The best thing about the internet is that anyone can put up information. The worst thing about the internet is that anyone can put up information. Unfortunately, if you are into blogging, then there is a lot of rubbish information flying around that does more harm to aspiring bloggers than good. Let’s take a look at some fairly prominent ideas that are in the mainstream, but are complete and utter lies.

1) Write Consistently and People Will Come – I am sorry but it just doesn’t happen that way. Sure you might fluke a post that ranks number one for some golden keyword on Google or some random visitor might give you the occasional bit of StumbleUpon traffic, but chances are that this won’t happen. If you write a blog and you want traffic then you need to be prepared to go out and get it. There are plenty of blogs that have been updated consistently since the 90s that still get traffic in the tens rather than hundreds. You need to be writing with good SEO in mond and then promoting your posts by email, Twitter and other social sites. That is how people will find it!

2) Social Traffic is Useless - This is a big one I hear repeated ad nauseum by people who aren’t smart enough to figure out how to use social media traffic. Digg is incredible for bringing links, Stumbleupon is amazing for bringing page views and signups, Facebook is awesome for user engagement with your site and Twitter is superb for consistent traffic. The thing is you have to know how to use them properly. Plenty of big blogs that make a lot of money were built on the back of social traffic (Zen Habits, Copyblogger, John Chow, Cracked, Lifehacker etc etc)

3) Link Bait is Only Worthwhile Occasionally – If you are not considering ways to turn every post into a piece of link bait then you are losing out in so many ways. People love link bait. They never get sick of it. If every single post you write is done to the utmost of your ability then at the very least, more people will come back to your blog. You will get a steady collection of incoming links without trying. People will Tweet your posts. And occasionally something will hit the jackpot without you even trying. Every piece of content you write should be written like linkbait.

The blogging game wasn’t meant to be easy, but people who take the time to learn their craft will be rewarded.