Ever since I have become a blogger, I had the rare pleasure of connecting with many top bloggers in the world. Some I interviewed for hours so that I could get into their mind and understand what separates them from the rest of the world. Why they are so successful, why they attract so much “people love” and how did they get started in the first place?

Not only that, I have over 1000+ blogs that I scan everyday for my personal reading via my RSS reader.

Wordpress Evangelist Lorell Van Fossuem made a brilliant post on her Blog titled. “The 12 biggest problems with your blogs” highlighting this issue in great depth.

Here are a few from my own observations( by no way they are ground breaking, but still are very relevant)..

1. Follow Up Blunders
This is probably the biggest reason why most bloggers don’t make money online and also ruin their credibility in the process. We all know quality optins are important for followup marketing. The best way to collect peoples email addresses is to place an optin box on the blog prominently somewhere.

In order to expedite list building most bloggers deviate from the stand norm and try forcing user actions. We all know Forced Action is a dangerous thing in the web 2.0 world. Here is what I mean by “Forced Action”

• Use of Lightbox: A light box forces a user action. It stops the visitors from accessing the blog till they opt-in. Certainly the visitors can close the box without opting in, but most visitors don’t. They reluctantly opt-in only to opt-out at a later time. For every 100 people who opted in on my personal blog 40 people unsubscribed almost instantly.

  Lightboxes facilitate in building huge lists pretty fast. I made a detailed post about lightboxes on this blog. The technology aspect of putting a lightbox on a blog pretty easy. There are many softwares that can do that, what most bloggers don’t realize is, its the content quality, offers, call to actions, frequency of emails in the follow up sequence matter the most.

  So my suggestion to you is, consider an optin box if you now for sure that you have a series of follow up messages that can create enough value for the visitors to come back more often to you.

• Pop-Unders, Pop-Overs & Exit Popups: They all have a role to play, there are pros and cons for using any of them. Exit pop-ups seem to be doing well in the market lately, but I am still testing them on several of my blogs. If not properly handled these pop-ups can become pretty annoying.

2. Monetization blunders Monetization is an important aspect of blogging. But when couple of greed it could prove fatal. I admire many blogs for the rich content and stickiness, but I denounce many for their aggressiveness to squeeze every dollar from their visitors. Some common problems include saturated right panel with 125X125 ads, dazzling banners on the header and footer areas. Contrasting colors of banner ads that restricts good reading experience. etc

3. Filler Content: Imagine loading up a good perfoprming blog with filler content. Filler content is the silent killer. The need to stuff the blog with filler content stems from a desire to maintain or advance rankings on search engines. Filler content in my opnion is more dangerous than PLR content.

Personally I had been in situations where despite of my best effort my content was percieved as Filler or less than average. This is a common problem with those bloggers who struggle with Writers Block. My advice to don’t publish anything in a hurry. save the work as a draft. Revist, Re-write and Refine it till you are 100% satisfied. this leads us to the next point..

4. Hurry To Publish: Not many bloggers use the future scheduling function on their blogs. I personally, still write my posts on a daily basis and enjoy them upon publishing. When I am constrained for time, I try to push myself to publish the content ASAP.

I have come to realize that this desperation stems from my need to maintain my search rankings and also to live up to my existing reader’s expectation to find new content every time they visit my blog.

In most cases this has resulted in grammatical errors, compromised quality and bunch of verbiage that means nothing. As you know average content worse than no content and can have far reaching implications.

3. Family Comments:Sometime ago I made a post on this blog warning bloggers about stuffing their sites with comments from friends and family. You can read about it here.

Initially when starting out many bloggers solicit comments from friends and family. While there is nothing wrong in doing this, when done for a long time it could potentially create a false sense of accomplishment. You need genuine comments.

5. Do not visit their own blog: Bloggers who desperately seek traffic for their blogs, seldom visit their own blogs on a daily basis. Its a crime to expect someone else to visit your site, while you yourself never visit your own site.

In my view, this is absolute disrespect. Remember, If you don’t enjoy and cherish your own work, then others will have a all kinds of excuses to run you over.

This “Do You Abuse Your Own Blog?” post has now inpsired me to write another post titled “Do You Abuse Your Own Content?” So stay tuned for that..