You check your traffic every day but all you find are tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape of your blog. Well, there’s a reason you’re not building readership. Your blog sucks.
Most do, and all for the same reasons. The same 10 reasons.
1. You use syndicated content. You can download badly-written articles on the topic of your website at ezine.com, helium.com, goarticles.com and other places on the web. You can cut and paste these pieces on your blog and all you have to do is provide a link back to the author’s site or blog. You can, but you shouldn’t. Without unique content your blog is nothing.
2. Your blog is boring. There I said it. Write about topics that interest me, your reader, not topics that interest you. I want you to keep me engaged, entertain me and teach me. Otherwise, you’re boring me.
3. Your blog revolves around your person. Stop talking about yourself already. I don’t know you personally, and I couldn’t care less about your ramblings. Tell me something I can use in my own life. Facts, stories, not boring personal stuff.
4. Oh no, not your favorite music on auto-play! So as soon as I access your blog, the ukulele string quartet starts playing? I’d rather hear an accordion band. Don’t add music to your site. Half the people won’t like it and the other half will find it’s a distraction.
5. You use clip art. I can spot it a mile away. The model smiling, the perfect family spending the day at the beach, the marathon runner — all license free clip art. And with free clip art, you get what you pay for.
6. I can’t find the post I want to read. So I have to scroll down through pages and pages to find the piece you posted two months ago. First, even the simplest blog platforms allow for categories and search boxes.
7. Your writing totally sucks. Oh, not the writing itself. You’ve got a good writing style. Easy to read. But your posts are loaded with typos, misspellings, lost punctuation and other mistakes that signal you don’t care enough about your readers.
8. You’re spinning articles. You might not be using software to actually spin the articles, but you are writing about the same stuff everyone else inside your niche is. This is not as bad as getting content from article directories, as you are actually using your own words here, but it won’t cut it all the same. Write something interesting or go home.
9. You post once a month. How often you think I’m coming back to see if there’s some new, pithy pearl of wisdom I can glean from your blog? If you can’t update your blog at least a couple of times a week, forget about it.
10. Your blog looks like 12023532989 other blogs. WordPress offers hundreds of templates from which to choose. So, if you choose Minima Brown, your blog will look like all the other writers who build blogs using Minima Brown (or Blue).
Does your blog suck? Well, roll up your sleeves and do something about it. It is still time!
Great article.
Well, it is really tough (and not necessary) to have a unique design for your blog, you can still customize your blog by incorporating custom header images. Otherwise, Content is king. You need to understand the pulse of readers and connect with them again and again.
Daniel, you are just doing that perfectly 🙂
Wow, 3 out of 10! That means my blog sucks a little :)! But I talk a lot about myself and about the topics which intrests me. Like Nintendo and stuff. I get around 80 visitors a day and that is quite nice for a blog that is only online for three to four months!
the rule has appeared here, I agree with this 10 reason
Agree with you Edward. I see that many bloggers are really guilty with #1 and #10. They don’t really care if they have a site full of syndicated posts and with themes that everyone’s using. All they care is to slap they site with full of adsense ads and pray that they could earn from it.
What if my blog sucks and that’s the niche I was going for?
What a perfect thing to blog about and not suck! If I blog about a blog that does not suck with original words of my own, no clip art….. I have a chance!
Let’s see. How will I start? The contrarian style
“This blog about how to not suck does not suck.”
The agreeable style
“The “why your blog sucks” is absolutely full of the best “unsucky thoughts ever”
The MAD style
“What is the point of stating the obvious. The blogs that suck don’t care if they suck and maybe that is why they do.”
The admiration style:
“If only I could meet the author of this incredible blog about why other blogs might suck. My day would then suck less”
OK
I guess I have to still think on it some. Maybe 3 more candy bars will do the trick. (not milk chocolate of course… they are bland and boy do they suck!)
Lucky me. I am now following Edward Khoo on Twitter!
Good stuff here. New fan. Just put it on my “how to blog better” page for another link to you.
@michaelhartzell
Given the ability to subscribe via RSS (through a ready or via email), posting frequency isn’t as important as posting quality.
Dosh Dosh is a perfect example. Sometimes monthly, sometimes a little more… but each article is well thought-out and I eagerly await reading them.
On our site we only publish new posts quarterly… mostly it’s because the majority of our time is spent doing the thing we blog about (filmmaking).
I guess if you blog about blogging you should post alot, but otherwise your posting rhythm should be the sweet spot where you ability to post meets having something to say worth writing about.
Do my blogs suck? Sometimes, especially when I can find a full stop and the blog post runs like waterfall.
I just hope my blogs do not scare away the hungry ghosts from hell. That will be the ultimate rotten blogs.
Why does my blog suck? Maybe its #2 or #7 above, I dont know what to do about that. I’ve only been blogging a little while, in September WP still meant Word Perfect to me. Now I’m tweaking .htaccess files. But my blog still sucks according to Google analytics and the fact that I have NO comments.
I think it has to do with my poorly chosen url from 2 years ago. No one knows what the hell qi-harmony means.
Anybody have some time to kill and some comments to spare?? Why DOES my blog suck? Thanks.
@ wouter Yeah, RSS readers on blogs help but you aren’t being innovative. All you’re doing is publishing some other author’s innovative writer’s work.
RSS feeds increase information velocity on the web but what does that have to do with information quality? If you’re relying on remote site syndication as a means of populating your blog, you’re already yesterday’s news.
Blog readers want it fresh and original. That’s why I like Edward’s posts. Who else would write a post with this title?
Wouter, we all know what RSS can do. Can you provide a list of what it can’t do? If so, you’ve made a good point. With utmost respect, if you can’t, you’re just taking up valuable bandwidth.
Webwordslinger