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15

May

11 reasons why your blog might suck

Posted by stuart as ,

  1. You use nofollow in your links. You expect me to come to your blog and interact with you, give you free content, but not get value for my link? No thanks!
  2. I can’t find your navigation for all the ads. I have no problem with you wanting to make a few bucks from your blog, hell, I might even buy through your affiliate link or click one of your ads if it interests me. Just not at the expense of me being able to find anything!
  3. You have no “recent comments” list. It’s just too damned hard to check back to see if you’ve responded to my comments without a list.
  4. You just repost others’ content without adding a new perspective or thoughts. Why would I read something on your blog that I can get from the original source
  5. Your blog takes forever to load. Dude, you’ve got thirty seconds, then I’m gone.
  6. You don’t publish an easy to find link to an RSS feed. I’m not coming to your blog every day to see if you’ve updated it. If I can’t find your RSS feed, I can’t subscribe to your feed.
  7. You don’t link out. Stingy bastard. Why would you expect people to link to you if you don’t link out?
  8. Your blog is full of irrelevant ads. I like ads. If they’re relevant to the subject I want to read about. Don’t hit me with a 336×280 Flash(ing) ad in the middle of your post about cheap airfares if I’m reading your blog about miniature schnauzers.
  9. You post too many reviews/paid posts etc. I want to know what you think about the subject at hand, not what someone else is telling you to think.
  10. You don’t post for a week then hit me with ten in a day. I have a short attention span. I’ll read two, maybe three, then lose interest.
  11. You cloak/redirect affiliate links. As I said in point 2 above, I have no problem with you wanting to make money. If you post a review of a product which I think I might want to buy, I’m happy for you to get your cut of the action. But why do you need to send me through www.yourblog.com/affiliateproduct.html and then do a redirect to the affiliate site? If you want to track the amount of clicks through the link, get some better stat tracking software.

That is all.

14 comments so far

Rhys says May 15th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

Regarding the whole nofollow/dofollow debate, I found a plugin (http://www.allpassionmarketing.com/software.html#linklove) which removes the nofollow for people who regularly comment on your blog, but leaves it on for people who comment less than 10 times. I just feel that drive by commenters who post nothing valuable (I was getting spammed by a member of my family to promote his business, he used a different name each time, the fool) who just want the google juice can be detrimental to my listings, and I don’t want to help them

Nice blog by the way, I’ve added you to my RSS subscriptions. I do like the fact you’ve used an image (may nick that idea myself!)

SarahG says May 15th, 2007 at 10:06 pm

Point 3 - I’ve taken to subscribing the comments feed on blogs too. I forget where I comment on sites and it’s nice to see the responses at times.

Point 11 - I use a spare domain to put all my referral links through, simply because I can remember the links better than I can the full link! It has nothing to do with tracking or hiding as I’ve taken to putting a title attribute in the link to state it is an affiliated link. It’s just easier.

Chance says May 15th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

Keeping this list in mind, it will be interesting to see your forthcoming blog reviews :)

Reasons Why This Blog Might Suck at Internet Marketing Fool says May 16th, 2007 at 3:00 am

[...] Stu’s posted 11 reasons why my blog might suck. I don’t think most apply (I’ll await his review of my blog before responding to the rest), but here’s my response to those that might. [...]

Will says May 16th, 2007 at 6:18 pm

12. Your blog isn’t accessible making it more diffifcult for people in certain circumstances to read it.

Stu, the black text of you blog disappears into the black page background when I view your blog IE on my Pocket PC!

stuart says May 16th, 2007 at 6:47 pm

Rhys - thanks for the kind words, I’m a new reader at your blog as well! :-)
Sarah - My feedreader is so full of blogs now I’m not sure it will fit comment feeds as well!
Fair point on the domains - a point I hadn’t considered.

Will - bugger, that’s something I hadn’t considered. I’m not even sure where to start in addressing that issue. I’ve been thinking of setting up a text only alternate version of the blog. Might be time to look a bit more closely at this.

Will says May 16th, 2007 at 7:26 pm

Stu, there’s a WordPress plugin you can install that renders mobile friendly pages. Try googling for “wp mbolie plugin”.

SarahG says May 16th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

Alternatively set up a stylesheet for different screen types ie. PDA, Phones etc. That way you can remove say bandwidth heavy photos and graphics but still inject a little design and colour into the site.

45n5 says May 17th, 2007 at 1:24 am

“If you want to track the amount of clicks through the link, get some better stat tracking software.”

I don’t understand that point. Do you recommend a better tracking software?

For instance, I redirect amazon affiliate links for statistical purposes because their reporting sucks.

How would you recommend I do so without a redirect? (more specifically, I like to get the referrer that sent me the buyer and keywords they used if from search)

Same for most affiliate programs, their stats suck.

Good list othwerise.

Will says May 17th, 2007 at 2:28 am

Following on from the redirect link point, how is having affiliate links in the messy raw format ‘better’?

stuart says May 17th, 2007 at 6:28 am

Will - you’re a legend. I’ll be having a look at that this morning.

Sarah - I like Wills’ idea because I suck at CSS!

Mark (and everyone else who’s made this point) - I hadn’t really considered the reasons behind redirecting affiliate links. Not really being into the whole affiliate thing (although Mark your recent posts have certainly piqued my interest), I wasn’t aware of these valid reasons. My (obviously completely wrong) assumption was that it was to hide where the links were going.

I guess I suck then, don’t I? ;-)

45n5 says May 17th, 2007 at 6:42 am

“I guess I suck then, don’t I?”

nah, 10/11 ain’t bad ;-)

There’s a Blog in My Soup! » Blog Archive » Blog Tipping: Better Late than Never… says May 17th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

[...] Blog-tippee #2: PimpmyPageRank I Think for this one I’m just going to include a link to my 3 favorite blog posts, as theres some good ones: 1.  11 Reasons Why Your Blog Might Suck 2.  Why Maki’s List of Ways to Game Alexa Are Probably Dumb 3.  Review You! Drop a line here and he’ll Review your site for Free, I’m thinking of doing the same for my readers, I just haven’t gotten to writing about it yet. [...]

Derrich says May 29th, 2007 at 8:37 am

It doesn’t suck because your domain name is cool. :)

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