Things that will Kill Your Blog Post

Blogging is a lot like fishing. Some people do it all the time and never catch anything. While others catch everything. 

What kills a blog post? 

Here is a list of 12 things, ignore them and you will have a tough time being successful.

1. Crafting cute, clever or confusing headlines (or really bad ones)

Your headline is going to appear in many places. At the top of your post. The goal of the headline is to stop readers cold and draw them into your post. You can’t do that if you use cute, clever or confusing headlines. if you write headlines that are unique, ultra-specific, useful. 

2. Never linking to old posts

Just because you’ve published a post doesn’t mean you should forget about it. Each post is a valuable asset in which you can give new life to with each link. 

3. Never linking to other bloggers 

4. Forgetting to fill out your page title and description fields

 You’ll screw any chances of your post ranking if you forget to fill out the page title and description fields for each post. That meta data is critical to search engines crawling and indexing your site. And when you use keywords properly, it tells those spiders what the page is all about.

5. Creating clunky URLs

Creating clunky URLs for each post that people can’t read or search engines can’t index is another thing.

• http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/602-9912342-3046240?_encoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B000FN0KWA
• http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=98115&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1&iwloc=A

If you want to give your post a fighting chance in the SEO landscape, then you have to include recognizable words in your URL. This means keywords, too.

6. Plagiarizing other bloggers

That’s when the temptation to copy what other bloggers write comes in. (By the way, scrapers are shameless plagiarizers.) But there is no faster way to kill a post and ruin your reputation than to plagiarize.

7. Publishing less than one post per month 

8. Writing big blocks of copy

Writing short paragraphs is a basic blog post writing law. Just like simple words and short sentences. Resort to long blocks of copy and you are stacking the deck against your blog post.

9. Zero presence on any social media platforms

Hopefully you are on these sites (especially Google+) and hopefully you are being strategic about how you use these social sites to promote your content. Every post you publish needs a boost from your social media presence. 

10. Never inviting readers to leave comments

You also have to encourage people to comment. 

11. Writing about a topic nobody cares about 

12. Giving up

Blogging is hard work and commitments like job, family or other reasons can overtake your blog. That happens. This is why it is so important to count the costs before starting a blog because in the end giving up on your blog will kill every post you’ve ever written and success will not come.