Hi all, 

After browsing and reading so many blogs on end, countless times I come across so many common mistakes that can make your blog become quite unattractive and these mistakes are very easily avoided. 

This post is scheduled to be published on my own blog at http://kevin.kevandisa.com very soon. But thought I'd post the entire article here as a sneak peak for everyone else. And hopefully some of it may help you. 

What Makes An Attractive Blog

On the contrary to what most bloggers think, what makes an attractive blog isn't necessarily on just the presentation of your blog or the theme you sat and trolled through and finally picked for your blog. The number one key attractiveness of your blog is always going to come down to the content, the more content you have the more successful your chances are of owning an attractive blog.

Of course building the content takes time and a tremendous amount of patience, even if you have been writing posts almost on a daily occurrence, the time it takes for anyone to notice these posts doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime there are other things you should avoid doing while you wait for the readership to grow and take notice of your content.

Avoiding these common mistakes that most bloggers (myself included) will no doubt also help along the way to increasing your readership.

Top 5 Things To Avoid On Your Blog

5. Downright Plagiarism/Similar Content

At times, when you have had a writers block, it can be tempting to browse and read through other blogs and follow a certain writing style from someone else's blog. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well this formula of writing seems to work very well here, perhaps I should try this on my own blog. Not to mention copying content without legal permission can lead to all sorts of obvious problems.

4. Using Irrelevant Post Titles

Titles are one the most important aspects of a blog post. Having a proper title tells the readers what the content is about. More often than not, I've seen so many titles which are just too vague and even too creative. In my opinion having such a vague and creative title can lead to a certain expectation of the post that never becomes fulfilled.

3. Too Much Advertisements

This of course is subjective, for example for blogger A, his/her blog and writing is their full time job and as such taking advantage of monetizing their blog wherever they can. However blogger B, who is enjoying writing or blogging and isn't their day job and placing advertisements in almost every nook and cranny of their blog can make it become unattractive very quickly.

Of course though, you need to find the right balance of advertisements with the right amount of useful content to make this combination successful.

2. Busy Layout/Design

Having a very busy layout or design for your blog can more often than not deter readers away, after all, the visitors coming to your blog is purely there to read what you have to say in your blog posts. If they are having difficult time in trying to make sense of your layout or if things look a little busy they will click away.

This really follows the old saying "less is more". Same applies your blog's sidebar, it can be really tempting to load up as many attractive widgets and the like to your sidebar.

And finally,

1. Making the Post too Long

I tend to fall into this trap myself and should really be avoided, ironically the reality is people do not want to read, they want to glance or extract the key messages from your posts. You should try to find the right balance of being able to get your points across or better yet, keep your posts to roughly around 800-900 words mark, anything more than that and you should consider perhaps breaking the post up to a series of posts.

There is nothing worse than someone scrolling through a 1000 worded post as this can look very unattractive.

With these in mind, you should be able to make your blog a little more attractive and over time increase the readership and returning visitors. I personally have been trying to stick by the above and has not been easy especially with some of my posts exceeding the 1000 word mark, at some point down the track I will change those posts into mini series of posts.

Do you find yourself unwittingly making some of the mistakes above? Do you have any general rule of thumb tips to stick by in your blogging experiences?