Seven Simple Ways to Annoy Your Readers

If you want to make a living blogging, there are a number of things that you need to get right. Arguably, the most important being some killer content and some savvy SEO. One other thing that you need to get right however, is to not irritate your readers.

Many bloggers make mistakes, that unbeknown to them, greatly irritate their readers. Such mistakes result in a loss of traffic, a loss of profit and in some cases, a loss of a blog. Here are seven simple ways to turn loyal readers against you.

Ignore Your Comment Sections

Just about every blogger is aware of the importance of blog commenting when it comes to promoting their blog. What many bloggers don’t realise is that how they handle their own comment sections is equally important.

When somebody leaves a thoughtful comment on your blog, you need to respond. When you fail to do so, it gives the impression that you do not care what your readers think. And that’s simply not how you build a following.

Take Frequent Unannounced Holidays

One of the first rules of running a profitable blog is that you post on a regular basis. You can post daily or weekly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you post to a specific schedule.

When you disappear, your readers continue to check your blog for new posts. When they do so, they get disappointed. And eventually disappointed readers stop being readers.

Cover Your Blog in Ads

Bloggers, like anybody else, deserve to earn a living. And one of the easiest ways to turn a blog into a profitable web property is to include a few advertisements. There’s nothing wrong with this and most of your readers aren’t going to begrudge you for it.

There is however a line and when you cover your blog in flashing banners, you’ve crossed it. If you want to monetize your blog, do so with subtlety. If your ads are the first thing that visitors see, you’re not being subtle.

Write Sneaky Sponsored Posts

Another highly effective way to monetize a blog is to write sponsored posts. While there’s nothing wrong with sponsored posts, two important rules must be followed.

First off, sponsored posts must be honest. Don’t write a positive review for a poor product. And secondly, the sponsored nature of a sponsored post must be declared. Break these rules and you will lose your readers respect.

Make Navigation Impossible

The wonder that is WordPress allows just about anyone to create a reasonably professional looking blog. Web design expertise is therefore by no means required to profit from blogging.

One thing that you do need to get right however is your blogs navigation system. If navigating your blog is confusing, frustrating or simply inefficient, you will lose readers. Here are a few tips to help you avoid this faith.

Categorise your posts in a clear fashion.

Include links to said categories on every page.

Underline all textual links and don’t underline any other text.

Use breadcrumbs so that readers know where they are.

Experiment with Cool Fonts

There are many ways to express yourself in your blog but your choice of font isn’t one of them. When deciding what font to use for a new post, the only thing that you should be thinking about is legibility.

This means nice big, black letters. It doesn’t mean Comic Sans and it certainly doesn’t mean yellow text.

Make Them Wait

Some bloggers get a little carried away when it comes to making their blog look shiny. They add a few hundred photos, choose a textured background and finish the effect with some nice Flash graphics.

While the resulting blog often looks fantastic, it suddenly takes forever to load. This is not a clever trade off to make. If you think that your blog takes longer than average to load, here are a few tips for solving the problem.

Limit photos to one per post.

Optimize all photos.

Remove flash completely.

Clean up your blogs code (or pay somebody to do it).