15 Experts Share their Worst Blogging Advice Ever

You’ve probably heard that saying about everyone having an opinion?

Well, in the world of Pro Blogging, the opinions are flying around daily!

And with so many experts out there telling us what to do, it is insanely confusing.

Who should I listen to, and what is the “best” advice in the end?

So I went out there and asked some experts:

What is the WORST blogging advice you have ever heard or read?

And more importantly

WHY?

Because there is a lot of common wisdom out there that is:

•  just not true.
• or does not work how you would expect
• or not for everyone.

So without further ado, here are the experts telling you how it really is!

Adam Connell (Blogging Wizard)

Content is king.

This has to be one of the biggest lies ever told and has spun out of control.

I’ve lost count of how many bloggers I’ve seen take this advice to heart, create awesome content and then watched in dismay as it sits gathering dust.

Like Lee Odden says;

content isn’t king, it’s the kingdom.

The truth is that generic content isn’t going to do anything for you and the best content in the world may not do much for you either.

The real magic happens after you hit the publish button and you need to do the leg work to put your content in front of the right people.

Like I always say; clicking publish is just the beginning.

Brian Dean (Backlinko)

Without a doubt: “publish regularly”.

The fact is, no one cares how often you hit the “publish” button in WordPress.

Blogging today is 110% about quality…not quantity.

 

 

Ian Anderson Gray (Seriously Social)

Blog as often as possible and don’t worry about the quality…

I think it comes down to the balance between quality and quantity. It’s often recommended to blog very regularly and not to worry about the quality.

Whilst it’s important to post on a regular schedule, it’s important to find out what works for you to ensure that you are posting quality content. That might be twice a week, but perhaps weekly or even monthly might be a suitable goal.

With such a huge amount of content being posted every minute of every day, it’s important to write content that stands out. This means writing content that you’re passionate about, keeping your personality intact and going a little deeper than your competition!

Peg Fitzpatrick (PegFitzpatrick.com)

Personally, I feel the worst blogging advice is to write a certain number of words with a certain number of keywords etc.

Write for your readers, not for Google.

Answer questions, explain how to do something, or entertain your readers.

Give them a reason to share your article and come back to your blog again.

Sarah Santacroce (Simplicity)

‘Blog it and they will come’

Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s bogus. Just because you’ve finally started to blog, doesn’t mean that people will just flock to your blog and subscribe to you via RSS feed.

In fact, you will probably be your only reader for quite a while. Or maybe you can convince some relatives. But that’s fine. It will give you practice.

What’s important to keep in mind here is consistency and continuity. And of course you need to start sending out invitations to that party happening on your blog. Social Media is great for that. Go share crazy with your blog posts. Share them everywhere. The real marketing happens after you’ve pushed the ‘publish’ button !

Adrienne Smith (AdrienneSmith.net)

The worst advice I’ve ever received was that blogging is easy.  

If you don’t consider yourself a writer then there is nothing easy about it at all.  On top of that people fail to tell you all of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on like setting it up, plugins not playing well, picking a paid theme, hosting and database issues and the list goes on.  

For new people just coming on the scene like I was many years ago, we couldn’t afford to hire people to set this up ourselves and it was definitely a huge learning experience for me.  

Although it’s not easy, it was so worth it.

Marc Andre (Profit Blitz)

I’d have to say the worst advice I read was to avoid popular, saturated niches. I’ve been blogging for about 7 years now and I’ve always been drawn to niches that have a lot of readers, and a lot of existing blogs. Although there is a lot of competition for attention from readers there are also a lot of positives about highly competitive niches. The traffic potential is huge, plenty of opportunities to create and sell your own products, countless affiliate products that you could promote, lots of sites and blogs for guest posting and link building, plenty of other bloggers to network with, etc.

Creating a successful blog in a popular niche is definitely not easy, but the rewards can be very high. If there is a niche that you want to enter but the competition is stiff, as long as you are willing to put in the work and have some patience to see the results, I would encourage you to go for it. The one thing I would caution here is that you do need to take into consideration that a single-author (you) blog will not be able to do the same things as a popular blog that has a team of full-time writers. You’re not going to be able to create a celebrity gossip blog, publish 20+ posts per day on your own, and beat popular blogs to the latest news. If those are the types of blogs that are in your niche you’ll need to take a different angle on the same topics.

Kristi Hines (KristiHines.com)

Everyone needs to blog daily.

The truth is, quality matters more than quality. It’s great if you have the time and the contributors to put out high quality content on a daily basis, but many bloggers do not. When they find themselves trying to meet the weekly quota, they end up publishing lackluster content and eventually getting burnt out.

The best approach is to focus on quality first, even if it is just one blog post per week. Readers will be more excited to get notified when you publish one amazing post per week versus getting notified about a lot of posts, many of which they end up not liking.

Brent Carnduff (Echelon SEO)

I’m writing this from an SEO perspective –

“Don’t worry about SEO, just write good content.”

You hear this one a lot right now and it drives me crazy. Content marketing is part of a good SEO strategy, it is not a replacement for SEO.

I recognize that this idea comes straight from Google, and it probably works for brands and big businesses, and for those markets that are not yet competitive, but if you’re a small business fighting for the limited real estate on page one of Google, it’s not enough.

Two reasons why it’s not enough:

1. First, I know from working with small businesses every day, that keywords and traditional SEO do still have a huge impact on search ranking. Google is trying to get to semantic search, but it’s not there yet.
2. I did a quick search on LinkedIn for “Chicago Lawyer” which produced 267 results. All are at least digitally savvy enough to be on LinkedIn, I’m assuming most have a website, and many are probably writing, or will be sometime in the future.

It’s probably safe to say that not all will be good writers, but also safe to assume that many will be. How will Google differentiate them? There is still only limited space on page one and its only going to get more difficult to get there in the future.

Yes, your content should be good, and it should be unique, and it MIGHT even end up on the search engine results pages, but why leave it to chance? Why not give your content every opportunity to be ranked by search engines?

Mike Allton (The Social Media Hat)

The worst blogging advice I’ve ever heard was that it is important to write content to everybody wants and loves. It’s based on statistical analysis showing that only a percentage of viewers will click past a headline, and then as the reader travels down through your post, more and more will click off, resulting in a small percentage who actually finish the piece.

And that’s a problem, right?

Wrong!

In and of itself, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that not everyone will be interested in your article, and that not everyone will continue to be interested enough to read it.

There is no article that is universally timely and interesting.

Instead, the goal of your writing should be to write for the people who need that information at that time, and that may be as few as just one or two people. One of the greatest writers of our generation, Stephen King, writes for just one person. His wife. Most bloggers should have specific demographic profiles set up to keep in mind for their more general articles, and specific people in mind for some others, like when they’re answering questions. Some of my most successful blog posts have been answers to questions that a single person asked me. But generally, where one person has a question, other people will as well.

So don’t worry if not everyone clicks through to your articles and if not everyone finishes them. That doesn’t mean you won’t have room for improvement, but within reason.

Rebekah Radice (RebekahRadice.com)

“Don’t worry about building a list.” This could be the single worst piece of blogging advice ever and unfortunately, something I followed for my first year.

If you’re blogging for business, you must focus on building an email list from the very beginning. Why? Building a list allows you to create deeper, more meaningful relationships with your subscribers.

Subscribers are the backbone of your blog and a marketing extension of your business. Start today and extend the conversation beyond the walls of your blog.

Ron Sela (RonSela.com)

Most of the advice given to new bloggers is about the importance of maintaining a high standard of content and posting something new everyday. This can bring more visitors to a blog, because all new content is indexed by search engines, and a blog with fresh content appearing on a regular basis can rank higher in search results.

Not every blogger is able to make such a big commitment, and this advice is not right for everyone. Many people will be put off blogging by the idea of creating and publishing quality content every day. It is better to suggest that bloggers set a schedule for posting content with their own timetable in mind.

Bloggers should just try to keep up with their own posting schedule. A blog can perform well enough with as little as two new posts a week, as long as the blogger is willing to create some good content. This is just as effective for company blogs as it is for independent bloggers.

Ann Smarty (SEO Smarty)

Blog daily…

Back in 2008 when I started a blog, the popular advice was “frequency is the key” and “publish at least something daily”. It was believed “pinging” search engines with fresh content is the key to rank it well…

I broke that rule right away. I was blogging in the foreign language and writing an article would take me three days. I had no choice. I was forced to come up with my own style: Put up a blog post you are proud of and turn lots of information into an easy to consume format (the latter was due to my lack of English language practice as well). I ended up publishing comparison charts people loved to spread.

I think my inability to follow that wrong advice was the major reason why my blog succeeded so quickly (within a couple of months): People saw something new and refreshing…

My own advice would be “Do what works for you as long as you enjoy the process. If you love blogging daily, do that. If that’s making you crazy, don’t force yourself. Come up with your own style and stick to it!”

John Paul Anguiar (JohnPaulAguiar.com)

Building a popular blog that makes money is easy.

Today more than any other time, building a popular blog that makes you “real” money is much harder. The amount of behind the scenes work that goes into a popular blog on a daily basis is insane. You need to do everything, you need to know everything, you need to be everywhere.

Oh and you need to consistently come up with helpful, targeted content.

Pauline Cabrera (Twelve Skip)

Worst blogging advice I’ve ever heard? “Don’t post everyday..” because people will get tired of YOU. Hmmm.. Sure, it may apply on some niche but it really depends on the type of blog you own, on what you’re trying to achieve and/or how big your site is.

So this advice definitely doesn’t apply to ALL bloggers.

I mean, bloggers don’t have to post everyday, but gurus need to avoid giving tips like this, or at least include that this tip is for certain types of bloggers.

Of course, if you’re the only one who works on your site or if you’re just starting out, obviously you can’t post everyday. Remember, there are those ‘aggressive’ blog owners that want to stay on top of their game 😉
As long as you provide value to your users, posting frequency shouldn’t matter right?

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