We bloggers have become lazy. Even in our ever-growing pursuit for followers and views, we have decided that some pieces of blogging are beneath us. And so, in our passivity, we have neglected key parts of our blogs and the posts therein. This has resulted in a lack of blog quality and a lowering of standards. But, if we work hard and learn from our failures, we can overcome the failures of our past and turn the Christian blogging community into a high-quality writing niche.

So, to combat laziness and blog failure, here are five common mistakes that many bloggers make. If you read these carefully and correct the mistakes that you are already making, you will immediately find an increase in your blog traffic and visitors.

1: Many bloggers don’t advertise themselves. I mean, come on. How do you expect people to find you? There are over 1 billion websites now, and many of those are personal blogs. Unless you have extremely high SEO, you should be advertising yourself whenever possible. Ways to advertise include sending monthly emails, running advertisements, badgering your friends to read your posts, commenting on other blogs with helpful criticism, and telling new friends about the site. I am actually doing all of these except the second one, which I won’t start doing for a few more months. However, you can see the result- in the last month alone, I’ve averaged two followers a day. Obviously, that’s not insane, but 14 followers a week is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a kid from Africa.

2: Some bloggers don’t change anything beyond the preliminary pieces of their blog. They may set the site up, change a few things around, and create an awesome site, but they never change it. I probably make between three to four major blog changes per month, not including widget changes. A blogger that constantly changes and upgrades their site with fresh ideas will find himself with increasing traffic.

3: Very, very few bloggers ping their site. This is, quite honestly, one of the most important and unknown parts of blogging. If you want Google to index your site faster, thus giving you more visitors, you have to set up a pinging website. Thankfully, this process is extremely easy; it probably takes about five seconds from beginning to end. Simply go to Ping-O-Matic, found here, enter your website name, URL, and RSS URL (the URL to your posts page), make sure that all the boxes below are checked, then click “Send Pings”. As instructed, bookmark that page and come back every time you make a major change to your website or release a post.

4: Only a few bloggers use Categories in their posts. Categories will, at the end of the day, make it easier for WordPress users to find your blog. At the time of this post, I have 20 categories pre-setup and ready, all encompassing the different subjects I blog about. I even have a general category to encompass most of my posts, titled “Africa”. Creating several dozen categories can attract more visitors to your site, especially if those categories directly relate to your site theme and focus.

5: Many bloggers fail to include tags on their posts. “AGH! Tags!” You probably are screaming. Yes, tags are difficult and annoying. After all, who wants to go out of their way and spend an extra thirty seconds on a post when you could be releasing it? Me, for one. Tags are, by far, the best way for WordPress users to find individual posts. Just like categories attract visitors to your blog and blog theme, tags attract visitors to your individual posts, making it FAR easier for them to find you. Currently, because of my massive effort in including relevant tags, I rank third on WordPress for Africa blogs and fourth for Africa posts. Literally anybody that searches “Africa” on the WordPress reader can and will see my name and blog. All because I tagged “Africa” on every single Africa post. Crazy, huh?

So, to increase your traffic through tags, make sure that you are tagging relevant pieces of your posts. For example: If you did a post about pineapples, you obviously wouldn’t want to create a tag called “Donald Trump”. Instead, save that for a post in which you talk about politics or the President himself. As you create the tags for your post, make sure you ask yourself, “How do I want people to find this post? What search would likely produce this post?” So, in your post about pineapple, you might tag “How to cook pineapple”, in the hopes that fellow pineapple fans will come to your blog. Understand? Hopefully you do. If not, you can find more info at this website.

Alright, that’s all for today. Hopefully, you have learned a bit from this post, and will do your best to make your blog even better than it was before. Anyway, thanks for reading! I love you guys. Your support means a ton to me.

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