Websites are sure easy to make, but also just as easy to become a big disaster. A website has to have a purpose, as well as properly convey that purpose to people. If you can’t even do that, they you’re missing out on all those commentators, subscribers, and buyers. Just saying things like “Oh, I’m gonna start a blog”, or “I’m gonna start a website for my business” are merely plans. Her are some of the mistakes that people make when setting up their website.
5 Mistakes People Make When Setting Up Their Website
1. You website has no plan or site focus.
It’s okay if you want to start a blog that covers a variety of topics, but what do you want to do? Are you trying to make money off Adsense? Are you wanting to sell an ebook or some crafts? Do you provide a special service like web design? Do you just want to become popular and get a lot of social engagement? You need a site focus!
Focus on building a site that revolves around a business plan that achieves letting the visitor know why they are on your website. Then, you can focus on the next step, which is on this list- putting a proper call to action in order to get that return on investment (ROI.)
2. Your website has no calls to action or website conversion strategy, or even having a broken or inadequate strategy.
Website conversion is important. It ties hand in hand with creating a site focus because your ultimate goal is to get some type of ROI. If you want people to buy a product, you’ve got to give them an easy way to find it. Same goes for getting subscribers, social shares, and commentators. It’s not hard to put a call to action solution! Here are some examples of solutions:
- You’re selling a product – Make sure the item is easy to find, order, and purchase.
- You want comments on your articles – Make sure you have a reliable comment system.
- You want people to share your articles – Have social share icons somewhere on the page to easily find and use.
- You want people to contact you – Provide a form with questions that you want your visitors to fill out. Don’t just plop your email address up.
- You want newsletter subscribers – Select a newsletter service and put up an optin form.
Be transparent about what you want them to do. Of course, you don’t want to do it without any tact, but you don’t need to use subliminal messages to get them!
3. You are not creating content with as many mediums as possible.
Nothing is worse than driving away potential loyal readers and buyers than not connecting with them on mediums they relate to best. Mediums in content creation can be text, images, video, and podcasts/ audio. Think about not just creating a topic in one medium, but on several.
You can go further by sharing them on various social networking platforms to maximize obtaining more visitors.
4. You are not creating content, or not creating content regularly.
Lacking enough content to sell someone into buying, commenting, or subscribing is a huge problem. So is not creating content regularly.
If you’ve got a product that is not easy to explain, this is where creating content to educate your audience comes in. You could put together videos, a facts and question section, case studies, and much more. Build content around your product to funnel people towards the end goal!
If you don’t like blogging, that’s fine. However, you need to create new content to keep your site up-to-date and fresh in the eyes of search engines. When you update, the search engines will come back to crawl your website. If you don’t blog, you should consider hiring someone that can write at least once a week for you. Don’t hire someone that lacks passion in writing, but someone who is interested in your field, that can deliver thought provoking and easy to relate to content.
5. You are not creating a follow-up plan to keep visitors, and buyers interest in returning.
Just having a site is half the battle. Creating a real strategy to keep them coming back is the other half. You can do this by making sure that the call to action process has a follow through. That means that you should be acknowledging your visitors somehow by replying to comments, replying to emails, thanking customers for buying or subscribing (even if it is an autoresponder type message.)
The biggest takeaway of this article is to make sure that your site focus not just covers what your sites is about, but also it’s purpose. If you’re not making money or any of your intended goals, your problems will fall into one of the 5 mistakes mentioned above. And if it’s number 1, you’ve got a lot of work to do!
What mistakes do you often see new website owners make? Are there any other things you believe should be in this list?
My biggest mistake is broken link unfortunately modified permalinks, and google ranking goes to about 29 lack. Worst day in my life
Many professionals and non-professionals are commiting these mistakes. At the end it is all about common sense, but being more than a decade in this business, I have to say that nearly 90% doesn’t have any strategy behind.
One of the biggest turn offs for me is sites with TOO MANY ads or those pop ups that demand your email address prior to even looking at the site. Why do I want to sign up for a newsletter before I even know if the site author even knows what they are talking about?
That’s the reason I have an exit pop up. I can’t stand that in your face strategy. lol
Hello Nile,
Good to see you here! Well, there are many mistakes that newbie do after coming in to Blogosphere. They just want the money as early as possible and go on committing mistakes. You have mentioned populat mistakes which are done by every bloggers. No doubt, sometimes I had also done 😀
I think not include Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest and others social media share bar and widget in website is the big mistake in these days. What you think?
I don’t agree with that. Why would you not want your articles be shared?
Yes I agree but it is really hard to balance monetization wit user experience. Online marketing professionals who are working for an agency and not making a living from their websites do not know how much every little wasted dollar (unused ad space in this case) can hurt.
Nobody should call himself an online marketing professional unless they make a living from their websites!
Hmm. I don’t think so if you are using Wp install mobilepress it will help for great mobile view, neat site and can also monetize and reach you advertiser
There’s a lot of good advice out there for improving a blog, but it’s overwhelming. A blogger could take just what you’ve written here, and do what you say, and it would go a long way toward improving his blog! Thank you for an excellent summary.
I think you should included here not choosing the right webhosting provider and an appropriate theme for a website or blog. Just my opinion.
Hi Nile,
Nice Post!
I thought that this post would talk about WordPress when I clicked on it but its even better as it talks about the content and its strategy.
The sixth one though not about content would be is to change the nicename in phpmyadmin as if not done then anyone can know the username just by clicking on the by name. Right?
And the seventh one would be is to set webmasters tools so that Google will not index that haunting replytocom and utm links.
Unfortunately, these have nothing to do with mistakes made, Anurag. These are with specific strategies for SEO and web development that you’ve mentioned. The ones I am pointing out are the base of most website’s that have mistakes.
The above mistakes are committed by most of the newbies and then they usually get dishearten but i always recommend every newbie to learn from their mistakes and keep going on because their is no secret to blogging only your content content content on your blog can give overnight success
Since creating an online presence seems like a daunting and tedious task, you thought that you could use a little extra help – at least with your website. The above tips really worth! Thanks Nile!
Hi Dear,
A BIG bouquet of thanks! I have just gone through the guide and it’s really awesome. Thanks for sharing your guide. I always love getting freebies and this one will definitely help me out with my own blogs. I’m a new blogger therefor this post is helpful for me.
This guide is loaded to the max with invaluable tips and resources. I love this post because it is useful and
informative for me.I have shared and tweeted it. Always enjoy your posts. 🙂
Thanks again !!!
Agreed! Common mistake people do while manage their blogs is lack of frequent updates. One should update their own blog atleast thrice a week to keep blog healthy
Hello Nile,
Great Post!
I am new in blogging. I did so many mistakes like broken links, Commenting mistakes & more. You will provide me a very helpful post. It was really awesome. I think that i will be able to recover myself by reading your post.
Thanks
Nice post these are common mistakes in today times generally peoples are doing at the time of website creation. Some times, It can happen due to lack of knowledge.
Peoples are creating websites without calculating his pros and cons.
I think you should also add some more points in it. if you can.
I agree– a website should encourage a conversation as it should be more customer eccentric catering the need of your customers.
I think one mistake that people is not utilizing the proper plugins to enhance the speed of their website. A slow website will cause many people to click away before they even get to your website. Making sure your website is as fast as possible is key before you start promoting your site.
I think that is a later problem to think about. When you’re not making money or getting ROI, that’s the major problem… heads and shoulders above site speed.
Also aside from site speed, it’s not plugins to rely on, start at your host first, optimize your site, and then you can consider adding on plugins. I only use my cache plugin and my plugins organizer. Otherwise, the rest, I’ve manually taken care of whether htaccess, or moving files around.
True and at the same time if you are new to the whole game then it can be difficult to even start making money. If first time visitors are clicking away from your site because it loads slow then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.
What have you done with your httaccess? Have you ever done anything with CSS sprites?
Excellent post. now a day people monetize their blog with too much pop up ads, that’s a big mistake and reader will quit this types of blog quickly.
I made this mistake with my last blog. I started it as a technology blog and ended with fully mash-up of movies, dishes, life hacks, viral videos and lot more things.
Anyways, I am not gonna repeat this mistake this time 😉
heello nile
i think these mistakes are common .Blogosphere. They just want the money as early as possible and go on committing mistakes. You have mentioned populat mistakes which are done by every bloggers. No doubt, sometimes I had also done. but i must share with my some new bee blogers so they dont do mistakes
regards
sakshi
I agree with your points. A site focus/purpose/plan is totally essential, so I like seeing that as number 1. I’d add a point about crazy-busyness. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people make with their websites. They’re too busy and hard to read and navigate . . . hard on the eyes.
I have never set up a website but this information would all be helpful. I will share this with my sister who does the website stuff.
Having no plan and no content are BIG ones. I’m glad you touched on those.
I have to say that I stared my blog just to start one. At first it was a huge learning curve & helped to have an outlet for my creativity from there. But now it’s grown to something else & I feel like a newb every single day! LOL
You certainly need a creative vision and stick to it. COnsistency is what return users want and expect!
I definetly agree with your list of mistakes. I’m totally guilty. My blog is as ADHD as I am! Before blogging, I had several that were my favorites to follow but then with their sites re-branding/content changing frequently in addition to pages becoming too spammy, or too many promotions… I lost the desire of connecting with writer. That said, there are several bloggers that I loved that improved their blog for a minimalist and more FOCUSED style – and it totally works for them! Thanks for sharing the great advise! 🙂
I understand that life happens, but it helps to update a blog regularly. I can easily attest that from firsthand experience.
My first blog started off with no primary focus…it was all jumble. Took many months of going through and correcting everything once I learned what I needed to do to make it sucessful. Wish Someone had told me all this before I got started!
About #3: I only write and illustrate with photographs. Yes, I know some people like audio / videos better but I don´t so I won´t. We can´t please everyone.
Great post with good information on what not to do along with suggestions. It is very important before starting a blog to research and to keep up with changes etc. to their blog by listening to what is important to their customers. Thanks for sharing.
This is very helpful post, specially to those who are just beginning to do blogging.. Learned as well too 🙂
Your last point is exactly where I am right now! Getting people to come back is the hardest part!!
My mistakes are broken links and wrong tags. Thanks for sharing this as this will be helpful to those who will start their new websites.
These are five excellent observations Nile!
And while i definitely agree and can relate to all five,
my biggest takeaways by far, are #’s 2- 5!
Being inconsistent with content creation is huge, but
so is, not effectively utilizing all the potential to reach
our desired target audiences!
Thanks for sharing five extremely solid tips!