101 Tips To Drive Traffic Away From Your Blog
Exactly what it says. Not all of them will be applicable to everyone, but all of them will be applicable to someone; and of course, there are exceptions.
Enjoy!
Design
1. Pack your site full of Adsense, especially when you’ve just launched
2. Use flashing GIF’s
3. Use a design that everyone else is using
4. Don’t change the header, or any visual aspects of the free theme you’re using
5. Use fonts that are too small
6. Use fonts that are too big
7. Use light text colours on light backgrounds
8. Use dark text colours on dark backgrounds
9. Have a huge header, especially of yourself
10. Make your main content area too wide, so it’s difficult to read
11. Don’t show any difference between normal text and hyperlinked text
12. Leave no margin around your images
13. Use fonts like Comic Sans
14. Fill your sidebar with icons/images
15. Fill your sidebar with blogrolls
16. Make the page width over 1000px
17. Don’t optimize images for the Web
18. Avoid aligning headers, sidebars, graphics or titles, etc
19. Use too many colours
20. Have no ‘design’
Usability
21. Don’t offer RSS feeds
22. Don’t have a contact page
23. Have “Site best viewed with…” somewhere in the page. Especially IE6
24. Have too many categories
25. Use a free service for your blog with a free domain e.g. example.blogspot.com
26. Send out a newsletter everyday
27. Make your url and site name completely unrelated
28. Use a visible site counter, especially when you get very few visitors
29. Use a visible feed counter when you’ve under 50 subscribers
30. Don’t use points or subheadings
31. Use words that are completely obscure, and no one knows
32. Get music to play automatically when people visit
33. Use the Snap Shots plugin
34. Make your site so heavy, dialup users have to wait 30 seconds for each pageload
35. Use lots of Flash
36. Have a splash page
37. Don’t have a search box
38. Design a site usable in one browser only
39. Place so much content on one page, that users can barely click on the scrolling bar
40. Make links open in a new browser window
Relationships
41. Show no respect towards highly respected bloggers/webmasters/designers
42. Leave rude, negative comments on other people blogs
43. Be a pseudo expert in your niche
44. Don’t try to become an expert in your niche
45. Never trackback to other blogs
46. Email everyone (especially people you don’t really know), to tell them of your latest post
47. Be deliberately controversial
48. Recommend products that you’ve never tried yourself
49. Never leave comments on other blogs
50. Never reply to emails
51. Never take advice
52. Ignore visitor questions
53. Never help another blogger - every man for himself
54. Turn comments off
55. Don’t reply to comments
56. Treat people in a different manner than you would treat them face-to-face
57. Allow commenters to attack other commenters
58. Don’t admit when you’re in the wrong
59. Write about, and name your collegues and boss without their permission
60. Delete comments just because they disagree with you
Content
61. Copy other peoples work
62. Write about your trip to the supermarket
63. Rite lik dis, u no, lik a txt msg
64. Use no punctuation at all which makes your writing hard to follow and people have no idea when to stop or breathe and the sentance loses any meaning because the reader is so annoyed with the writing that they don’t even know what youre writing about
65. Use there, their, they’re and your, you’re in the wrong places
66. Don’t hyperlink when you’ve cited a reference
67. Write reviews that are always negative, pointing out all the faults
68. Use foul language - swear/curse/cuss
69. Update twenty times a day
70. Update sporadically
71. Offer nothing new
72. Copy articles, and ‘tactfully‘ reword them in a way where they lose their effectiveness
73. WRITE IN UPPERCASE
74. Never proofread
75. Write boringly, without passion
76. Don’t write in your own voice, copy someone else
77. Write about everything
78. Always write really long posts, and never break them into a series or parts
79. Write only paid-per-post or paid reviews
80. Change blog topics
Miscellaneous
81. Use popups
82. Require registration in order to leave comments
83. Write for search engines
84. Don’t have an about page
85. Use post titles that tell the reader nothing about the content
86. Blog solely for money
87. Offer partial feeds
88. Don’t use Akismet, or any way of stopping spam
89. Don’t keep up-to-date with the latest news in your niche
90. Focus on traffic and ignore content quality
91. Choose a url with-more-than-one-hyphen
92. Change your url
93. Have a Blogger blog
94. Use an unreliable host
95. Have your content below the fold
96. Have large blocks of text, with no paragraphs or breaks
97. Leave out relevant images or videos that could support your post
98. Email people to ask them to ‘Digg’ your post
99. Have 40 ’socialize’ icons at the bottom of each post
100. Have a contest that requires lots of effort by the participant, with a $10 prize
…and most importantly
101. Don’t have a blog!
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Comments
52 Responses to “101 Tips To Drive Traffic Away From Your Blog”
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dude! these had me rolling! esp #s 35, 36, and 81! i hate those! lol
32, and especially 39 - playing music…that is so annoying! Why would I want to listen to music? The only thing this ever does is make me jump out of my skin, and then I leave the site in disgust!!!! :-L
Great post Armen!
How I hate music that plays automatically: This is why my speakers are usually switched off….
Yeah, I’m not surprised that badly used flash, popups, and background music go down as some of the worst; and yet, the Web is still rampant with them!
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That is a great list!!
BTW, thanks for the Digg!!
Armen,
Superb list! I’ve stumbled it for you.
Having just arrived via Dawud’s blog I wanted to say that I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments on being part of a whole.
Couple of things, I’m not entirely sure how much a partial feed affects your subscriber base. I’ve been offering a full feed for some time now, but if I see a partial feed that grabs my attention I’m more than happy to click through to the site.
Also, I believe you could slightly improve your own blog by hyperlinking your blog logo to the home page.
Saman - Thanks! No problem, it deserved it.
David - I have a couple of blogs on my list that I really enjoy that use partial feeds. I click through, but I’d rather not have to. I’ll get through my feeds a lot faster if I don’t, and I don’t think bloggers should assume their site is worth spending more time on than others. If the Full Text Feed plugin wasn’t available, I’d be offering partial feeds too probably, but now there’s no excuse in my opinion.
About the logo; it’s been on and off my to-do list, but I should have made it priority. I’ll get it done asap. Oh, and thanks for the Stumble, I really appreciate it.
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I haven’t seen too many blogs with music coming up… just myspace pages.
That was a great list though!
Kelly - Yeah, to be fair, it’s not as big a problem as it used to be. However, it’s still highly frustrating when you come across it, especially because people should know better by now.
I’ll be sure to do this.
Great list! There were some really important points that I’ll make sure to get right in my own blog during the weekend. Thanks!
Superb list…
And me thinking that I had improved my site completely. There are always a few things that always slip our minds… With this list, now I know where to start looking…
Thanks
[…] Armen Says: May 12th, 2007 at 11:18 pm […]
Great list, very funny to read but also so true of many blogs. I’m working on starting my own blog soon and will be sure to avoid these.
One question on #33, this looks like a cool plug in that could improve usability and I’m considering using. What’s bad about it?
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I agree with a ton of these, but some I choose to ignore. I write long posts, and I won’t change, because I’m a storyteller…it’s what I do. I write about everything (I’m “eclectic”). But, I switched from Blogger, and now can’t understand why anyone would use it. I dislike music on a site, and I agree that presentation is important.
Just so you know, I clicked on your “contact” page, because I was curious about yours and got a 404.
Shelly - Like I said, there are exceptions. For instance, a lot of Steve Pavlina’s articles are very long, but it works for him.
Thanks for telling me about the link, fixed now.
Great list, definitely very funny and unfortunately true of many blogs out there. I did have a question maybe someone can help me with. What’s wrong with #32, using the Snap Shots plug-in? I’m working on starting a blog of my own and I saw this on someone else’s blog and thought it was pretty cool and could actually improve usability. I’m still learning but this list really helps.
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Edwin - I’m glad you liked the list, and as a new blogger, I hope it’s beneficial to you.
If you want to learn why I object to Snap Shots, read my post on two plugins, it’s the one you don’t need.
Armen,
Thanks for the link, interesting perspective on the Snap Shots plugin. One of the commenters to that post, Pamdoc, posted that he changed the setting so that it doesn’t pop up when you mouse over links but over a special display icon after the link. Do you guys think this solves the problem for most people? I still like the plugin and was wondering if there are some settings that would give users the benefits without annoying them.
Edwin - At the end of the day, it’s you’re choice, but I really don’t think it offers any value, especially if your links have a discriptive anchor text.
I can work around the plugin, but someone with disabilities using a program to surf the web, will probably just get frustrated and leave. I don’t want to risk losing visitors over a usability issue, there’s no excuse for it.
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I agree on most of this, but I can tell you the SnapShots are actually good and a number of people wrote me, thanking me after I finally installed it. It hasn’t affected traffic one way or another. I have, though, decided that the DIGG-THIS icon is going because it’s fundamentally worthless anymore. The StumbleIcon doesn’t do much better but at least I still like Stumble
My blog must be okay because I’ve broken the 100,000 hits mark and it’s still going strong.
Eric - At the end of the day Eric, your site is yours, and you’re free to do what you want. If your visitors appreciate it, then you should have it. However, those that don’t like it won’t even bother contacting to tell you, they’ll be so frustrated they’ll just want to leave. I try to place emphasis upon accessibility for all users, and SnapShots upset handicapped visitors.
The benefit of the social networking sites is severely over-rated, but I wouldn’t say no to a front page on Digg either
Keep up the good work.
Whew! I was nervous when I saw the title but I think I’m only guilty of using the rare cuss word and going off topic on occasion. Great post! Thanks!!
Gabrielle - Well I know I don’t appreciate reading swear words. There’s no need for it in my opinion.
Off-topic is fine, as long as it’s interesting, and not too frequent.
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40. Make links open in a new browser window
I’ve been guilty of this in the past - I had settled upon the convention of using TARGET=”_BLANK” on external links (those outside my own domain) and not using that attribute on “in-house” links. I had originally done this in an effort to boost the “stickiness” of my site. And I also thought it might make things easier for a large portion of our regular visitors who are older and/or less computer-savvy.
With the ever-increasing backlash against that practice, I’m certainly starting to rethink my position…
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Rob - I think research has shown that basically, when someone clicks on a link that leads to another site, they’re most likely ready to leave your site anyway. Therefore, frustrating them by opening another window makes little sense.
It’s probably debatable, but my hope is my content will bring people back anyway, even if they do click through to another site. If I really was afraid of people leaving, I wouldn’t link to others in my posts, or have a ‘Links’ page.
Well, unfortunately, I’m a blogger that use free Blogger blog. Anyway, whether people gonna visit or not, at least we have written something that express about us (I mean myself). Although not every content in our blog are the reality, but to be a blogger is to be someone that able to share, even without paid. To write a blog = To want people to know = To enlarge our network but To get paid more.
Thanks for sharing, It’s really helping for blogger communities.
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Very helpful for beginners indeed. Will try to use most of your hints for my own blog.
Thanks!
wintergarten - You’ve got a good design, but you should keep the designers link in the footer; it’s only right.
Thanks for the encouraging words.
I hate auto music play websites. I close them the moment it starts playing.
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Very nice list, but some of the things you mentioned aren’t that bad for traffic so you should reconsider and rewrite the list.
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I agree with comment 45. Although a very extensive list; some of the suggestions aren’t as bad as the title of this post suggests.
That was awesome, thanks for sharing it.
I generally prefer links to open in a new tab, but not a new window. Chances are once I leave someones blog I will never be back unless I stumble across another link to it. I web surf very randomly and though not everyone surfs this way I’m sure lots of people do.
Other than that, great list, not that I blog, but it was interesting.
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What about having broken links?
Also, popularity does not equal quality, google and others are working hard trying to solve the problem.