6 Deadly Blogging Mistakes that Killed My Blog
If I said I often get questions on how I got my Traffic Generation Cafe from zero to top 0.1% of all the websites in the world in 6 months, it would be a major understatement.
I get them ALL the time.
I know this specific topic or question rather is something that keeps a lot of my readers coming back to my blog again and again.
“How did she do it?” “What’s her secret?” “Was she well-connected before she started her blog?”
These are all the same questions I was asking as I lurked around popular blogs to see how they did it and what their secret was – before I started Traffic Generation Cafe.
As you know, I openly talk about all the things that worked and didn’t work for me when I first started blogging.
Feel free to go back and take a look at these posts to see what I did:
In this post though, I decided to talk about something that my readers might not necessarily think of asking, but yet is equally as important:
“What mistakes have you made in the beginning and what would you have done differently?”
I am going to expand the question beyond my blog and include the things I see other bloggers do that prevents them from reaching the full potential of their blogs and their earning power.
1. Pick the wrong niche
Not too many people know that I build Traffic Generation Cafe on the basis of a different blog, which I started in 2009.
I had the first blog for an entire year before I scrapped it altogether and transformed it into what you see now.
It never went anywhere.
I found myself spending countless hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and what I could be doing differently until I finally got it: my blog had no direction.
I never gave my niche much thought, I had no idea what to blog about, I had no idea who my target reader was.
Result?
No readers. No traffic. Waste of time.
Picking the right niche is the single best thing you can do for your blog. Really.
How to pick the right niche?
Usually it’s a combination of what you like to do and are passionate about and if there is a demand for the information and the products you can promote within your niche.
The first one is easy to figure out.
What is your area of expertise? What are your hobbies? What is your passion?
Obviously, it’s much easier to blog about something you already have knowledge in – it will save you a lot of time doing research on your chosen topic.
It’s also quite important to like your niche – that’s what will keep you blogging through ups and downs long-term. And if you don’t see yourself writing about the same subject a year or two from now, don’t even try.
Now that you figured that out, we need to marry it to the demand.
No niche demand = no readership = no income
How do we check for such demand?
One of the best ways to do it is to do a forum search.
Let’s say your niche is “healthy eating habits“.
All you do is perform a search for forums in your niche by searching for your keyword phrase “healthy eating habits” plus the word “forum“.
Look for active forums with lots of chat on the subject. Once you find them, stick around and see what people are talking about, what their problems and concerns are, how you can possibly solve those problems through your blog.
You might find out that your niche idea not a hot one and then you go back to the drawing board.
However, if it still looks good, you move to the next step.
This is another HUGE mistake I see many bloggers make. They assume that if they are interested in the topic, then there will certainly plenty of other people who will be as well.
Not necessarily.
Not all traffic equals money.
2. Don’t do keyword research
Here’s a problem with this: most bloggers know they need to do it, but ignore this step altogether, because
a) they don’t know how to do it
and/ or
b) they don’t want to bother.
Some bloggers don’t even want to bother with keywords because they are not planning on getting any search engine traffic to begin with. SEO is too complicated they say, so why bother?
Why bother???
Unless you want to spend every free minute of your day driving traffic to your blog, you need to come up with a more passive way of doing it and that’s exactly what ranking your blog for your desired keywords will do for you: bring you loads of free passive traffic from the search engines.
And then there are those bloggers who do want to do it, but don’t do it the right way, assuming that as long as they find a keyword that many people search for, they are all set.
When I build my previous blog, I didn’t do a proper keyword research, so my blog never really ranked for anything that brought me much traffic and more importantly any blogging income.
Here are some keyword rules you need to keep in mind when doing a proper keyword research:
1. 90% of keywords will never bring you much traffic.
2. Out of the remaining 10%, 90% will never bring you any money.
3. Out of the remaining 10%, 90% are way too competitive to consider for your niche.
So you see, you have to give this step some considerable thought BEFORE you move forward with your blog; if not, you’ll just end up wasting your precious resources, like time, trying to generate traffic through networking alone.
3. Pick the wrong domain name
Yes, your domain name is REALLY important for both the search engines and for your potential readers.
This was not one of the mistakes I made with my first blog, but I see bloggers make it time and time again.
Let’s say you are looking for traffic generation tips.
You Google “traffic generation tips” and the first two results come from anahoffman.com and trafficgenerationcafe.com.
Which one would you be more likely to click on? An unknown name or a site that you know focuses on traffic generation?
Exactly.
My next point is that search engine do highly favor domain names with keywords in them.
You know what website ranks #1 for “traffic generation“?
TrafficGeneration.com. Never mind they don’t provide any real information on the topic – their domain name is dead-on keywords.
So, unless you are Seth Godin or Chris Brogan, I highly recommend choosing niche and keyword appropriate domain.
4. Choose the wrong blogging platform
This one is definitely surprising.
Back in the day when I barely knew what a blog was let alone how to create a popular one, it still didn’t take me long to do some quick research and find out that self-hosted WordPress was the way to go.
However, time and time I see many of my readers and friends trying “to make it” in the blogosphere while using Blogger.com and such.
Here are some issues to consider when choosing the right platform for your blog:
1. MONEY: free blogging platforms don’t allow you to use them to make money, that simple. That means no paid ads, no AdSense, no affiliate sales.
And if they catch you do it or if they just THINK that’s what you are trying to do, they’ll shut down your blog in a jiffy.
Imagine waking up one morning and all your hard work is simply gone?
Not a good feeling I bet.
2. SUPPORT: most of the cool themes, great plugins, and awesome forums are focused on WordPress only.
That means that your competitors are leaving you behind in the dust when it comes down to the latest and the greatest to help them run their blogs as a well-oiled machine.
5. Poor design
Mind you, I didn’t say “inexpensive”, but cheap-looking, amateur, unprofessional.
When I first started blogging, I thought that using a free site to design my header would do the trick.
NOT!
Poorly designed header and the overall feel of your site makes your potential reader run faster than a tumbleweed across Arizona desert.
Previously, I was of the “you don’t have to put much money into your blog” thought. Now I switched to “No, you don’t have to put MUCH money, but it would serve you well to put in SOME.”
How much is SOME?
That’s an issue for another post, but I’ll tell you the bottom line: knowing what I know now about blogging, website designing, and making money online efficiently, this is what I would personally do had I needed to start over:
1. Buy a premium theme, like Thesis theme.
2. Hire someone to customize it for you, if you can’t do it yourself. Doesn’t have to be expensive, but professional.
This way will save you $1500 minimum for a custom blog design and get yourself a custom looking, perfectly search engine optimized blog.
6. What is your hook?
No, it’s not enough to have a great-looking blog in a good niche with all the bells and whistles to go with it.
You need to figure out how to stand out from the sea of other blogs and bloggers.
Finding your perfect angle, your unique hook was the most difficult thing I had to do as a blogger.
There are plenty other blogs that talk about traffic generation, SEO, blogging, and such.
Waaaaaay too many, if you ask me.
I had to figure out how to be different despite of all the abundance and redundancy.
Believe it or not, my success came when I stopped trying to “find my voice” and just decided to use the one I already had.
So here are some possible angles you can focus on in your blog:
1. If you already have good personality, look no further; simply be yourself.
2. Take difficult subjects and make them sound simple.
3. Communicate to your readers via videos.
4. Create a multi-author blog and offer differing opinions on the same subject.
5. Make your blog reader-driven, meaning center your blog around Q&A (question and answer) sessions with your readers. In the beginning, you might have to borrow the questions from other blogs or make up your own. 
6. One of the first posts I wrote for my blog was 202 Bite-Sized Tips To Insanely Increase Your Blog Traffic. THAT post can be a goldmine for any creative mind looking to hook their readers and keep them coming for more.
Marketing Takeaway
And there you have it.
Learn from other people’s mistakes – my grandma was right about that. Did I do it? Of course, not.
But now you have a chance to.
Take it.
Love it or hate it? Comment to show me that you’re alive!
Hey Ana! Wow you are EVERYWHERE!! lol great article and I gota admit I chose the wrong domain when I first started and although I built a pretty good following I could not quite build a brand around it.
So now I’m building a new blog with a whole new mindset and all the articles I’ve read from you are setting me in the right direction.
Joshua the ZamuraiBlogger
Yes, you are everywhere aren’t you? How do you do it all? You obviously devote ALL your time to your blog.
I’ve bookmarked your 202 Bite Sized page already!
Bruce
Hey Ana,
I am so glad you listed “Picking the wrong Niche” first. If you start a blog in a niche that is saturated or doesn’t have any buyers in it, you have already failed. If your goal is to make money from your blog, that is.
I find it hard to believe their are bloggers out there who are not using a self hosted wordpress blog. Hosting is cheap and domains are cheap as well, so what is stopping you?
Keyword research is not really as hard as people make it out to be either. You don’t even need a tool, like Market Samurai to do it either, of course it will take longer with free tools, but it can be done effectively.
Everyone who reads this should listen to what Ana says. By following her advice, I have taken my first blog from no visitors and a 3 million alexa rank, to loads of visitors and a 200,000 global alexa rank, in just 6 months. Pretty impressive I think, but of course I am biased.
Thanks Ana for sharing and have a great day!
Right on the mark! There really is no other way around making money online, long term than to work your butt off and put in the time and effort in applying the steps and principles to success that you just shared. Thanks!
Wow!… everything has so much sense now! I really was misleading my efforts in the wrong direction. Ok… three steps back and start over.
Thanks for the heads up
Nice to read your guest post Ana. It gives me great joy to always read your piece. You write concisely and explain the necessary steps needed to achieve a long term success blogging.
Though I have one question: what’s your take on blog contest. Should bloggers invest time into hosting one or ignore it?
That was a great blog post.. I think my first problem was thinking I could make money with those wordpress.com domain.. LOL
I think most people start off with the wrong platform then when they figure out that making money with this is so limited, they start looking for a way out..
Great post. Hope they can read this before they start blogging…
One of the best methods for learning something is by making mistakes and like Einstein said, “someone who has never made any mistakes has never tried anything new”
How about dropping by my blog and letting me know if I pass your litmus test?
btw,
Thats a cool call to action you put at the end: Comment to show me youre alive
This is a great article,for anyone starting the joys of blogging and success, this article posted here will really help.
I started some 6 years ago when things were a bit easier to make some dollars on line,however now a different ball game-They say “content is king” so true and as Ana so rightly says you have to be in a niche that you have a passion about as hell hard to write great content a few times a week with no passion
Over the years have around 97 blogs,you know I guess around 5 are successful-reason being they are on my hobbies,like I fly rc helicopters and planes,one of my rc plane site now gets over 9,000 hits a month and only 6 months old-again as Ana says the right domain name and in my view also is crucial-
Another tip if doing a review on a product buy it yourself and use it,then you can write on good and bad points as you have experienced them for your self and not pinched other peoples reviews which are plastered all over the search engines-unique content always-sorry love this article and making a dollar on line I go on a bit-read this article above at least twice-Thanks Ana-have posted your article on my Facebook!
Im not so sure about this advice. You may have reached a dead end in step 1.
“Usually it’s a combination of what you like to do and are passionate about and if there is a demand for the information and the products you can promote within your niche.”
What if you are passionate about something but there is no demand, or there is a demand but you are not passionate? Then you have reached a dead end already.
I am also just starting a new blog and these tips will really help me go a long way.
Hi,
This is a Great Article – packed with some excellent advice and tips.
Follow these steps (really liked the piece on My Perfect Recipe to Building a Popular Blog – Step by Step) and you surely succeed.
Thx
Neil
Yes picking the wrong niche is disastrous and thank you for sharing your pitfalls as i shall try not to make these same mistakes.You also need to make sure you are adding real value to your blogs and providing great content that is key to getting visitors to keep coming back.I try and give great content.Thanks for sharing.