The Red Stapler Chronicles

Maybe the title of this post should really be, don’t do the stupid things that I have done. Just today, I realized that my feedburner subscription button redirected people to my old wordpress site. As a result, anyone who tried to subscribe (27 of you) have never received a new post on their reader. No wonder only two did not bother to cancel their subscription. GRRRRRR!!!!!! Okay, back to this post, I will list the five other biggest mistakes I have made blogging, some of which I have discussed in previous posts.

1. I underestimated how much work goes into blogging. Incorrectly, I assumed that blogging would be easy and the ideas would just flow freely out of my head. Instead, I do a lot of research and am constantly writing down ideas for posts on any shred of paper I can find around my house. Before you decide to become a serious blogger, I would suggest a practice period in which you write (but not publish) a post a day for a week to see if this really is for you.

2. I stared off my blog on wordpress.com. Yes, wordpress is the best blogging platform out there, so I did make a wise choice in that matter. However, if you are interested in making some money with your blog, you must get your own domain name and host (since wordpress.com does not permit java-script ads). Although you can transfer your posts from a wordpress.com blog to your new domain, all of your backlinks will be invalid. I had to spend hours asking fellow bloggers to update their links and editing profiles all across the internet.

3. I further compounded mistake #1 by paying wordpress.com $10 to domain map my blog to my new domain. There really was no reason to do this–a complete waste of $10. I thought that by purchasing the domain mapping, I would not be subject to the wordpress.com terms of services and that I would be allowed to put ads on my site. WRONG on both accounts. Even though my blog appeared on my new domain name, it was still hosted by wordpress.com

4. I failed to change the structure of my permalinks from the default day and name. As a result, my posts looked like redstaplerchronicles.com/2008/05/06/postname. For SEO reasons, my permalinks should have just been redstaplerchronicles.com/postname. Even though I found a nice plugin that has re-directed my old permalinks to my new ones (so I don’t lose any traffic from Google), I have effectively split my backlink power in half.

5. I put ads on this site too quickly. In retrospect, I should have concentrated on getting more traffic, (even “un-targeted traffic”–see my Taking the Next Step post.) If I would have waited, I would have been accepted to more ad affiliate programs (since I would have had more traffic). Furthermore, I think ads on “younger” blogs really turn people off from your blog. Even if you produce great content, it may be skipped over if your new blog is crammed full of ads.

In other news, my post Financial Health Days was included in The 156th Carnival of Personal Finance.

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