Do You Have These Bad Online Publishing Habits?
Habits are formed, whether good or bad; and the sensible person will accept what bad habits he has formed. More so, he will go one step further and do something to rectify the situation.
When it comes to publishing online, bad habits are not uncommon. The question is whether or not you, the writer, have realized that you have some of those bad habits and if you are willing to get rid of them.
Here are some bad online publishing habits for you to peruse and get rid of (if you have them).
Made up authors
It’s a no brainer. Readers will trust an article more if they know the person behind it. A generic avatar, even though it’s grinning, doesn’t really do anything to add authority. It’s so easy to create a Gravatar, which will show your real face. More so, why create fake authors when you have real people writing articles anyway?
Writing/publishing just to have some content up
This is an easy trap to fall in to. You don’t have anything to write about, so you just pull a topic out of your a$$ and string words together in the hopes of saying something that’s more than gibberish.
Forget it. No content is better than poor content.
If coming up with topics on the fly is an issue, I suggest you read a previous post of mine: 6 Things That Will Help You Churn Out More Blog Posts.
Entertaining shady link partners/advertisers
You won’t believe how many emails I receive from online casinos, online “gaming” companies, and adult sites – all offering a goodly sum for a link or an ad block. Or maybe, you can believe that – you might get them yourself.
As tempting as it may be to accept $100 or more for a single link or post, think about the consequences. Do you really want to be that blog? Oh, and Google.
Writing long-winded posts especially because you have a word count to meet
I’ve known really good writers who can pull in traffic and engage readers with a short post – 300 words or even less. No issues with that, right?
But then, there seems to be the idea that the longer the post, the better. NOT!
If you have something to say, and you can say it in 300 words, why go to 700 words?
So maybe you have a required word count. That means you’re blogging for someone else. Maybe you can talk with your editor so that you have the leeway to not meet that word count if a shorter post will give the same quality. Needless to say, do not abuse that agreement.
Not linking to relevant pages that will give your readers more (useful) information
So you’ve got a mighty fine article with lots of tips, tricks, and data to support your premises. But you don’t feel like sharing your sources, so you don’t link back to any of them.
Sure, linking is a touchy issue, but my point is, when you mention resources, for example, why not link to their website directly? That way, your readers just have to click on that link and not search for the website themselves.
Here’s a good example of this kind of informational linking: 4 Powerful Free CRM Integrations & Plugins for Your WordPress Site.
So do you have any of these bad online publishing habits? Time to get on it and make some changes, then!