There are many deadly sins of blogging out there, but there are a few that we, bloggers, are still guilty of, and we’ll never learn to avoid doing, since some of this deadly sins were already a part of what our blogging style has become.

The following deadly sins are what I think of are the most common and are the most ignored from what I have observed. Really, the obvious are the hardest things to see.

Not Blogging / Not Posting Regularly

Mainly this is one of the common problems of those bloggers who were just starting out and was only persuaded to blog just because. If you really want to be successful in blogging, put your heart in it, put some time in it, get yourself dedicated to blogging, nothing beats a blog that is always updated.

Stealing Other People’s Ideas

If you have had something that you want to brag about it was taken away from you without your permission, what would you feel? Well it’s the same as having your unique content stolen. Well its ok that someone had the same idea as yours, but having the same post down to the last letter is a different story. You have that something sitting inside your skull called brain. Use it. Don’t betray your readers and don’t steal content, if it can’t be helped, ask permission and well at least leave a link from where you got it from.

Not Having a Good Website Design and Usability

There is beauty in simplicity, but don’t think that you won’t shoo off a potential reader off your site if you will use the default template of a blog. Bland design scares readers away, so is the opposite, too much nonsense stuff pasted in your webpage is a worse, and then having a design that is not very eye-friendly leaves the readers thinking that you are raising hell on your site. If you’re going to use dark background make sure that your font is light and vice versa. Avoid using pictures, hell no! I have seen a lot of this amateurish style on social networking sites like Friendster.  Most of all fix your navigations. Readers uses internet to gain access to information easily. You are there to design your site for easy navigation, not to make a labyrinth.

Using Free Blog Hosting Services

Start as a pro even if you’re an amateur. That was what I learned when I started blogging off on my own hosted site with my own name. I have had some blogs before that were hosted for free, but all of them met their early demise. I had 1 on bravejournal, 1 on i.ph, 1 on Friendster blogs. The most active of the three was on bravejournal, around 15 to 20 posts something, the rest have 1 to 3 entries. And all of them discontinued. I had a multiply account with nothing on it. I just used it for downloading songs back then. The lesson was, if I had started off on my own hosting site, I would have reaped all of the things that should have been mine in the first place, money, traffic, freedom and reputation. Money since I can monetize my own site without worries, traffic and reputation since I have my own domain name and host, those readers will easily trust rather than the ones who are on a hosted site, and freedom, since you own your own site, your potential on becoming a unique blogger is limitless.

Being the Jack of All Trades

You are not a one man team. You can’t be perfect on everything, but you can be very knowledgeable on something. Find your niche. Something that you really know everything about, and readers will trust you easily since you are focused on an interest. Having your own niche guarantees you of higher chance of regular readers.

Not Having the Best Posts Page

This one is crucial. You wouldn’t want your popular articles be buried deep and forgotten. You would want it to be read always since its one of the bests and it works sort of like a badge for a new reader. Immediately a reader will know what kind of writer are you at a glance, and popular posts serves as an ID for your site. Your credibility as a blogger depends on how relevant and popular your articles are.

Not Having an About Page

This one is often overlooked. Readers would always like to know who the writer was behind the posts. You wouldn’t want to trust articles coming from an anonymous person.

Not Having a Subscribe Button

Some people want to see everything at a glance that is why RSS Feeds are used. Some people want to read your posts without the hassle of going to your site. Some just want to get informed if there is anything new that interests them to go back to your site. That is where the subscribe button comes into play. You wouldn’t want regular readers to be out of your list. You would want to keep them connected. Don’t worry they would still have the urge to come back to your site. Why? because feeds and email subscriptions only send summarized articles and not the whole articled posted, it would always have the “READ MORE” link in the end of the feed or mail, so if they did like the summarization or teaser of the post they would have the urge to click the “Read More” link that would lead them back to you site, hence, potential traffic wouldnt get lost.

These are just some of the common mistakes that a blogger is always guilty with. There are still many more out there but for me these are the essential ones that a typical blogger should always look out.

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