Have You Learned These Bad Habits From Other Bloggers?

“…Blogging is about passion, creativity, and expression…”

For every new blogger that enters the blogosphere there are legions of “expert bloggers” to tell them how to be successful. They’ve been experts for a long time. And they’ve maintained the same advice.

But, the game has changed.  And the real question now is…

Are you playing by THEIR rules?

If so, you may be preventing yourself from increasing your subscriber base, optimizing your blog properly for search, or from generating revenue.

Part of the brainwashing begins when you look to the older generation of bloggers.

The previous era of bloggers swore that if you did not follow their commandments to the letter, your blog would burst into flames and leave you ashamed and in total ruin!

Fortunately, we know that blogging has evolved and a lot of those “rules” actually did more harm than good.

Surprisingly, you are still following these rules, aren’t you? And some of you still write about it!

1) “Source Blogger, in order to keep my readers coming back, I have to post each and every day!”

I see this a lot, don’t you? You were told that you had to update your blog every day. By blogging every day it showed that you were serious about your craft. Daily postings meant more traffic, more loyalty and better “audience training”.

Reality: Maintaining this demanding, robotic pace was overwhelming your readers with too much content, and stripping you of your true creativity.

2) “Source Blogger, readers have a short attention span. I keep my posts short and sweet!”

These short, daily posts became to be about short, personal observations, small link drops, while briefly alluding to something they had read.

In addition, the entire blogosphere under pressure to put out daily content was scraping content from each other at record levels.

Reality: Readers are actually very patient. Reading your favorite blogs and discovering new ones is not a race. Readers know that the quality of content from one blog to another is vast. They would remain on your blog if it entertained and advised them to their satisfaction. And yes, images within posts worked too!

3) “Take those ads off your blog!”

As internet marketers and splogs (spam blogs) began to populate the blogosphere there was a “movement” that attempted to counter all that was blog advertising. Google AdSense became the root of all evil. Readers set their computers to shield them from popups and graphical ads and also would only read your blog in RSS format.

You were made to feel guilty because your hard work yielded sales conversions and high CPM.

Reality: You have a right to advertise on your blog to recover the cost of maintaining your blog, don’t you? And that since you were targeting the advertising to your site’s demographic, it was actually benefiting them!

4) “I like your site, but I’ll get back to you when you Alexa Rank is lower, your Google PageRank  is higher, you have about 500 more subscribers, and the more popular bloggers link to you!”

No blog shoots out of the gate already possessing hundreds of subscribers and followers. Were readers (and other bloggers) showing apprehension about joining your blogging community?

The result was clever methods of manipulating blog statistics and disguising your blog’s true following.

Reality: The new generation of readers would not be bound by those parameters. They read content now. They can’t be fooled by fancy, WordPress themes and the incessant name dropping and inclusion/ linking to other more prominent bloggers and websites.

Readers now don’t expect you to know all the answers. But, they can judge a blog author’s sincerity and now realize it’s about solving problems rather than overpowering readers with their so-called “expert opinion.”

Your Turn

Have you fell victim to these foolish notions?  What mistakes do you see from other bloggers? Do you see a lot of difference in blogging advice now than from before?