Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche [Day 4: 31DBBB]
watching, listening and observing . . . so often, we’re in a hurry to make changes. Pause is good, a pause with fresh perspective is better. Excellent warnings below:
1. Don’t become Obsessed with what other Bloggers are Doing
A trap some bloggers fall into is spending so much time watching their ‘competitors’ that they spend less time actually building something of value of their own. This analysis is useful to do every now and again – but don’t let it become something that you do at the expense of other core activities on your own blog.2. Don’t Copy – Be Unique
Another trap I see some bloggers doing is virtually replicating every aspect of another blog. While there’s a lot we can learn from others and lessons we can take from what others are doing – if you simply copy everything another blog does you don’t differentiate yourself and give potential readers no real reason to read you instead of others.
21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog
I haven’t really done no.6. much. should I? Two links already from Problogger today (The rest is via him anyway. Thanks!) 🙂
21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post
Interesting to note my Chinese name Ming (?) can mean Tweet! I’m working on #5. The highlight on Ernest Hemingway once famously told F. Scott Fitzgerald got my attention:
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments
Very helpful. I didn’t leave a comment but I think there will be a trackback. So, that’s like commenting right?
43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
Agree with the following or the points made me think.
2. Make the content scannable: this is the Internet, not a book, so forget large blocks of text. Probably I will be visiting your site while I work on other stuff so make sure that I can scan through the entire content. Bullet points, headers, subheaders, lists. Anything that will help the reader filter what he is looking for.
9. Do not overuse Flash: apart from increasing the load time of your website, excessive usage of Flash might also annoy the visitors. Use it only if you must offer features that are not supported by static pages.
10. Do not play music: on the early years of the Internet web developers always tried to successfully integrate music into websites. Guess what, they failed miserably. Do not use music, period.
24. Do not blend advertising inside the content: blending advertising like Adsense units inside your content might increase your click-through rate on the short term. Over the long run, however, this will reduce your readership base. An annoyed visitor is a lost visitor.
34. Do not use animated GIFs: unless you have advertising banners that require animation, avoid animated GIFs. They make a site look unprofessional and detract the attention from the content.
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