Y’all know that I look at a lot of blogs. I’m always checking out new ones and I have bunch that I like visiting over and over. Something I’ve railed about is seeing a topic that looks pretty good, only to start reading the post and find that it’s a bunch of garbage for one reason or another. I’m going to talk about one of those reasons while pointing out why it’s garbage.

via Flickr

I’m not going to link to the post because, frankly, I don’t think the post deserves it. It’s a guest post on a blog that I like, and I’m glad that the owner didn’t write it, though I’m sad that she posted it. I’m not even giving the exact title, but it gave 7 ways people could fix their blogs so that they’d work better for them.

Why is it useless? It’s useless for two reasons. One, you’ve seen it before, over and over, on other blogs. It has to be close to 100 times that I’ve seen the same advice. Two, because there’s nothing here that will improve your opportunities for more traffic. I’m not even worried that I’m listing the 7 tips because I know you’ve seen them before. You want some useless information? Here we go:

1. Integrate Your Blog into Your Website. This is great advice if the topic was how to raise the ranking of your website but it does nothing for one’s blog unless the website’s getting a lot more traffic. Also, if you move your blog people will need to be redirected to your new location, which means your blog will suffer for awhile, but it won’t ever really improve just because it’s attached to your website.

2. Write Relevant Blog Post Titles. I see this one all the time, and it’s partially garbage. You do want people to know what you’re writing about, but relevancy doesn’t always get the job done. I’ve seen people advocate writing snazzy or tricky titles to lure people in that have nothing to do with relevancy. I don’t support that type of thing, preferring relevant titles when I can. But it does nothing new in bringing you more traffic unless it ties in to things you’ve already been writing about (unless it’s about cleavage; that will always bring more traffic. If some of you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s in a previous post).

3. Integrate Keywords Into Your Blog Posts. Duh! Let me ask all of you a question. If you’re writing a blog post and you have a particular topic you’re writing about, is that a keyword? And if you’re writing about a particular topic, are you probably destined to mention that word, or phrase, more than once in your post? Isn’t this particular point a major waste of your time to read?

4. Improve the Quality of Your Backlinks. Yeah, this will work; if you have an inordinate amount of time to work on backlinks. You do a lot of this type of thing for websites, not blogs. If you want to improve your blog with links, link to previous blog posts where you can, and if your blog is with your business website make sure to link the to each other every once in awhile.

5. Plan for Social Media Sharing. This one’s not total garbage, but we’ve seen it before; heck, I’ve written about it. Most people are already sending out automatic blog links whenever they have a post go live, and if you’re not, you should be. For some sites, you’ll actually have to post the links, but that’s not such a bad thing either if you have enough people following you in those places.

6. Tell Better Stories at Your Blog. Once again a garbage point because without an indication of what a better story is the write has no real idea what it means. What it’s supposed to mean is to be real, put your own natural rhythm into what and how you write, and if it’s compelling people will like it. But will you immediately get more traffic from it?

7. Find Readers for Your Blog. This is garbage mainly because of how it’s stated. Basically, blogging works best if you’re part of a community. You don’t just up and join a community per se. You work the system, such as commenting on other blogs, writing guest posts or asking others to write one for you, sending your blog links to other social media sites, sending some posts to your friends, etc. You don’t write your blog and just expect people to show up; this isn’t Field of Dreams (one day I’m going to watch that movie).

Out of all the points above, the last 3 are probably the only ones that can help. However, I have to say that if you saw the original article (nope, I’m not sharing it), you’d have thought “hey, this doesn’t really say anything”, and it didn’t.

I do have a point here; actually, two points. One, this is an example of using what someone else has written and making it your own. The only thing I’ve borrowed from the other post are the tips, and I didn’t use anything else from the post. When people say to me that they can’t think of anything to write about, I’ll tell them to read something then write their opinion on the topic they just read. Two, originality always wins out. What this guy wrote in his post was a lot of what others have said before. The only originality in his post were a few links to something that others had said. Everything else I’d seen before, which was probably why I was irked. My hope is that everyone reading this could take the 7 tips above and write a completely different post, even if the tips were the same.

That’s it; rant over. Am I being hard or do you agree?