Many bloggers out there fail to realize that ‘One good post is worth 100 non-sense posts’. Who cares about the number of posts a blog have? Instead people look for value in every page and when they can’t find anything worth reading, they just quit.
Updating blogs regularly is well and good, but if you can’t write something good, why fill up with a useless post? No one asked you to blog on the first place. Here I list ten common filler posts. How does this list make value? Next time you start writing any of these posts, ask yourself, ‘Who will benefit from this post?’ If no one has any benefit, then please don’t do it.
Don’t Ruin your Blog with Filler Posts
Quick Surveys and Survey Results
Making up a poll takes less than 5 minutes, and you might end up with some user interaction if you have a good reader base. I am not speaking of the feed back surveys, but about the quick polls that we find in blogs very often. The worst part is that, even big bloggers with over 15k readers post polls every week. Who is interested in learning how much you earned in January? If you really wish to fill up with a survey, think of something funny.
Best thing about surveys is that they can be followed up with a survey results post. Results may look like, ‘Out of the 2000 people who took the survey, 18% earned less than $10 in January’ and the list follows. Oh Great! Your survey just opened my eyes; bring me more useless surveys like this in the future. 😉
WordPress 2.8.2.1001 Released!
Who is interested in a new version of wordpress? The answer is the wordpress users themselves. And all wordpress users are informed when a new release is available right in their admin dashboard. Then why bother writing about a minor release? Write about it when WordPress adds a new feature that users might fail to notice.
100 Cool WordPress Plugins every Blogger should have
The best part of WordPress is plugin support and there are over 4000 free plugins available for wordpress! All of them are listed in a neat searchable datable at Wordpress with direct download links, any many bloggers have listed them out already. Still we see new posts coming up every week, with a list of the same plugins again and again. Instead of doing that, write about one cool plugin that you like really much, explain its advantages and tell your readers how you use it effectively.
Top Entrecard Droppers
Most blogs participating in Entrecard write about the top droppers of the month. Dropping Entrecard doesn’t need any effort, then why bother making a list of the top droppers? Instead, use a plugin like this to thank them!
Thanks for Commenting
Should you spare a post, when you can thank your commentators using a Top Commentators Widget? Infact the widget is the real thank you because it stays on the sidebar and visitors to all pages of your post will see the links. Also the links get the page rank juice of the homepage which is usually more than most post pages.
Link Servings
Google for a keyword and you will get over one million links for anything, then why bother posting some of them on your site? Link serving is a quick way to make up a post, but I feel it’s a big waste of time and space, especially when you just post the links that go without a description. Personally, I never follow any links from a link serving post.
Blog this and you get 10 more chances of winning
This is one tip that I should consider myself! Most online contests give participants an extra winning chance if they blog about the event with links to the sponsors. Even I had given this option on my last contest. From a reader point of view, it’s a useless post. Sorry, if I have annoyed some of you, it’s all over!
Q and A with James Scott
Who is James Scott? How many kids does he have? And one last question, if you were not what you are, who would you have been? Some one said, doing interviews is a cool post idea, so you wake up one morning, go around your home and start asking questions? Ah, it really sucks. If you can’t find someone related to your niche for an interview, please don’t do it.
20K followers on Twitter? Then Blogging is easy!
If you are really popular on twitter, with lot of active followers, then you probably get lots for replies for every question you ask. Ask them, what’s the best thing they love about twitter, save all the replies you get and post them as such. Wow! Blogging was never this easy. The post goes with the links to all those who replied too. Such posts are extremely useless, are you going to read all the replies? I don’t think so. If you are gonna post one such post, analyze the replies, sort the data and present the result.
For e.g.: you could say that, most people who participated where on twitter for the joy of meeting new people. Then it is something of value!
My Site last week
Telling the world how your site does is a good thing. Let them know that you had 2000 unique visits per day over the last quarter. What if you people start to post the site stats every week? Even every month is annoying. The best thing is the do it once every year, maybe on your sites birthday!
What’s the Big Deal?
These are some of my observations over the past 3 years. If you just realized that you had been doing some of these that create no real value, think about it. Ask the question, ‘who is going to benefit from this post?’
I guess you have come across more such non sense posts apart from the above list. Share them here and brand yourself!
I am a WordPress product developer and creator of Image Attributes Pro. I am passionate about solving problems and travelling the world.
Great tips! I should never ever do them in my new blog. 🙂
Wow, New blog looks awesome!
Great work and Good luck to you… 🙂
Wow. Really a good article for bloggers. Thanks. Great work.
But i wonder if there are any plugins for Top Entrecard Droppers for blogspot users.?
Ah, Blogspot users are always left behind. I dont know if they have one!
Turn to WordPress, nothing beats it. Blogger is ten generations behind wordpress!
Cheers
you forgot quick reblogs 🙂
Ah, there you go!
But reblogs are never bothered about their reputation, they dont have any.
They just need the traffic and some free Ad money.
🙂
Hahaha, some of these made me laugh. I had to double-check and make sure I wasn’t guilty of committing any of your points myself. 😀
lol, I am guilty myself! I have encouraged readers to blog about my contest in exchange of an increased chance of winning. 😉
Never gonna do that again 😛
Hi
i agree wordpress if ahead by blogger by 10 generations. But there are many users like me who don’t have enough money to buy a hosting. I am a student. And if i ask my parents some money for this purpose they never give too. But the free wordpress won’t allow to publish adsense. So again stuck there. I have lotof ideas in the future for my blog. We the blogspot users can now only just sit and watch the worpress blogs gets fuelled up again and again.
~~~~ I dream of the day i will buy a hosting and build a wordpress blog. ~~~~
I wish that you dream comes true in the near future, I will help you in every possible way 🙂
BTW, the hosting and domain is not that expensive these days, and you can easily get back all your investments if you are really serious!
Good luck
really useful.perfectly explained that what should not be there while writing a new a new post like WordPress 2.8.2.1001 release
well yea, Thats the most annoying part, I have never known of a wordpress update from a different place other than my dashboard.
Cheers
Arun, you hit the nail right on the head, sometimes bloggers go up their own *ahem* backsides looking for something to write about, and you have picked out some of the most tedious examples of that kind of blogging. I hate leaving my blog without content for too long but to be honest it’s better than boring the few readers I still have left 😀
Oh and by the way I stumbled the site!
I used to write a lot of fillers back in the startng days. But one day I found that quality is way too better than quantiy, and stopped writing fillers. Even though the posting frequency went down to as low as one post a week, I started making more readers!
Well, I am not used to this usage called stumbling. You stumbled my site means you came here from stumble? or you gave me a review? Thanks for that. You are very like your gravatar – wonderful !
I gave your site the “thumbs up” and promoted it via Stumbleupon. You don’t know it? I think you’ll love it!
link
It’s a social bookmarking website, basically if you find a website you love, you give it a “thumbs up”, add some tags so that people know what the website contains, and then other stumblers who enjoy, for instance, pro blogging as a subject, will get served up with your website when they click their stumble button. It’s a little hard to explain actually 🙂 But I use it a lot and it’s a good way of finding new interesting sites and promoting the ones you like to other people. Give it a go, tell us what you think!
Oops, I think my first reply got eaten… anyway, I gave your website the “thumbs up” and promoted it on Stumbleupon. (I’m not going to type in the link this time as I think your spam filters hated it)
It’s a hard thing to describe, but basically its a social bookmarking website. You get interesting new websites served to you according to your interests when you press the stumble button. If you like a site, you give it a thumbs up, and so that site continues to be promoted. It’s a really good way of discovering interesting new sites according to your interests, and promoting them if you like them. Give it a try, let us know what you think!
No dear Bird.
Your comment was never missed, and oh! I am already there at SU. But I am not active there.
When I said, I didnt understand “by the way I stumbled the site!” is – I didnt get it whether you came to this page from SU or you gave this page a thumbs up. Now I get it! 🙂
As you said, SU is a great place to be. Thanks for that. I really aprreciate you doing this for me. And writing it again for a second time, WOW that needs a big KUDOS.
Add me up on SU and I will do the same : http://arunbasillal.stumbleupon.com/ 🙂
BTW, I edited the moderation message ‘Your comment is awaiting moderation’ to a new one. Was that confusing for you? Details here.
Also I check my spam folder every day. It gets over 500 spam now, but sometimes genuine comments go in there. Every commentator spends a good part of his time to write it, so its defenitly worth checking the spam folder daily. You may be surprized to find many valid comments in there. Check it out.
Cheers
Arun
That is a great bunch of tips.Yes you said very well, “quality is way too better than quantiy”. Maintain the quality wish you all the very best.
Quality helps you stay ahead of competition, quantity will do nothing on its on.
Thanks mate for the wishes, same to you too 🙂
Great post!
This post will definitely help ppl not making the mistakes.
I want to know from where did you get that image. That iamge on this post is great!
I got that image from Free Stock Photos and I did some touch up by adding the text! Good to know that you liked it, Try your luck!
Agreed, but some people like to write about the above so to show readers they’re still alive…I too am fed up with “10 best sites for…” instead prefer original content.
Evnetually more and more people will stop reading them and lets hope they stop doing that. Cheers…
Hi Arun,
Thanks kindly for the hints. I’m relatively new (2 months) to blogging (wanted to do something more productive with the little spare time I have). I need to favorite this page to constantly remind of me things I should’t be doing heh.
Regards
Dee
Hello Dee,
I just took a peep at your blog, You are new, but you are already doing awesome! But let me give you one killer tip: Shift to a Self Hosted WordPress Platform asap. If you are serious, you are going to keep blogging for many more years, and at some point of time, you will realize that WordPress is much better. So change right now, For any support, I will be there 🙂
Dont think furthur, WordPress is the best, I have been on blogger for more than 2 years 🙁
The list here are the most common filler posts bloggers do, take my word, one quality post is 200 times better than 10 useless scraps 🙂
Thanks for the good words here.
Three Cheers to you 🙂
Thanks for the advice Arun.
I’ve customized the heck out of my blogger template heh. It would be painful to let all that go but I’m in the process of doing some research on moving from the blogger engine to WordPress. I’m still not too sure on how to do the move especially as I’ve got the custom domain name from Google/godaddy and how to move the site across without incurring too much pain. 🙂
If any of your readers can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated! 🙂
dee
Dee,
You can still move either completely by or start a new wordpress blog (with the same domain name) and use it as a continuation. Your question inspired me to write a Blogger-Wordpress Integration Guide, check it out and thanks for that 🙂
Move at the earliest, before you build-up backlinks and ranks. Since you are new, a complete migration would be better. Details are included in the post 🙂
“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and injspiration, You success will came soonewr or later…”
im going to this suiting someone to a t factor called a friday fest with my co-worker tonight and idk what it is,there like stands and nonsense, but if u certain, plz disbosom oneself me so i can have a usefulness metre!!! lol
-THANKS!! 🙂