Why your blog looks like it’s run by a 13 year old

The amount of blogs today numbers in the hundreds of millions, and standing out in such a massive crowd is hard. Getting readers is even harder. Which is why many blogs plaster themselves with pointless features that dwarfs their content and makes them look outright childish. Read on for a few tips on adding a bit of professionalism to your blog, and less clutter and pointless features.

Too many social media icons

99 times out of a 100, the average blog benefits nothing at all by having dozens of buttons to all kinds of social media sites. It makes you look needy, and sure, occasionally, a user might click one of those buttons and share your story with their handful of friends, but rarely, if ever, is anyone actually using the buttons. If people like your content, they’ll find a way to share it. Don’t hit people over the head when you want them to follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your feed or check out your Delicious links (and whatever else you have going on). If they have any intention of doing that, they’ll do it. If they think your site is worthy , they subscribe to your feed and follow you. If you absolutely must have something, add a retweet button. It’s by far enough.

Promotion pop-ups

This is beyond annoying, in fact, you’re preventing your readers from your content — the sole reason they came to your blog (especially if linked to from other sites). To block them from reading your blog with a silly pop-up is borderline stupid. They didn’t come to subscribe to your email newsletter, they came to read your content. And if you have such a pop-up, they shouldn’t read your content — no one should — they should run away and never come back. Example:

You post spammy comments to promote your blog

You leave comments on other blogs, not because you have an interesting contribution to the conversation, but because you want to link back to your own blog, and to make matters worse, sometimes you make sure to include your Twitter ID as well. Take a look a these comments samples from a post on Instashift:

Your comment usually goes like this: “Great post, Very useful. Thanks!” and “Nice! Thanks for sharing.” Stop doing that. Everyone thinks you’re a spammer.

Useless WordPress plugins

Do you have a “top commenters” plugin on your blog? How about a Flash animated tag cloud that rotates? A box that displays all your Facebook followers? Not only do many of these things provide no real value to your blog, they clog it up and make it hard to read. On top of that, it makes the site load slower because the server has to process all the php queries on plugins like that (unless you have some form of caching, which you should). If you still think all those features are useful, dig deeper into your statistics (like Google Analytics), and you’ll find out that no-one ever clicks anything in that tag cloud of yours.

Your titles are AMAZING! (and other abusive adjectives)

This is particularly prevalent on design blogs, which there are so many of these days. Bloggers try to fit as many odd and popping adjectives in the title as possible to get any attention. Almost all design blogs, major an minor, abuse the adjectives to the point where it doesn’t make any sense. Words like “stunning”, “astonishing”, “epic”, “beautiful” are abused way too often. Take a look at these titles:

Here’s one that manages to cram 2 adjectives into a headline, right after one another:

This one takes the cake:

“Beautiful creative”? “Mouth watering”? “Really professional”? “Awesomely” is not even a proper word. We mean no disrespect to the blogs shown above — they offer some great content and we frequent them ourselves. There’s nothing wrong in spicing up your title with a sharp word, but there’s no reason to write a title like it was plucked from a conversation between two 13-year old school girls during lunch break.

In conclusion

If you want people to take your content seriously, have to to present it, and your blog, in a professional manner. You can still have fun and make a fun, colorful site with great features, but it’s still about your content. All those social media buttons don’t matter if your content sucks. It’s not going to make people share it just because there are some colorful buttons urging them to. Focus on your content first, and build the rest of your site around your content, not the opposite way.