How a Single Useless Blog Post Can Ruin Your Reputation

I have not been very regular with my blog posts as usual and one of the major reason for the same is that I don’t like to post useless blog posts that don’t add value to my readers and to write quality posts, requires serious time and effort commitment, which I am often not able to give this days. However, at times I do feel tempted to write some easy posts, often times I also do some nonsensical stuff for verifying certain hunches – you can call them my experiments. But at times these things really come to bite you back.

I was recently having a conversation with a gentleman in some professional context and while on phone with me, he happened to browse over to my blog and his first reaction was, “all I see is a collection of tweets from Adtech” and from his tone I could make out very clearly he wasn’t impressed at all – in fact it took away his appetite to dig deeper into the blog and explore the really good and useful posts I have done before.

I told him about some of the better posts I did and also guided him to use the search function to find them and his response was “you should have some way to feature the good work, not everyone is going to search”  – “you need to improve your navigation” (probably he overlooked the topic specific navigation provided just below the main nav bar.

What I Learned From This

1. Don’t Make a Blog Post Unless You Are Really Sure of it : Yes, a single non sense post can ruin your reputation. So try to avoid temptations to make easy but useless posts.
2. Cover it up : If at all you are posting any nonsense on your blog for whatever reason, make sure you follow it up with few good posts quickly enough, so they push the bad ones off your blog home page
3. Your Reader Might Not See, What You Can See : The top navigation by category is pretty visible to me, but it seems this reader completely overlooked it. Probably because of the overpowering main navigation on top of it. I have actually made it bold after our conversation.
4. Your Best Posts Demand More Real Estate on Your Home Page : I actually replaced the “Most Commented Posts” ( which was showing some very old posts) Section with “Must Read Posts” section
5. It is a good idea not to display the full posts on your home page but to show only a part of it as it allows the visitors to see more posts o your home page with relatively less scrolling.

While most of the above are generic best practices and are not really new to me, my negligent approach towards the blog was the main reason for such giant loopholes. Thanks to the gentleman and our discussion the other day, I got the motivation to fix at least some of these issues and oh yes, a new post in this one narrating the incident.