Top 10 Mistakes You MUST Avoid in Blogging!

What are the top Mistakes to avoid while setting up your blog? Internet gurus can debate all day about what makes a blog so successful. Indeed, many strategies are subjective. There are, however, certain mistakes that we all agree MUST BE AVOIDED!

Instead of banging on all the time about the keys to success! I’m going to tell you how NOT to fail!

Here are the top 10 mistakes that you must avoid at all costs:

1. Having a slow-loading website

A web page shouldn’t take anymore than a few seconds to load. If people have to wait for our content to load, they will get aggravated. You definitely don’t want anyone’s first impression of your site to be agitation. Avoid this by ensuring all your images are below 100KB. (Ideally all images totalled should be under 100kb).

Sign up to Amazon S3 and get your videos hosted under cloudfront, after you’ve converted them from large file sizes down to the smallest you can manage without affecting the quality. DO NOT have a website full of flash! It’s not flashy if all your audience sees is a buffering circle – 3 seconds and they’re gone……

2. Having a sloppy, haphazard website

Everything should be organized neatly. Your layout should have easy navigation. All of your pages should be interlinked. If somebody wants to find something on your site, they should be able to do so.

Consider creating a sitemap, not only will it help your ranking in the search engines, it will guide people around your website. Ensure you have a search function and make sure there are clear calls to action, where you want people to go, how they contact you, how they get more information etc.

Sometimes when it comes to design – less is more!

3. Don’t forget to submit your site to search engines

This one seems like a no-brainer, yet a surprisingly large number of webmasters neglect doing this. Take the time to manually submit your website to Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Lycos, etc. (I didn’t do this for months – simply because I didn’t know I had to!)

Get your site out there! It’s no good happily filling it with content if no-one’s going to read it!

4. Failing to update your site or blog every single day

At the very least, you should update three or four times a week. The more original content your website has, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. Plus, consistent updates show dedication, which will give visitors a reason to return in the future.

Look, people want some real bang for their buck these days. The key word here is VALUE! You need to constantly be giving new, up to date, fresh content to your readers. Remember the web is incredibly competitive these days and if you’ve been really canny they’ve subscribed to your RSS and have a reader of up to date content hitting their screens daily.

Now if Mr Jones is posting new interesting stuff daily and you only come up with something new once a month, it won’t be long before your feed is canned, at the very least completely ignored! This takes work!

5. Not giving Social Networking a try

For so long I tried to ignore Facebook. I didn’t understand it and I thought it was a waste of time! Did you know that facebook has over 500 million customers and over 50% of them are active on a daily basis – that’s 250,000,000 people you could be getting your message in front of! That’s phenomenal! You Tube has 2 BILLION views a day – 24 hrs worth of video is uploaded every minute.

I mean you’d be crazy not to include these in your marketing strategies! Be as creative as possible when making videos, images, content, software, etc. Create great relationships with people and have friends and fans link your content through their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites.

Put your videos up on YouTube and have friends give them two thumbs up! Also create a facebook fan page, it’s essential 

6. Spamming

There is no need to spam your site all over the internet. If it’s good, and you promote it properly, people will visit. Traffic will come inevitably if you know what you’re doing. Spamming your site and adding your URL in linkfarms could cause your site to be reported to your ISP and banned by all search engines!

If you think that popping onto high ranking blogs and adding a vague comment about nothing and including your link is good marketing, think again. The internet as I said in point 4, is all about value and content. You need to build trust and relationships to be truly successful.

7. Not building a list

Ok, so I’m back again to value and content, building relationships. Are you getting a common theme here? Your list is your business. It’s as simple as that. Without customers there is no business, so you MUST collect email addresses and build a list!

Having a list of customers is the key to success on the internet! You will be able to send out regular updates, newsletters, links to your blog, new videos you do, new information and….once they trust you and know that your main intention is to provide value and things that will help them, you can start to send promotional emails with your products or products you believe in, or create a membership site or run events, there are so many ways you can then go on to make money. But the key is the quality of your relationships with a customer database, in other words your list.

8. Choosing the wrong products to promote

This is very simple – DO NOT SELL RUBBISH PRODUCTS! Just because commission rates are high, or the graphics are fancy, if you start farming out complete tosh to your trusted list, you will soon lose all credibility and no-one will buy from you anymore.

Be selective and become known to only ever recommend products that you have used and proven their worth.

9. Not targeting your ads to the right demographics

I think maybe the title of this one should read, not knowing anything about your customers, because it’s not just about targetting your ads, it’s about targetting all of your marketing efforts, free or paid. Clearly not everybody is going to need what you’re promoting.

So make sure you’ve drilled down exactly who your customers are, sex, age, location, interests, desires, buying patterns, keywords etc. Then you can focus on ensuring you get your message directly under the right noses.

10. Failing to interact and network with others

This is HUGE! No man is an island. The power of collaboration is without doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies you can have. So, you must ACTIVELY promote your company. You need to post on forums, join social media communities, comment on blogs, send out press releases, and so forth.

Get to know consumers and other entrepreneurs. Treat consumers as individuals rather than just potential customers. Join in conversations and share tips with others. Join hands and do some marketing projects with other entrepreneurs in the same niche – 2 heads are always better than 1!

Avoid making these ten mistakes and I’m sure you will ultimately succeed at creating a fantastic blogs online!

Fake 'Dislike' button spreads across Facebook

Social networking website Facebook, which offers its subscribers a "like" button for anyone's updates, is now faced with a fake "dislike" button, which is spreading like a virus across the site.

The fake dislike button is followed with a link that takes people to a fake application. Instead of installing a dislike button, the application uses the person's network to continue spreading the fake program.

Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos wrote in a blog that the fake dislike buttons "are going viral" on Facebook.

"Watch out for posts that look like this: I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts!" CNN quoted Cluley as writing in the blog.

"If you do give the application permission to run, it silently updates your Facebook status to promote the link that tricked you in the first place, thus spreading the message virally to your Facebook friends and online contacts," he wrote.

A message on technology blog Mashable said: "As usual, we advise you not to click on suspicious links on Facebook, especially if they promise something that sounds impossible or unlikely. Do not give away your personal information, unless you're absolutely sure why and who you're giving it to."

Cluley said the fake dislike button is part of a recent trend of Facebook scams. "It's the latest survey scam spreading virally across Facebook, using the tried-and-tested formula used in the past by other viral scams."

Such schemes are designed to steal information from internet users. That information then can be sold to other parties. The scams are also used to affect an internet user's social network contacts.

The experts give the following advice to avoid the fake button: "If you accidentally installed the fake application, click on the 'account' button at the top right of the Facebook home screen. Navigate to the option that says 'application settings' and disable the fake 'dislike' application."

"If the application is posted to your Facebook wall, go to your profile page and delete those posts to stop the scam from spreading further."

Facebook has said it is trying to block the "dislike" button.

"We're working hard to block and remove malicious applications that claim to provide dislike functionality and inadvertently update people's statuses," a Facebook spokesman said.

"There is no official dislike button. Also, don't click on strange links, even if they are from friends, and notify the person and report the link if you see something suspicious," the statement said.

Facebook reaches saturation point in Britain!

Social networking website Facebook is nearing its saturation point in Britain and its growth in the country has gone down over the past six months.

Britain, however, has the second-largest membership of Facebook in the world, at 25 million. The list is led by the US, while Indonesia and Turkey follow Britain.

Despite Facebook getting its 500 millionth user in July, the average amount of time spent on the social networking website by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27.36 minutes in July 2010, a study by web-analytics firm Hitwise said.

Facebook is, however, still the second most visited site in Britain, after Google, and it accounts for one in every six webpages accessed in the country.

Robin Goad, Hitwise's research director, says the figures show that Facebook is nearing its saturation point.

"Facebook's market share of page views has trebled over the last five years, but growth (in Britain) has slowed significantly over the last six months. Last month, there was a slight decline in share, but this may well be down to seasonality - the August to September back-to-school/college/university period is significant for Facebook," he said.

Facebook Bug: Decreases the Fan Counts!

Over the past few days many Facebook Page administrators have noticed their fan counts decreasing. If you’ve seen this happen, you are not alone. Facebook does not response on the issue, which means there is probably a bug which needs to be fixed. Unfortunately there hasn’t been any clarifications from Facebook, but don’t worry as many other people have noticed similar issues.

We watched our Facebook Page increasing in popularity earlier this week, however starting three days ago, the number of fans we have has decreased by over 400. Initially I thought that there had been a temporary surge in fans which was followed by a random mass “unfanning”, something that has never happen before. Even the top Facebook Pages, like Michael Jackson, have seen their fans decreasing.

So what on earth is going on? We have no idea to be honest but rather than not posting about the issue, we’ve decided to make it known that this issue appears to be happening to the vast majority of Facebook Pages. Don’t worry though, your fans should all be intact. We’ll definitely be sure to update this Page once we receive any information from Facebook, who has so far been quiet about the problem.

Facebook addresses this issue with the following statement: “There was a bug that caused an accounting error for the number of people who like a Page. We are working hard to fix this bug and restore the counts as quickly as possible. No fans or data was lost, and news feed distribution has not been affected.”