How is your blog doing? Is it hopping with excitement or has it been ran over like a bad Atari Frogger experience from 1981?
If your’s is the latter then be sure to read this post. Even if your blog is thriving, then share this with a sinking friend.
Here are 5 mistakes you can fix to keep your blog from dying.
1. No Comments
If you are just beginning to blog, comments are really hard to come by. This is because you haven’t gained blogging credibility yet. After time and some interesting posts you should begin to start getting comments.
If you have been blogging for a year and you still have very few comments, it may be time to either hang it up or go searching for commenters.
Create a community. Go search for like minded blogs and leave comments. Soon enough bloggers will leave comments on your blog as well.
Discard the ones who don’t return the favor.
2. Low Traffic
Just like getting bloggers to comment on your blog, you need time to build traffic. There are ways to get a head sooner rather than later.
Use social media tools. Submit your posts to places like Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. If you really want to move traffic to your site then you are going to have to engage a good amount of time on those tools.
Building community on social media sites will build community on your blog.
3. No New Posts
Have you run out of topics to blog about? Maybe you have to begin each new blog post with, “Sorry I haven’t written in a long time.” Tip: don’t ever begin a post with those words no matter how long you’ve been gone.
Does your blog have a niche or are you all over the place with topics? Try to narrow your focus. No more than 10 categories for your blog and no more than 1 category per post.
Start your blog title with one of the following: Why, What or How. Answer a question that you think your readers want answers to.
Be sure to check out these resources for inspiration:

4. Slow Loading
If your site doesn’t load quickly people will go look on some other blog. There may be a few reason why your site is loading slowly.
Is your theme coded badly? I have to be honest and tell you I have no clue how to tell if a theme has bad code. What I can do is point you in the right direction.
John Saddington from TentBlogger has created the Standard Theme. He claims that the Standard Theme is the best coded theme ever. I have been to several blogs that run the Standard Theme and they all seem to load very quickly.
If you have a good coded theme and your site still runs slow, make sure that you have a good cache plugin. I recommend WP Super Cache.
If you would like to see how fast your site is in comparison with other sites then go check out Which Loads Faster.
5. Low Subscribers
You need to set your site up with Google’s FeedBurner. This will require you to have a Google account but that is no big deal.
After you set up your blog and optimize it, then go to the Publicize tab and scroll down to Email Subscriptions.
From here you will see an email subscription code. Copy and then paste this into your sidebar at the top. This should help you to increase you subscriber count.
I have chosen to add a huge subscription photo on my sidebar that leads to a new page and describes all of my subscribing options. You can try this also but keep in mind that this requires my readers to go two steps where as the subscribing widget is only one step.
I have just recently decided to try out the Hello Bar. That is the orange bar at the top of the page. Hello Bar is free to try. Time will tell if this increases my subscriber count.
Work on these 5 steps and your blog should quit croaking and start hopping!
Share in the comments what has helped keep your blog afloat.
Boosting Your Blogging IQ,

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