In general, the world of blogging is a fairly friendly one (depending on your sector – certain sectors have a reputation for being quite…shall we say ‘passionate’?)
But there are a few things some bloggers do that can upset or annoy other bloggers.
Copy content
Possibly one of the worst things you can do in the blogging world. There’s nothing more annoying than working hard over a blog post…only to find out someone else has just copied and pasted your content into their own blog.
Oh, and it annoys Google too – so you’ll get penalised for your lack of originality.
On a similar note, @missnatwilliams raised the point on Twitter that some bloggers (often the new or naive) use images without a) linking back or b) crediting the original photographer. If you’re unsure whether you can use an image, it might be worth sticking to your own images, or using sites like morguefile.com, where you don’t have to credit.
PR Request everything
Ever looked at the #PRRequest Twitter hashtag? While it’s been used in the past for PRs to keep tabs of what journalists are looking for for upcoming features, it’s used increasingly for people to grab a freebie. I’ve even seen one blogger (with a very small following) requesting a free buggy.
I’m not averse to free sample or review products, when suitable. If it’s relevant to your blog or a feature piece, great! But if all your content comes from PRRequests, it suggests you’re not doing any research yourself. And reliance on free products means your blog will be exactly the same as thousands of others.
Overdoing the self-promotion
When I tweeted to get people’s views on bad blogger habits, a lot of people cited too much self-promotion – especially on Twitter.
Here’s what a few of them had to say:
@nuttycow “continue self promotion on twitter. A pet peeve. Link once, maybe twice. Not every hour for 5 days.”
@Hannahjlees “only talking about follower numbers?! Like when they leave comments saying ‘follow me and i’ll follow back’…”
@amylane “…RTing every entry to their competitions, jumping on the bandwagon for the sake of it!”
@sianysianysiany “Promoting the same blog post four times in a day for their ‘international fans’. Whatever love, you’re from Bolton.”
It’s fine to promote your blog. Essential even. But one or two well-timed tweets a day will do it, rather than one every single hour. If it’s a good enough post, you’ll get RTs and they’ll do the promotion for you anyway.
Also, don’t forget to be nice to everyone – no matter how big your blog gets. Most of the successful bloggers I’ve met are wonderful and grounded. But a few get to the point where they demand cars for press days.
Bad content
At Cybher last weekend, one of the most interesting bits was when Jess Markwood from Aigua Media explained that not everyone can blog. It’s a common myth that anyone can blog. But the reality is, most successful bloggers write engaging and original content and keep an eye on their spelling and grammar. My grammar and spelling is by no means perfect, but that’s what proof reading and spellchecker is for…
Pinterest and Instagram posts
This might be more of a case of things that annoy me rather than bloggers in general, but the rise in Pinterest and Instagram round up posts is a little odd. They’re pretty, yes. But would you be interested if someone did a weekly blog summary of their tweets? You’d probably just follow them on Twitter instead if you wanted to see that, right?
Are there any bad practices you’ve seen in the blogging world that I haven’t mentioned?
I tend to disagree with point number 4. I think anyone can blog. I am not comfortable with the phrase ‘bad content’. What’s ‘bad content’ anyway? who decides that it’s bad? Is bad content, for example, when a person wants to share the contents of their glossy box when some other have already blogged about that? And then I have an issue as well with the bit about ‘most successful’ bloggers in that paragraph as well. We don’t all write posts for them to be successful. It’s nice to have success and successful posts but sometimes we just want to blog about something to share it with someone and not really for recognition or retweets or comments on it.
What does annoy me is when i see three consecutive tweets (within same minute) about the same thing but posted on three additional network programmes and it looks like this:
{ a tweet to tell me that a picture of shoes has been posted on facebook}
{ a tweet to tell me that the same picture of shoes has been posted on instagram}
{ a tweet to tell me that the same picture of shoes has been posted on tumblr}
wtf? xx
‘Bad content’ was probably a bad title. I was trying to describe that kind of content that isn’t spellchecked, fact-checked and doesn’t offer anything particularly engaging. Everyone has their own judgements of what good or bad content is, but I’d suggest that those blogs with great content are the ones with a good following.
I guess if someone is posting something online, they want others to read it (otherwise they’d just email it to an individual or write it in a diary). If no one reads it, would it be considered unsuccessful?
Certainly with you on the consecutive tweets! Twitter is a post in itself really, don’t forget those Twitterscopes! 😉
I agree with the point about bad content. But more than anything, I agree with the point about bad writing. (Partly because I come from a journo background.) If you can’t start a sentence with capital letters or use an apostrophe, I won’t be reading! It’s especially important when bloggers want to work with advertisers and PRs! (Obviously if it’s a hobby and they don’t care about readers it doesn’t matter so much!)
yey you used my tweet! haha. This post is so true! I agree with everything you said. As for the ‘bad content’ I think the main thing is that so many blogs are badly written. They have terrible grammar and spelling mistakes and a lot don’t even have punctation. I don’t want to criticise other bloggers (as my blog is by no means perfect) but the general reading experience of blogs, and the professional aspect of them would be improved by simply proofreading.
Now… I’ll follow you… if you follow me back?
(just kidding ;))
Ah yes, I didn’t even touch on punctuation! I guess I feel that if someone is contributing to content on the internet, they have a responsibility to give it a quick check.
(Oh, and consider me your newest blog follower 😀 )
I was actually about to mention you in my comment Lizzie!
I completely agree with you about this. I’d probably determine “bad content” as “unengaging content”. As I have no journalistic experience or writing credibility I’m probably a serial offender for bad grammar and spelling mistakes. But if a post is all stock images and text which hasn’t been thought out then I won’t read any further. And the “I’ve followed, follow me back?” thing gets right on my wick. If someone leaves a comment on my blog 90% of the time I look at their blog anyway, but if you write that I probably wouldn’t bother.
Great post. Fancy following eachother ;-p
Lx
Thanks for your comment Lauren! Yes, completely agree on the unengaging content. I think a lot of it is about experience and learning what the readers want to read (and hell, I’m still learning about this!)
Also, great point on how you’ll usually check out someone’s blog anyway (which is why I’ve just subscribed to yours!)
Found this really interesting Emma. I wanted to look at that moguefile site as only recently I have become aware that getting images off we heart it isn’t really the done thing. So am interested in how to do the right thing! May need more advice from you on this. Tried to click on moguefile file but it took me to zinga? Anyway great post x lv x
Thanks or the comment Lisa (and for letting me know about the link for Morguefile, should be fixed now!)
You might also find http://www.zemanta.com/ useful, as it fetches images and links for you while you type and pops them in a little sidebar. Then you just click on them to insert them!
Hopefully there should be a guest post coming up all about image copyright and how to source safe images.