Top Mistakes to Make on Your Blog that Make you seem Less Professional

REVIEW OVERVIEW

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If you run a website and you are serious about making it into a profitable enterprise, it is absolutely crucial you think about professionalism.

How you are going to make yourself seem like a real organisation and not an amateur?

If your site doesn’t look professional then you will find that a lot of your viewers leave as soon as landing on your pages – why would they bother to stick around and read something that looks average or is poorly written?

How can they be at all certain the information in your post or website is correct?

If you do manage to give your site that sheen of professionalism you will find that it opens new doors and creates new opportunities too. Your SEO will be easier because people will be more likely to link to you (and thus associate themselves with you), and at the same time you’ll find get more opportunities from advertisers. Ultimately it may help to get potential offers from buyers willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to provide you with an exit strategy.

But professionalism isn’t just about having a great design – really it comes down to the little details. Big companies are the only ones who can afford to hire teams of proof readers and who will have entire departments to check over their work.

As such, it’s the big companies that have flawless sites with none of the little ‘giveaways’ that smaller sites do. Read on and let’s take a look at a few of the little giveaways that might just be letting down your site and damaging your reputation…

Copyright

You know that little copyright notice at the bottom of websites? Well generally that’s very good for helping a website to seem professional, and some people even speculate that Google might use this as a sign that a site is good quality when doing rankings.

But this will be flipped on its head if you aren’t careful to ensure that the copyright is up to date. Find a blog written by an amateur and scroll down to the bottom – you’ll usually find that the copyright says 2012 next to it which tells you right away they aren’t paying close attention.

‘We’

A lot of webmasters have delusions of grandeur and want to imagine that they are running a large corporations. As such, they will go out of their way to try and convince you that that’s the case. ‘We here at fundogs.com always say…’. Some articles will even recommend that you do this!

Unfortunately though this will have the opposite effect to what they intend. It’s obvious when a company is really just one guy pretending. There’s actually nothing wrong with operating as an individual, and in fact it has many perks for other businesses that might want to work with you.

Be honest and upfront and you’ll gain more respect as a result. It’s just like high school all over again…

Desperation

Apparently some visitors rate sites as looking more professional when they have a few ads on them. The assumption is generally that a site with ads must be doing it to earn money, and by definition that makes them ‘professional’.

But on the other hand when that site is absolutely covered with ads – and will take all comers including ‘dodgy’ ads – it just makes you look like a spammer.

And worse, it suggests to visitors that you are hard for cash and so willing to completely sell out to try and make some money at the expense of your visitors. This isn’t going to impress anyone, so stick to your principles and act as though you don’t need to do anything for money.

Content

Contrary to what you may think, a few misspellings aren’t going to completely ruin your site. Even the biggest websites in the world have a few typos – that’s the nature of any business where you have that much writing. But if your content doesn’t flow, if it’s full of errors and inaccuracies, and if it sounds like pigeon English, then you are going to send visitors and business partners running a mile.

About the author: Keith Richardson, the author of this article, works for Adslot Create, a company specializing in placing ads on websites. He is an avid traveller and enjoys playing sports, especially rugby and hockey.