Skipping Posting
Inconsistency of any kind on your blog is an easy way to confuse and annoy visitors. If you want to make sure people don't return to your blog or stick around to read more than a single post, be inconsistent in your tone, style, voice, topic, and posting schedule. It's very easy to skip posting to your blog for a couple of days here or there, but those couple of days quickly turn into a couple of weeks.
Your blog's success depends on your goals and the effort you put into creating fresh, interesting, and consistent content. Don't fall into the habit of skipping posting. A short, thought-provoking post is better than nothing. Just don't publish useless posts that do nothing more than clutter your blog so people can't find your good content.
Ignoring Your Visitors
If people take the time to visit your blog, acknowledge them. If you moderate comments, review them at least once per day. It's important that comments are published in a timely manner or why should anyone bother commenting at all? Also, be sure to delete spam comments to protect the user experience on your blog.
Respond to people's comments, return their email messages, thank them for retweeting your content on Twitter, and leave comments on their blogs when they publish posts that trackback to your blog. It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities of publishing content and forget to moderate and approve comments, and it's even easier to skip taking the time to respond to those comments. That's a habit you should break right now.
Obsessing over Numbers
Bloggers have access to so much free data about their blog traffic thanks to free blog analytics tools that it's easy to get sucked into that world of numbers and forget there is more to blogging than statistical data. Don't sweat the numbers. If you must, check your blog stats on a daily basis, but unless you're trying to develop a highly successful blog very quickly, checking stats once a week or less is probably more than enough time for number crunching.
Instead of spending time analyzing blog traffic stats, create more great content and interact with your blog visitors. Both you and your blog will be better off in the long-term.
Trading Your Blogging Time for Other Social Web Time
Everywhere you look online, social media experts are saying bloggers should have a presence on Twitter, a Facebook Page, a Flickr profile, and so on. With all of those social media profiles and activities, many bloggers wonder when they'll have time for blogging. Unfortunately, bloggers get spread too thin and their blog content suffers.
The truth is that you don't need to be everywhere on the social web unless you're trying to develop a highly successful blog, make a lot of money from your blog, or using your blog as a tool to indirectly market a business, products, or services. While it's true that diversifying your social media presence to indirectly promote your blog content can help to build your blog, it's not a requirement, and most smaller bloggers don't need to be everywhere to reach their blogging goals.
Match your social media activities to your blogging goals, and don't worry what everyone else is doing. If your blog is your priority, than the last thing you want to have happen is for your blog content to suffer because you're spending all your time on other social media activities.
