Learn From My...er...eMom's Blogging Mistakes

The best way to avoid making a mistake in life or in business, is to watch and learn from the mistakes made by other people. That's why I found it refreshing to see Wendy Piersall make a post outlining her ten biggest blogging mistakes from her first year of posting. Some are big, some are small, but all are things that you can easily avoid when you decide to launch your own blog.

Here are Wendy's Top Ten Mistakes: (visit eMoms to read her explanations)

1. I chose the easy blogging platform instead of the right blogging platform
2. I stopped commenting on others’ sites
3. I stopped linking out thinking I was Steve Pavlina
4. I did too much self-promotion
5. I blogged 7 days a week
6. I used number based permalinks instead of post title URLs
7. I ran my contest way too long
8. I didn’t promote my feed
9. I waited too long to learn about SEO
10. I slammed a future good friend

Since no one is immune from making mistakes, I thought I'd throw up a short mistake list of my own.

1. Not putting my blog on my own domain. When I was setting up The Lactivist for my 30 Day Experiment I was trying hard to cut budget corners. Rather than wait a few extra days to get enough money to pay for monthly hosting so that I could put the blog directly on my URL, I got impatient and started blogging on a Blogger subdomain. While it hasn't hurt the popularity of the blog, it's now created a monster that will be difficult to move, but that gets MORE difficult to move every day.


2. Blogging in spurts. I still have problems with this one. Some days, you have a million ideas and topics for writing, other days you can stare at the screen for an hour and get nothing. It took me a good six months to realize that on the days I'm full of ideas, I should add them to a running log of ideas and topics to write about. OR, I should write the posts, but hold them to be published on one of those "stare at the screen" days.


3. Slacking off on commenting. Like Wendy, I often find myself absolutely buried in work and my visits to other blogs suffers. It's not that I don't read their writings via my feed reader, it's that I don't take the time to visit and add my two cents. My own blogs make me fully aware of the power of comments, so it's a continual battle to force myself to go and take part in more conversation.