Posts Tagged ‘tactics’
How To Handle Blogging Mistakes
Everybody makes mistakes. Some mistakes are small and negligible. Others are huge and can be devastating for your business (see BP). Bloggers make mistakes all the time. Having typos in headlines, getting stories completely wrong, or forgetting to name sources just happen Perfection is a fool’s gold. Not only it’s almost impossible to achieve, it can take away from your business too. Not everyone handles mistakes the same way. Some go crazy and start making drastic changes. Others apologize and beg for forgiveness. Smart bloggers understand the inevitability and focus more on learning from their mistakes to make sure they don’t happen again.
If you have never made a mistake as a blogger, then more power to you. But most bloggers have and will during their careers. Sometimes, you can get away with your mistakes. Some other times, your readers will call you on it. While not all mistakes are equal in magnitude, the last thing you want to do is dwell on your mistakes. Every misstep can be a learning lesson. If you don’t make mistakes, you are not going to learn much anyway.
Here are a few smart ways to handle blogging mistakes:
- How it happened: understanding how you committed your mistake can help you avoid it in the future. You certainly do not want to make a habit of making big mistakes on a consistent basis. Going through this process will help you figure out the next step too.
- Why it keeps happening: sometimes you end up making a mistake over and over again. Assuming that you are going to get it right after a while is not the smartest way to go. Those of you who have a large team may want to look at your team and find out where things broke down. Solo bloggers need to take a look at their processes and find out why they have continued to do things the wrong way. Read more »
5 Ways To Handle Search Engine Rankings Drops
Are you a Google junkie? I know I was a few years ago when one of my first blogs was doing so great on Google. It’s quite addictive when you think about it. If you are pulling in 3000+ visitors a day just from Google, you know your content is getting some decent exposure without it costing you any money. Of course, nobody’s satisfied with any level of traffic. The more of it you have, the more of it you want. But those who live by Google, die by Google. In 2004, my top blog was pulling in 90K visitors a month just from Google. Sure. It wasn’t as popular as a super blog, but the blog was paying for itself, and it was making me a good amount of change for my efforts. Then came Google algorithm changes. The site suddenly disappeared from the SERPs without me making any changes to the code or the content on my blog. It took me months to get my blog back up to where it was. But I learned my lesson. You should never rely on one traffic source to drive traffic to a blog, especially one as volatile as Google.
A lot of people can’t handle the thought of losing their search engine rankings overnight, but it could happen. A lot of blogs get flagged for duplicate content and some even become victims of hack attacks or serve downtime. It doesn’t take much to lose your position in the search engine results pages. You can handle a drop in your search engine rankings two ways. You can panic and start going berserk, changing your code, web host, and even your domain, or you can think logically about it. While there are no guarantees that you can get back your original search engine rankings, there are things you should and shouldn’t do when faced with such a dilemma. Read more »
