So you think your great idea for a blog is gonna “go” viral the minute you push “publish”? It’s possible, just like it’s possible for you to hit a ball out of Wrigley Park your first time at bat. So for those who want to be smart about how to avoid blog mistakes, here is a list of the top 5 blogging bad moves you can make right out of the chute, and how to avoid them:
1. THINKING READERS WILL FIND YOU WITH NO HELP
It astounds me when people begin blogs certain their posts will “go” viral when they’ve done nothing to promote it. Sure all your friends and relatives may click on your new blog, but to generate real traffic you have to, at the very least, promote your blog by a.) networking and b.) providing posts that enrich your readers in some way. For example, launch a blog project (like Christal Presley’s 30 Days with My father, now a book to be released next year) or have a contest – give people a reason to come back – rather than just navel gaze and wonder why your audience is dwindling.
2. IGNORING THE BENEFITS OF SEO
SEO means “search engine optimization.” Writers have to face the fact that there is a new reader in their audience that deserves their huge consideration, and that reader is a robot named Google. If you don’t figure out and incorporate what Google is looking for in terms of your subject matter – and somehow proliferate that throughout your posts without sounding like a robot yourself – then you may as well pick out a cave for future residence.
3. DENYING “LINK LOVE” 
Unlike the old days, when writers kept their “sources” close to their chest, bloggers need to share their audiences in order to survive. The more blogs and other sites that link to you, and vice versa, the more new traffic you get and the more your fan base grows. So if you see a post you found informative, LINK it! And let them know you linked it. The idea is that they will reciprocate.
4. STAYING AN AMATEUR BLOGGER
In order to make a viable income from your blog, you have to host it under your own domain. When you blog under the auspice of Blogger or Wrodpress, for example, you are contrained in terms of marketing whatever it is that you want to sell, be it your book, your service as a house painter or your handmade soaps. Migrate your content to your own domain and will give you the ability to customize your blog so you can actually take orders and charge people, for example.
5. NOT PARTICIPATING WITH OTHER BLOGS
Like I said earlier, bloggers stay above extinction by sharing with each other. Let’s say you write a blog about albino vampires, for example. It would really serve you to join online forums devoted to your genre, AND it would doubly serve you to write guest posts on other blogs devoted to similar subjects (club-footed werewolves?) This allows the audiences of these sites to find you, which will put rockets of your traffic stats.
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To learn how to start a professional blog or just make the one you’ve got greater, sign up now for Atlanta’s Famous Blogging Workshop at the Shocking Real Life Academy with Hollis Gillespie and Michael Alvear!!
Hurry, the Atlanta blog workshop is limited to 25 attendees and we’ve sold out every blogging class! THIS CLASS IS SO POPULAR, THAT WE SELL OUT EVERY TIME!
| Buy Now! to attend the class on SUNDAY, April 17, 11am – 5pm
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Cost: $175
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* Includes finger food, champagne and inappropriate conversation.
CLASS Location is in the historic Castleberry Artist District at 313 Nelson St., Atlanta, GA 30313. The workshop space is a large live/work loft complex in Castleberry Point. There is ample street side parking as well as covered parking. CLICK HERE for directions from your location.
