225 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Blog

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Lately, I’ve been trying to improve my blog traffic and increase the number of subscribers to my RSS feed. I’ve done all sorts of things like networking over MyBlogLog, digging my own posts, and writing catchy headlines. Nothing seemed to work. However, I finally found 225 reasons why my blog traffic and RSS subscription have stagnated.

Are you ready for them? These past two days I went through every single post I have ever written since I started blogging in October 2006. That’s over 300 posts.
In the 300 posts that I have written, I found 225 typos. 225. That’s almost one typo per post.

It finally dawned on me that the reason more people weren’t coming back to my blog was because I lost credibility every time I made simple typos. It doesn’t matter how awesome my post idea is, small typos will ruin any piece of writing. If I were a reader of my blog, I would think that the person who wrote it was so lazy and inconsiderate to his readers that he didn’t even take the time to run a simple spell check and read through his posts before publishing. If I want to show my readers that I respect them, I need to do a better job with editing my posts.

My Most Common Typos

• Confusing “there”, “their”, and “they’re”
• Confusing “your” and “you’re”
• Confusing “its” and “it’s
• Writing “alot” instead of “a lot”
• Subject/verb agreement
• Typing “a”, “the”, and “to” too many times. (Ex. I think the the fair is awesome.)
• Dumb spelling mistakes

If my blog were a term paper, I would probably get a C- for all these typos. How embarrassing!

What I Will Do to Correct It

• Use Miscrosoft Word to write posts. To my credit, I often did use the spell check in Wordpress’s post editor. The problem with the spell check in Wordpress is that the dictionary is limited, so it skipped several of my misspelled words. Wordpress also lacks a grammar check, so it’s hard to see if I’ve made any subject/verb agreement mistakes or if repeated too many “the’s.”

• Have my wife look over my posts. Even though Word has a powerful spell check and grammar check, it still misses things. My wife on the other hand has an eagle eye for spelling and grammar mistakes.

I’m Sorry

I owe a big apology to my readers for not taking the time with such an little, but important thing. You deserve the best and I failed to deliver.

I also need to apologize to my wife. She’s been on me for sometime now about doing a better job editing my posts. Out of pride and stubbornness, I ignored her. I don’t like to admit I have a problem with spelling, but the sad fact is I do. I’ve never been that great of a speller. In fact, I had such a problem with spelling in elementary school that I cheated on spelling tests. My third grade teacher finally caught me one day. I don’t think I ever cried so hard in my life (I’ve also never cheated on anything since then). I just need to accept that spelling isn’t my forte and take steps to mitigate errors, even if that means accepting help from others. I’m sorry, Kate.

I want to start clean. From now on, I promise to have no more typos in my blog posts. I hope by focusing myself more on editing, I’ll be able to attract more traffic and more imporantly, more subscribers to my blog. I hope other bloggers can learn from my mistake. If you want to have an extremely successful blog, make sure to edit the crap out of them.

[tags]blogging, miscellaneous blog tips[/tags]

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20 Comments

1. Chris on 19.05.2007 at 13:09 (Reply)

   I’m tempted to reply ‘here-here’ as so many people use in comments at the moment, but I’ll stick to ‘hear-hear’.

   The WP spell checker is pretty useless, but I find the Firefox one is pretty good once you’ve been using it a while & ‘trained’ it to your vocab.

   I re-read my posts for several days after posting & am not afraid to reach for the ‘edit’ button….

2. The Frugal Law Student on 19.05.2007 at 13:37 (Reply)

   Chris-
   Thanks for stopping by! I agree WP’s checker is completely useless. I haven’t had much luck with the Firefox checker. Firefox can’t tell the difference between “there” , “their” and “they’re.” That’s what gets me in the most trouble.

3. William White on 19.05.2007 at 14:09 (Reply)

   The biggest turn off for me is “too many words” .
   If you want to keep your readers learn the magic of Brevity.

   If this were a blog I would Title it

   Brevity: Use it!

4. The Frugal Law Student on 19.05.2007 at 16:15 (Reply)

   Great point, William. People who read blogs want their information fast. Brevity is key in capturing the attention of bloggers.

5. jen on 19.05.2007 at 16:17 (Reply)

   Wonderful! I have not read your blog before (I came from The Simple Dollar), but I know that typographical and grammatical errors will drive me away from a blog or any written communication faster than lack of interest. Honestly, grammatical errors are worse, too, so definitely have your wife take a look.

   I like the Firefox checker, but you’re right, it doesn’t handle grammar errors.

   Good luck! I’ll be back!

6. The Frugal Law Student on 19.05.2007 at 16:53 (Reply)

   Jen-
   Thanks for stopping by! I understand completely how grammatical errors can totally turn off a person from a blog.

   It’s funny, in legal writing we talk about how it’s so important to make sure your briefs for judges are PERFECT. It doesn’t matter how strong your argument is. If a judge sees a misspelling or case cited incorrectly, your credibility is shot. With blogging, my readers are my judges. Thus, I should put the same amount of time and effort into a post as I would with a legal brief.

   I think part of my problem is how instantaneous web publishing. With my legal briefs, I would print out hard copies and edit, and edit, and edit some more. Blogging you just type, click, and boom, you’re published.

   Maybe I should print out hard copies of my posts, edit them by hand, and then publish. It might take some more time, but it will be worth it.

7. Cade on 19.05.2007 at 21:06 (Reply)

   I agree with you 100% or maybe 225%. I live in Provo with Dave and Court. I have learned that from Court and what he says about my site. I have been doing blogging for a little bit and I have to say that I have lost reocurring traffic because of my writing decisions.

8. Enough Wealth on 20.05.2007 at 00:06 (Reply)

   Hmmmm… any “evidence” to back up your claim? I agree that we should all use a spell(ing) check(er) (or are you Harry Potter?), but I’m not convinced that you’ll actually increase your readership by simply eliminating typos. If there is a correlation between typo frequency and blog success I doubt that it’s causal. More likely that a blogger who makes the effort to proof read their posts will also produce higher quality content.

   Regards
   http://enoughwealth.com

9. The Frugal Law Student on 20.05.2007 at 13:56 (Reply)

   Cade-
   Thanks for stopping by. I think one of the common mistakes that new bloggers make is thinking that content is king and presentation takes back seat. Don’t get me wrong, content is extremely important, but if you have lackluster presentation (ie, a bad template or typos) people will be turned off. I know I’ve been guilty of this during mistake during my short time blogging.

10. The Frugal Law Student on 20.05.2007 at 14:02 (Reply)

    Enough Wealth-
    I don’t have any hard “evidence” to show give you, just anecdotal. It seems like many people in the blogsphere list typos as a blog turnoff.

    I agree that eliminating typos won’t magically increase my readership, but I’ll at least increase my chances of making a good impression with readers so they’ll want to come back.

    Thanks for stopping by! Also wanted to say, you have a great site!

11. The Frugal Law Student » Blog Archive » 10+1 Easy Ways to Make Yourself Look Like a Blogging Newbie on 21.05.2007 at 11:33

    […] posts with tons of typos” to Court’s list. As I posted earlier this weekend, I’ve had to learn the hard way that typos make you look like a complete newbie. Typos are a red flag to readers that they’re dealing with a blogger who has no idea what […]

12. Shepard on 22.05.2007 at 07:20 (Reply)

    We are like two peas in a pod. Spellng and details are not my strength (at least this kind of detail).

    Just what I needed to read!

    Thanks,
    S.

13. tom on 22.05.2007 at 18:29 (Reply)

    Good work on this. I would also add that I will most likely scream if I read or hear one more person misuse the words “less” and “fewer.” Not just blogs; even reputable newspapers do not use them correctly.
    Ugh!

14. The Frugal Law Student on 22.05.2007 at 18:53 (Reply)

    Tom,
    Thanks for stopping by! It’s sad that fewer and fewer people aren’t taking grammar as serious as they should. While I’ve been making egregious typos on my blog, in law school I’ve developed a better appreciation for words and grammar. You’d be surprised the difference a comma or a misused “fewer” in a contract can make. The misuse of grammar has been the cause of many a lawsuit in our country.

    I hope I can start applying my new found appreciation for grammar to my blog. It will make me look like less of an idiot.

15. The Frugal Law Student Month in Review- May | The Frugal Law Student on 01.06.2007 at 19:20

    […] top post in May was 225 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Blog. It was my mea culpa for the excessive amount of grammatical errors in my post. It was also a […]

16. Q at $1 Million to My Name on 05.06.2007 at 05:12 (Reply)

    I tink yer beein’ a little hard on yourself!

17. Brett McKay on 05.06.2007 at 07:22 (Reply)

    Q-
    No, it was pretty sad the number of errors I had; many of them egregious. I wasn’t respecting my readers enough to do a simple spell check.

18. Ian on 05.06.2007 at 08:39 (Reply)

    If you’re really serious about this, kudos for putting some steps down on the right path!

    Two notes though, as this is a post on spelling and grammar:

    - You’ll be using “Miscrosoft Word” to spell check?

    - It doesn’t seem like you expressed your true intention when stating your desire to “mitigate” errors. You likely want to reduce or eliminate them, not continue to make them with lessened impact.

    Good luck with the quest!

19. Brett McKay on 05.06.2007 at 10:43 (Reply)

    Ian-
    Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I really appreciate it.

    “Miscrosoft?” How embarrassing! Even Word didn’t catch that. Yikes.

    Point taken on my misuse of mitigate. I’m so smitten with the word that I use it even when it’s not appropriate.

    Thanks again for your feedback and encouragement. I hope you come back and add to the conversation here.

20. Q at $1 Million to My Name on 05.06.2007 at 10:58 (Reply)

    Micro$haft needs to build the following into Word: a common spelling/grammatical error checker. It should be an option that lets you run through a document and doublecheck usage in the area where errors are commonly made. For instance, in the business world, “Manager” is so easily misspelled “Manger,” and spellcheck does not pick up on it. So this tool would run through your entire document and just flag instances where the word “manager” or “manger” appears. It would flag “from” and “form” and you’d manually make sure you’re using the words correctly. You decide whether a change is warranted. Time consuming, perhaps, but zero error tolerance is worth the time!

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