogging mistakes I have seen out there.
1.)
Copy and Paste entire articles from other sites into your blog post. Besides that this is a copyright infringement, the whole idea of a blog is to share your opinion. Keep the quotes to no more than 2 or 3 sentences, and like I have said before, make sure to add your perspective. Summarize. Don't be afraid to say "I'm not sure what to think about it, but it caught my attention." Some of your readers may be able to articulate some feedback and the article might be a good discussion starter. But, just make sure to highlight the important or provocative part of the article.
2.)
Pasing real long URLs right into your blog post. There are few times where this is necessary. First, most readers won't remember the whole address, so what's the point. Second, this may cause your blog layout to stretch out and look bad. So, what you want to do is select a relevant word - try to find a verb or phrase - and create a hyperlink using the top right link icon on your blog editing tool. For example,
...this is the must-read article for today. You can check it out here.
3.)
Using italics for quotes instead of the blockquote control. Italics is difficult to read when used in a full paragraph. So, use it with restraint when you are trying to highlight a phrase or word. For quoting, use the blockquote control above. (It looks like a small blue arrow pointing to the right, just like in Word.)
4.)
Shading or selecting a different background color for yhour blog posts. This makes reading your post difficult. Other than on one blog, most of the Townhall.com blogs have a white background. It's done that way to make your work easy to read. If you are going to experiment with text backgrounds, make sure there is a good reason (highlighting something) and do it minimally.
5.)
Not using links to references or other blogs. The power of blogging is in sharing the traffic as much as possible. The research has shown that linking to other blogs only helps create more traffic, becuase other bloggers will like you more (for the links) and link back to you. Of course, you still need to have something good to link back, so work on making your posts intelligent, focused, and passionate.
So, I'll leave you with five. Can you think of other common mistakes? Leave me a comment.