17 Wordpress Mistakes to Avoid for New Bloggers

Key Takeaways

Hey, what's up everybody? It's Jim and Ricky from Income School. Um, our business is about teaching people how to start a blog that's profitable and we've done it with a lot of different um, niche websites, just kind of small topics uh, writing about them and and earning money with them. So, today we want to talk about 17 common mistakes that we see um, as we're coaching people through WordPress. Uh, so you want to take the first one? Sure. Let's just roll through these. Okay. So, the first one is forgetting to set up permal links. Oh, that's a terrible mistake. It really is. It It's a Get it right from the start. Um, permal links is when you write an when you create a post or a page on your website, um, that your WordPress is automatically going to create a a URL, a web address for that site. Um, and you can set up what the format of that URL is going to look like. The way that it usually comes is um the the plain one which is like incomeschool.com/questarkp equals and then each article will be given a number or I don't I I don't know that might be the default otherwise it is. Yeah. So it's just this weird code um which I think it has two problems leaving it u leaving it that way. First of all it just looks ugly um because you have this weird code in there. It used to serve a purpose years ago. It used to make it faster, but it doesn't anymore. Um, and the other thing is it hurts your SEO because it's just a long um a long URL and then you can't get those those keywords in the URL. So, what we recommend is to just go with the post name. So, you're just going to go into settings, change your post name, so it's just incomeschool.com and then the name of the post with hyphens in between them. Cool. So, very simple, but do it now. If you wait to do it, what's going to happen is um breaks all your links. Yeah. Later you're going to go in and be like, "Oh, shoot. You know what? I I want to have all the links have my my title name in them." Well, any any link anywhere that linked to one of those pages on your website, now those links are broken. So, if you know somebody comes in from another site, from Pinterest, from wherever, then um they're not going to end up on the right page. They're just going to end up getting like a 404 page error. So, do it now at the beginning of your website. If you haven't done it yet, I'm sorry. Yeah, you you really do want to get that right. And I wish they would fix that by default. Okay. Number two is not backing up your website. Look, your WordPress site is going to get messed up at some point. It will happen, especially when you're new at WordPress and you're making mistakes. You have to have a backup. I promise you, you will cry like a baby when you lose 6 months of work because it wasn't backed up. Just because it's on a hosting company doesn't mean it's backed up. Now, having said that, getting a good hosting company is going to help you. Like, we recommend your first site should be on Blue Host. I've been a customer since 2007. Um, and the reason is that they keep good backups. Multiple times I've called them and said, "Hey, I messed up my website. can you just roll it back to what it looked like yesterday and it's fixed in a 30- secondond phone call. Um, but also you need to keep a local backup. One that I've used for this in the past is called Vault Press. Um, and uh, it's just a plugin you can install that will do this. Now I'm using it a little bit more of an advanced way, but this this will definitely do the job. It's one that I would recommend to start out with. So back up your website. All right. Number three, using a free theme. free or just super cheap or just ones from not reputable companies, anything. You know, it you need a good theme and a powerful theme. Um, not having a good theme is going to cause things to break. It's going to cause your site to go slow. It's not going to work well with the the plugins that you want. Um, there's just so many problems you can have by using a bad theme. And those problems may not surface at first, but as you get more traffic, as you get, you know, plugins and more articles, you're you're going to run into problems down the road. Our favorite theme, we use it all over the place, is called X Theme. Um, you know, go to incomeschool.com/wordpressmistakes. You're going to get to see this, you know, all of this information there. You can see a link to X theme. You can also check out our review of X Theme. Um, we we love X Theme. Yeah. And I I hate spending people's money when it's not necessary. And there are a lot of acceptable free themes, but you know what? You're spending so much effort. I mean, forget the money you've spent on a host and stuff. Think about your time you're spending on this. I It's worth It's worth the 60 bucks to get this theme. It really is. I I use X theme on every single website I make. I probably have 15 copies of it right now um that I'm using on different websites. There are other great themes for sure. Uh but I really would recommend sticking with X theme. I've tried well over a hundred themes over the last seven years and this one I really really like a lot. It's really powerful, really fast and really not that expensive compared to other good themes. So yeah, that's our recommendation. So customizing your theme is awesome. And this is mistake number four. But the problem is you can spend three months customizing your theme, especially if you got one that wasn't very good and it makes it hard to customize. Even though it's it's possible, it's hard. And what we see all the time, so we do niche site consultations. Uh you can go to our website um at incomeschool.com and then you can go to our niche site school and here you can um you can hire us to to record sit down at our microphones like this and we'll record a you know 10 15 minute audio just talking through the idea for your blog any problems you can mista you could face how to do the monetization for your blog all that kind of stuff and we'll email you the 10-minute MP3 and And then also we'll send you emails almost every single day uh with um with a video from us uh showing you what step to take. Just you know spend an hour a day for 60 days and you can have a very very nice blog that that should start earning money in short order and we're going to help you avoid all these mistakes we're talking about today. You're going to avoid them all because we're going to walk you through the right way to do this. Yeah. And you can email us like we're going to be there to make sure we can help you with it. Now, when we talk about customizing your theme, like X theme or any of the good themes out there have lots of really cool things you can do, but it's using features that are built into the theme. Okay? What I don't want you to do is to go messing around in the PHP code or or, you know, messing around with CSS to try to customize it and make it look a certain way. You can spend way too long doing it and then once the theme updates or once WordPress updates, it's all broken again. Just don't mess with that. Buy a theme that you like that looks good. Um, I am I can pretty much guarantee you that X theme has a stack and a setup that will look exactly how you want your site to look because it's that versatile. Okay, the next mistake is writing too short of posts. Um, when I started my blog and what we see all the time when we're doing consultations is that people think that the way to get traffic is to write short, quickly consumable tips that people can go on real quick and get the information. And that is from my experience at least completely the wrong approach to it. Uh let me show you the analytics for one of my websites for just the last month. This website gets over a million um uh people going to it each month. And uh these articles, all the biggest articles, the shortest one is 3,000 words in length. The most popular posts on all of my blogs are the big fat meaty posts that are like really close to be turned into an ebook. I mean, we're talking 3,000 4,000 5,000word long posts. Uh, and they're almost always getting the best traffic for me. Cool. Awesome. Um, next one, not resizing images. um when you put an image onto your in into a post um it it's going to make it smaller on the page. So it'll look small, it'll look good on your site, but it's not actually reducing the size of that image um the number of pixels in that image. And so the file is still really big and when that happens, your site, your pages are just going to load really slow. It takes a long time to load those image. So, what we like to do, um, for, you know, your smaller images that have the text wrapped around them, for your little featured images, we usually go with like a 350 pixel width. For full width images, we're still only talking like 900 pixels on the long side on the horizontal side. And that's going to give you kind of a full width on your page. Um, it's going to look really good, but it's not going to be so huge of a file. Yeah. So, if you don't use Photoshop, just take your image and before you upload it to your website, just go to resizeimage.net. net and are really simple to be able to resize it. You got to do this or else your website's going to be running slow. Just because it's showing the right size doesn't mean it's been cropped to the right size. It just means it's taking the big huge picture and it's displaying it um smaller. It still is going to take just as long to load. Okay, number seven is too many plugins fighting each other. I have a hard rule that I can never ever have more than 20 plugins on a website. Um, and every time I try to get fancy and try to just add a couple more plugins that I really wanted because they were really cool, uh, it always causes problems. And there is nothing worse than coming to your website, it's down, you say, "Oh, what is wrong?" And now you have to go through each plugin and figure out what happened. I would say for your first whole year of blogging, no more than eight plugins, period. So, you know, if you want to do something fancy for one post and you want this cool feature for one post, skip it. Just don't do it because now you've added another plugin and you know, hopefully we're playing this the long game. Uh, you just can't do that for for one post. Only add a plugin if you really have a need. Plugins are what cause the most problems in WordPress. So, only buy rep only get reputable ones and use as few as humanly possible. That kind of comes back to the theme. If you have a really good theme to start with, you won't you won't need so many plugins. Okay. Um, next one, number eight, using a password that's easy to guess. In this day and age, there are computers out there that are just running a script to try to guess at your password to get into your WordPress site. And they're just going to do that over and over and over again every day, all day. Okay? So, um, you know, when you have a small site, you might not see so much of that, but over time, you're going to start to get a lot of password attempts. So, use a unique password that you don't use anywhere else. You know, I recommend using um there's a tool called LastPass. Just go to lastpass.com. Um there you can create a password vault that you can have across your devices. Um that's that's all encrypted. It's and it's free. It's totally free. And um and so then you can have it generate passwords that are like 12 or 16 characters long and have special characters. And you know, then then you don't have to worry about it. They're never going to guess those passwords. Yeah. my my WordPress website is getting 200 attempts a day to crack the passwords. Uh you really do have to be careful. And the cool thing is with with like a 12 um if you if you have a password that's like 12 characters long, 12 random characters, 12 random characters that use um alpha alphabet, numeric, and special characters, you have literally over a trillion password combinations. It's basically they will never get it. Yeah. So the NSA can't crack it. Okay, maybe not. They might find it later. Okay, next is using a junky host. So, uh, several years ago, I decided that I was going to try a different host because somebody had said they had this fancy host and so I tried it. I'm trying to remember who it was because I would totally call them out. Oh, that's I wrote it in the article, Storm on Demand. I spent five times as much as I did with with my good host and my website could not stay online. It was just not managed well. The way that my site was implemented on the server was just not handling the amount of traffic I had well. You have to get a good host. There are a lot of good ones. Most, in fact, are going to be pretty decent, but there are a lot of bad ones. And if you make the wrong call, you are definitely going to regret it. So, go to incomeschool.com/start and we have a tutorial there that'll walk you through picking a host, getting your WordPress theme on, all that kind of stuff. Yep. All right. Number 10, trying to SEO your way to traffic. We have a philosophy that is um rather than using trying to use all the SEO tricks and trying to basically trick Google into thinking your site has the content that people want, we just write really good content. And the reason for that is, you know, we've tried it. We've done the SEO stuff. We've done the link building, all the tricks that are supposed to work. And really, they do nothing for you. They do very, very little for you. And really, in the end, all you're trying to do is trick Google. Mhm. So, just write good content. Having those big beefy media articles we talked about is going to do more for you than any SEO uh link building stuff you do. We have an whole article about this. So, if you want to check it out, again, go go to incomeschool.com, check out uh this article. We have a link to the to the one about SEO as well. Yeah, if you just go to incomeschool.com/mistakes, it's going to link to everything. incomeschool.com/mistakes. So, one of them I wanted to show you, uh, this is an article where I showed all of these crazy different SEO techniques I did and it didn't make a difference. My traffic just rose steadily over time. You know, only a couple little dips were really just technical errors that I had to fix something. Uh, but it just didn't make any difference. It grows the same. Um, and so just don't waste your time. Just make some good content and uh I think you're going to be much much better off. All right. Number 11 is using junky images. Now, two things about this. One, you really should get a um a subscription to graphic stock. Uh buying stock photos for all of your articles can get really pricey. And so we started using this company um and it's just a lot less expensive. their their portfolio wasn't as big um as some of of the others, but you're not paying like seven bucks an image to get a full width image. It's $99 a year and you can just download like crazy for the whole year that you're podcasting. So, go to incomeschool.com/mistakes and we have a link to to get it. And another thing that I'll say about images, don't get too cheesy of images. you know, if you're writing a business blog, people always like have this, you know, black guy and a white guy shaking hands, like just super like it just looks so cheesy, fake, like really forced. Um, and it's it just it makes your website look cheesy and forced and not genuine. So find find photos that look professional but look real like it's like just just real not not like so every smiling all happy business people. Awesome. Okay, the next one is failing to miss or missing out on Amazon commissions. Every single blog out there has products that they could recommend and has products that they could they could talk about, they could compare and you should be doing that. Go sign up for a free Amazon Associates account. Um it's going to take you like 15 minutes and you know go to incomeschool.com/start and we'll kind of talk to you about how to do that a little bit. Um but you can just start earning commissions immediately it tomorrow and like my wife started a blog last month and she made her first five bucks this month and and it you know it's a ramp like you're going to not earn that much for a while and then you get traffic. Last year we made $150,000 just on Amazon Associates. It's like they just keep mailing you the check. It's awesome. So, don't miss out on those commissions. You've got to sign up. I in fact, I've seen websites for sale um that just aren't using the program and I'm always trying to buy them, but somebody always beats me to those. You know, in in our niche site school program, we do that in the first week we set up Amazon Associates because there's no reason to hold off on it at all. Yep. Okay. All right. Failing to block spam. This is a big one. Spam goes crazy on WordPress. Um, and we have a plugin recommended here in the article uh to that's been the best for us. Uh, but if you don't do anything to block spam, you're going to get inundated in just the first few weeks. So, you got to do something. We get spam comments and posts and um, contact forms, all that stuff all the time. Yep. Okay. The next one is failing to test your social media buttons. You may get a you may download a plugin because you want people to share your post, right? at the bottom of the post, it's going to say, you know, share on Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and this and that. Um, if you want, you want to test those out and make sure that they actually work and that they share properly. Um, we've seen this in the past where, you know, a plugin looks slick, it looks like it's working well, and then you realize I mean, you don't realize, right? You don't realize that it's not working and then you switch to a different plugin that works properly and suddenly four times the shares. Mhm. And that I mean, yeah, I've seen that. So, just just test it out. Make sure it's working if you're going to use that. Okay. Okay. The next one is overdoing it on social media. Uh whenever we do a consultation um with clients uh which is almost every day we're getting people uh submitting consultation uh requests for us. And this is the one that we really have to sit people down and walk them through because most people when they imagine starting a blog, they immediately go start a Facebook page and a Twitter account and stuff and they think that's the way to get traffic. It certainly can happen. And seven years ago when I started my first blog, that is how I got traffic and it really did work great for me. Times have changed big time and for very very few of our clients do we recommend any social media whatsoever until you're getting lots and lots of traffic you know over a h 100,000 for income school we do nothing on social media we have YouTube and our website and that's it because it's a massive time suck and what I'm seeing increasingly over time is Facebook and the other social um social networks are just not sending that traffic anymore. So, you're spending all this time into it and you're just not getting the return that you would get by just sitting down and writing good content. When income school started, you know, we created a Facebook page, we don't even worry about it anymore because it doesn't do anything for us. The the most that we do is occasionally if an article is appropriate for it, we'll pin it on Pinterest. Yep. And that's it. We don't worry about creating a social media community at all. Yeah. I have one of my websites has 650,000 followers on Facebook on the Facebook page and it's like the smallest refer of traffic to my website. It's just not something I focus on. Okay, the next one is and we wrote an article about this a couple years ago, but making your blog too nice. Okay, and when we talk about nice, we talk about making it status quo like every other blog out there. Okay, you're writing good content. You're coming up with good articles, good topics. Um, but in the end, it's just another repository of articles for most of your readers. Um, just like when you drive down the street and you see all these businesses out there, they all keep their the front of their stores looking nice, but the ones that stand out are the ones that do something a little bit different. And so, what we recommend is try to do something unique. Have something on your site that makes it stand out. whether it's, you know, a monthly YouTube video that just like kind of just does something really weird and different. Um, or or maybe it's it's a sort of a series of articles that that come out once a week. There's an article that falls under this category that's just a little bit offthe-wall. It's the purple cow, right? that you remember that that's going to be something that's going to make people more interested in your site and it's going to make it more memorable so people will come back um as opposed to just, you know, seeing it as again another repository of information. Yeah, somebody submitted a a niche site consultation uh this week and they said, you know, I'm thinking about doing a website about helping people buy their first house. And I said, well, you know, he also said he was handy. And so I said, well, what if you do a niche site about buying houses under $100,000? like really really inexpensive homes and fixing it up as your first home. You know, just do something that makes it different. Uh because people will it's something that's remarkable. At least you can say, "Hey, there's a website that shows you how to get houses under 100,000 bucks and this guy's making them pretty nice." You know, just something different. So, that about covers it. We talked through a ton of of uh WordPress mistakes that we've made. Uh to get the whole article and all the links and our niche site consultations, everything just go to incomeschool.com and this article is incomeschool.com/mistakes. See you.