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Top 5 Blog Content Mistakes

The most important part of a blog that attracts visitors and entices visitors to return time after time is great content. Design is important, but many readers will continue to visit and read a poorly designed blog with great content, but a well designed blog with poor content will have a hard time finding visitors.Here is a list of the top 5 blog content mistakes that I have come across recently.

Spelling/Grammar Errors

Blogs are some of the most frequently updated websites on the net. I often find many bloggers that seem to push out so much content that they do not proof read. There are few things that make a website more difficult to read than frequently misspelled words or poor grammar.

Incorrect spelling and poor grammar can be extremely distracting from the blogs content. You could spend hours writing a post that has great information, but if there are spelling and grammatical errors on the blog that is all the reader will remember.

The best way to prevent spelling and grammatical errors is to write all your blog posts in a word processing program (my favorite is MS Word) that has spell check and grammar checking abilities. Once you have the post written you can transfer it to the blog management software.

Stay on Topic

When blogging it is important to write about a niche you know about. I often run across blogs that are about anything and everything. There is no clear topic and there is no clear direction of the blog. This can be confusing and disorienting to a reader and should be avoided.

The best, and most popular blogs are those that have a clear subject matter. It is okay, from time to time, to add a post that is off topic, but it is very important to have a clear topic of discussion.

A great example is ShoeMoney.com. ShoeMoney.com is a blog about internet marketing and it stays on topic for most posts. Every now and the author will throw in off topic posts about Mixed Martial Arts and a few other topics. This works well because there is a clear subject, but the readers get to know a little bit about the author with the off topic posts.

Obvious Paid Blog Posts

Many websites are willing to pay a decent amount of money to get bloggers to talk about their website. Paid blog posts are becoming one of the better ways to advertise a product as well as a great way for a blogger to monetize their website.

The issue comes when the paid post is so far off topic that it becomes obvious. I was browsing a blog that was about video games and found a post about hitting the first page of Digg.com with links to sites that have nothing to do with video games.

This process is distracting and takes away from the bloggers credibility. It is widely known that many bloggers accept money for posts or links, it just looks very bad when they do not fit into the theme of the blog.

Lack of Unique Content

Why would anybody want to go to a website to read content that they can get from many other sources? There are many articles available from websites like EzineArticles.com that I see ending up on many blogs. Unique, compelling content is what attracts visitors and keeps them coming back.

If you find an article that you like, give a summary about it, link to it, and then give an opinion or a unique view on the subject. Posting the article on a blog as unique content adds nothing to your site, and as a side note, it hurts your sites SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Lack of an Opinion

Blogs have become popular, in part, due to the vast opinions that are shared. Opinions are what I would consider the lifeblood of the Blogosphere.

I have come across many blogs that are just posting facts and offering no commentary about it. Blogs, for the most part, are not intended to be passive observers or non-biased reporters. When visiting a blog, I want an opinion, I want bias, I want spin! If I want unbiased news I will go to FoxNews.com (Do you smell the sarcasm there?)