7 Blogging Shortcuts That You Should Avoid At All Cost

As a blogger, you must have realized by now just how much dedication and patience you need to keep your blog running. It’s not possible to acquire success overnight.

Those that want to succeed overnight try all kinds of shortcuts which end up damaging their reputation as bloggers. Here’s a list of shortcuts you must avoid at any cost.

Purchasing Links

If you come across an Ad offering you tons of links at a cheap rate, avoid it like the blazes. You may get the links you want, but you’ll never know the methods the people behind the Ads use to get those links. Did they use tactics like comment spam, posting links in self-owned blogs, link exchanges and so on? You won’t know.

The worst part is, you’ll suffer in the dark without knowing, when your site loses its ranking, importance, credibility and readership, even though all you did was buy something you thought was good.

Stealing Content

At least rewrite the content, and have the moral aptitude to credit the original site. You’ll be damaging your credibility with your own hands, and any reputation you’ve built as blog owner and SME will go down the drain.

Google will come down heavily on you and even your blog host can shut you down, if you’re flagged for duplicate content. Does this mean you cannot borrow ideas? No. Just make sure that you throw in something original from your own mind – your unique viewpoint, as it were.

Putting Up Too Many Adverts

Too many adverts on your blog and you will be driving away visitors. The route to steady monetization is the building of a good audience. No one likes to visit a site that is clogged with AdSense, banners and other Ads that scream the blogger’s only intent – that of making money overnight.

That doesn’t mean that AdSense is not a good way to make money; it is. Just don’t aim to achieve anything overnight. Phase out your monetization strategy so that your readers get used to it slowly and flow into it easily.

Using Automated Content Tools

Automated tools tend to import content from other sites, spin it all up and offer you something ‘original’. Readers want to perceive the person behind content, and the last time we checked, these tools are not human. Content spinners are getting cleverer these days, trying to produce content that’s as ‘human-like’ as possible. Unless you want your blog to lose its focus, credibility and uniqueness and usefulness of content, don’t use automated content tools.

Keyword-Stuffing Content

Why do your blog readers bother to visit your blog? So far, it’s because they like the content. What happens when you stuff your content with keywords in your niche? Readers are not stupid, they notice. They get discouraged and disappointed. You see, readers perceive that the content is for them to read and when you do keyword-stuffing, they realize that you don’t really care for them.

That, straight away, is a losing proposition. Focus on providing quality content, and build a relationship with your readers. Keyword stuffing will lose you visitors and also put you on the Google spam list, which means your ranking will suffer.

Trusting Search Marketers

There are no shortcuts when it comes to building quality links. Search marketers will try to convince you they can build you great links, but their methods are mostly unreliable and unethical. Links factor high in a search engine’s ranking algorithm, but that doesn’t mean your site ranks high because you have more links. Search engine ranking depends on 100s of factors, not just links.

Paying For Directory Submissions

Too many links too soon? That’s suspect, straight away. You could risk getting your site banned. Or, worse, your site could be listed in low-authority directories that won’t bring you any benefit. Put in the effort to get quality links, a few at a time.

Image Credit

This article is contributed by Sarah from Website Design Company GO-Gulf.com