If you are writing a blog for your business, there are a set of best practices designed to keep it running smoothly and keep visitors coming back for more. There are also some ways to kill your blog completely. Today I’m going to talk about 5 of those.
- Plagiarizing other bloggers – I’ll start with the obvious one. Your blog should produce original content. If you have to plagiarize, or steal, other bloggers’ content, then you shouldn’t blog at all. Keep it original.
- Posting infrequently – Ideally, you would post to your blog every day, but you should blog at least once a week at a minimum. If you are blogging less than once a week, then your blog is practically invisible.
- No outlinking – By outlinking, I am referring to linking outside of the blog post. You don’t have to link to other sources in every blog post, but if you don’t outlink at all, then you won’t build any community into your blog. Outlinking refers to linking to other bloggers, third party sources, and even your own older blog posts, which can drive traffic back to those posts and keep visitors on your blog longer.
- Non-search-friendly URLs – You’ve seen them. They include long strings of crazy characters and indecipherable letters and words. The search engines can’t index them and users won’t remember them. They’re practically useless.
- No social media promotion – Your blog should be SEO-friendly and sharable on social media. In fact, you should share your own posts on your social media accounts. If you aren’t on social media, you should be.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from these 5 practices that are guarantees to send your blog into obscurity.