12 Blogging Mistakes Beginners Bloggers Must Avoid & How To Correct Them (2024)

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This is lengthy, but it will be worth it..

If you pay attention to this article that it deserves, you will learn to avoid mistakes that beginner bloggers make.

Some of these blogging mistakes cost time, but some of them are lethal, and could cost you money.

So, pay full attention..

Blogging can be very profitable if you do it right. A lot of people jump into blogging without knowing what it takes to be successful at blogging.

In this post, I would like to highlight the top blogging mistakes that newbie bloggers make.

We asked this question to ShoutMeLoud community, and here are some of the harmful blogging mistakes by real people:

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1. Not Building An Email List

“The money is in the list.”

If you haven’t heard that line before, you have not blogged long enough. Whatever your blogging goals are, building your email list should be your top priority.

If you are blogging to make money, you would soon notice that your blogging income will be directly proportional to the number of email subscribers.

Making a growing, email will ensure that you have a steady stream of visitors as soon as you publish a new post.

You could also segment your visitors and send them targeted emails or drip campaigns. This way you would successfully make sales if you created your own products.

Having a growing subscriber base will also Google Proof your website. You can still get a good number of visitors on your blog if you regularly email your readers.

How do you start making an email list

Choose from one of many email service providers. The most popular ones are ConvertKit,  Aweber, GetResponse and hundreds more.

After you have signed up for a provider, integrate their subscription form into blog design and start collecting emails. Make sure to test and measure from which areas your users subscribe more.

Also, make sure to segment your email list. Send all your segments targeted emails. Keep an eye on key stats like open rates, click through rates.

Test your subject lines and send times to maximize these numbers.

If you have a product of your product that you sell (ebook, tool, consulting, training), make sure to set up a separate drip for new subscribers and see how they respond to your emails. There are hundreds of great email marketing training’s available, make sure you learn and keep improving.

2. Not Building A Relationship With Your Readers

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If I can tell you one thing about successful bloggers, its this.

The most successful bloggers create long lasting relationships with their readers.

Have a look at the big blogs, ShoutMeLoud, ProBlogger, Boost blog traffic. Every time they publish a blog; there are hundreds of comments of regular readers of the blog.

It’s not because of what they write is great (which it is), it’s because the readers know the man behind the blog.

Even ShoutMeLoud falls into that category. Almost all the regular readers know Harsh.

Building a great relationship with your audience has many benefits.

  • You develop a loyal following
  • You can make friends for life
  • It makes your blog trustworthy to first-time visitors
  • Since your audience will trust you, they will easily buy from you
  • You will have more engagement on your blog in the form of comments, which will boost your traffic
  • One of your readers may be a blog owner, and that will open new avenues for you

Its clear that having a meaningful relationship with your readers is beneficial.

Here’s how to start building a relationship with your readers.

1. Write in a conversational tone

This one is easy. Just notice how I am writing this post right now. Its like I am talking to a friend.

Nobody wants to read a boring blog filled with jargon. Its like reading a school textbook that puts you to sleep.

2. Learn the art of Storytelling

“Let me tell you about the old friend. He started a blog a while back but noticed that he was getting no visitors. He then followed the most successful bloggers and started following what they did. Soon enough, he was blogging, and his traffic was up.”

See what I did there? There is no friend. I just told you a story.

The best marketers are the best storytellers. If you want to blog and grow and successfully, you have so started learning how to tell a good story.

I recommend you sign up for a copywriting course or read some good books on copy writing to improve your skills.

Read: 10 tips for good storytelling

3. Encourage users to comment and respond to them

This is a no brainer. You should always encourage your readers to leave comments.

Have you noticed how does a classroom feel when the teacher finished an important lesson the class just sits there?
Its pretty weird. The students are either not interested, sleeping or too afraid to ask questions.

That’s exactly how a blog without comments feels like. New visitors who land on your website will be un-sure whether or not they should comment. They would also not trust your website that easily.

On the other hand, a blog with an engaging community feels fresh, trustworthy, and lively. Just like a classroom room of beaming children and an interactive teacher.

Coming back to comments.

Its important that your readers leave comments. Its also important that you respond to all the comments (or most of them). When a reader comments on your post, they feel like they are talking face to face with an individual. You wouldn’t ignore a person if they were talking to you face to face would you? Then you shouldn’t ignore readers who take the time to read the content you wrote and took the time to comment. That’s just rude.

If you have a low engagement/comments on your blog, here is how to fix it.

  1. Make is easy for readers to comment
  2. Respond to comments on your blog
  3. Ask questions in you posts and emails

Have a look at Derek Halpern. In all of his videos that he posts, he regularly asks his audience questions and encourages them to answer in the comments.

Derek Halpern
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3. Not Selling From Day 1

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“If you don’t tell it won’t sell.”

You may be blogging for ad income, to establish yourself as the thought leader, personal branding, affiliate sales or any more reason.

Whatever your goals are, you have to sell!

Selling does not mean taking your products and pushing them in your reader’s faces; it means gently reminding them that you have something for sale.

Even if you create tons of great content, and your readers love you, you won’t make any money if you don’t make a sale.

Remember, you are not running a blog, you are running a business.

A business makes sales and profits.

There are many benefits to selling from day 1.

  1. You know which forms of monetization work best for your blog
  2. You understand your readers better as you will be able to see analytics about different types of posts
  3. You gain more experience in selling
  4. It will boost your confidence. The feeling of the first $$$ is unmatched (I am still waiting for that to happen to me).
  5. If sets expectations from your readers. If you have ads or products to sell on your blog to sell for too long, your readers will become used to it. Suddenly adding a product for sale could surprise your readers and be counter-productive

Here’s what to do to sell from Day 1

  • If you have your products to sell, make sure to add great value to the product
  • If you plan to advertise, put up ads quickly so, your readers get used to them
  • Set up your affiliate links and disclaimers as necessary
  • Add relevant call to actions for your products
  • Email your subscribers about your products

4. Not diversifying your income/traffic sources

Diversifying
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This is a tricky one. If you are successfully monetizing your blog, you should try to diversify your sources of income.

Your income should consist of a healthy mix of advertisement income, affiliate income, consulting, selling your products and many other sources.

This has many advantages.

  • If you don’t try different monetization techniques, how would you know which one is the best?
  • If your blog is relatively new, you can still much more money from multiple sources than through a single source
  • It teaches you different monetization techniques that can help with consulting or any other blog that you start in the future
  • It safeguards you from unexpected events. If for some reason one of your income goes down, you will still have cash flow to survive
  • Even ShoutMeLoud was hit with a Google penalty in the past. If such a successful blog is not immune, then how can you be immune

It serves different types of readers.

This is a tricky one to explain. Your blog will have a variety of readers. Some read for fun, some for learning, some read it casually, and some consider you an expert. Different types of readers will read your blog differently.

Personally, I save all the long articles to the pocket app and read them later. If a blog depends on ads for income, they lost impressions even if I am a regular reader. If you have ads on the sidebars, readers on mobile won’t see them.

Some people like to use text to speech software to listen to the audio of a post. If you depended on affiliate clicks, your income goes down.

By using different ways of monetization, you will ensure that all your readers gain value and also add to your bottom line.

Diversifying your traffic will also save you from the wrath of the Google Gods.

5. Not Choosing A Good Design

“You get only one chance to make a first impression.”

These are wise words that you should follow when designing your blog. Choosing a good looking design is as important as choosing a good functioning design.

In the words of the great Steve Jobs.

“Design is how it works“.

Not only should your blog look beautiful, but it should also be functionally beautiful as well.

Being functionally beautiful means that all the content is presented in a useful way.

Your readers should have no trouble accessing the information on the blog.

You should take care about at least the following things

1. Choose a readable font

There are thousands of fonts out there. Be sure to choose the one that looks good and is easy to read. Test and make sure that the font size you choose is readable on all devices.

Some blogs like to choose 2 or more fonts, keeping different fonts for headings and paragraphs.

You can also check out fontpair for inspiration.

2. Choosing a good look for your blog

I chose this as my second point because I believe that a bad font will annoy the readers more than a bad design.

Read; How to choose a WordPress theme and things to look for when getting a custom blog design.

3. Managing your ads/popups

It might be tempting to fill your blog with ads all over for more income, but in the long run, it will be harmful. If your blog is filled with ads or popups that annoy your users, they will leave your blog and might not come back.

A blog without an audience is a hobby.

As I stated above, always make user experience a top priority. Keep ads to a limit that they do not hamper the reader’s experience.

4. Sending timely and relevant emails

Having a newsletter with high opens and click through is every blogger’s dream.

Its very tempting to bombard every user with emails almost every day in hopes that they will open your emails, but the hope is a bad way to do business.

I get hundreds of emails daily. Those include newsletters that I signed up for. But a lot of them go unopened and end up in the trash.

The reason? I only have a limited time throughout the day to check emails, and I’ll open the ones that give me the most value.
If you have high-quality content on your blog, you have set up your readers’ expectations. Make sure you provide them the same value in every email.

Make sure to test your email strategy and your autoresponders to make sure your readers get the best value.

6. Not Creating Visual Content

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Have you checked your Facebook recently? Next time you do, compare the number of photos and videos you see to the number of text updates you see.

If my estimate is right, over 90% of your updates will contain a photo or a video.

Why is that?

Facebook’s job is to make its news feed more engaging for its users. Engaging means that users see what they like, spend more time on the website, like and share more.

Facebook long discovered that users like to see more images in their news feed. If Facebook is adopting it, why aren’t you.

An image is worth a thousand words. There is truth to that statement.
Images are easily processed by the brain. An average person will digest information 100 times faster than text. That is the reason info-graphics became so popular.

If you still are not convinced, think about this. As a child, you must have enjoyed books with lots of cartoons and graphics. The same story presented in a textual way would not have been that interesting.
Take a look at my earlier article. Its filled with images and even has an animated header image. That sure grabs some eyeballs.
The verdict is, visual content is going to win in the long run and you should prepare yourself.

This is how you start creating visual content
1. Hire a designer

This is the easiest and expensive way but will work best. You can use Fiverr where you just need to pay about $5 .

2. Use design tools

There are hundreds of tools out there, but the simplest ones are Canva, Infogr.am, Visua.ly, etc. For advanced users, Photoshop or GIMP would be suitable.
3. Learn to Design

This would be the cheapest but the most time-consuming way to start creating visual content. For some people or beginners, this would be ideal.

7. Not Making A Fast Website

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Website loading speed is not only now useful for SEO, but also for user experience.

Nobody likes a slow loading website. As the amount of information available explodes, attention spans will get shorter and shorter. If your website loads even half a second late, it will cost you readers and money.

There are several ways to make your website fast. I will share some of the techniques here as well.

The best part is; you can follow the tips even if you are not extremely techy. Let’s get started.

1. Choose a good host

A host is the first thing that you find when you start a blog. Much has been written about choosing a good host and I’m no expert. It’s better to consult an expert. Harsh has been running ShoutMeLoud successfully for more than a decade.

 Here is what he recommends for hosting WordPress site.

2. Choosing a good CMS

I recommend WordPress. It’s the blogging standard on the web and for good reason. No CMS comes close to the functionality of WordPress.

3. Optimize your WordPress database

Over time, as your blog grows, the size of your database can grow muti folds. If not properly optimized, it can lead to slow DB performance. A slow DB means a slow website.

It is easy to fix this. If you can open your PHPMyAdmin console through your hosting, select your database

You will see a list of all tables, select all and select the option “Optimize Table”.

Optimize Tables
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There are also some plugins that will optimize your WordPress database by cleaning out revisions from the database etc. Here is the one I recommend. It cleans out un-necessary tables and reduces the load on the database.

4. Using Caching Plugin

Technically speaking, a WordPress website is a dynamic website. That means all the data is stored in a database, and all the pages are created using the code at the time of a request. That means that whenever a user tries to access your website, WordPress will access the database and generate the page.

This works when you have a few visitors, but when the number of visitors rises, the load of the database will become un-sustainable.

Caching solves this problem by creating a static page and keeping it “cached”. This way, whenever a user visits your blog, the cached page is shown instead of accessing the database. This saves resources and increases performance and speed.

Additionally, a caching plugin will also minimize CSS, Javascript and increase performance as a whole. The good news is, there are several WordPress plugins available that you can use to configure caching on your website.

One of the best caching plugins is WP-Rocket.

5.Optimize your images

When you create visual content, there will be a lot of images on your blog. It is important that you optimize those images for good performance.

Bigger images take longer to load and slow down the website.

Plugins such as ShortPixel will help in optimizing images. It’s better to resize the images properly and then upload them. You can also use Snagit to take the screenshot & resize it before uploading it to your blog gallery.

8. Not doing any testing

Testing
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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

This is what I learned in engineering. Measuring and testing are part of any progressive project. If you don’t test and measure your results, they will not improve magically.

Ideally, you should test everything. Content length, writing style, blog design, CTA’s, ad placements, multiple ad providers, multiple affiliate programs and more.

If you can’t test everything, then you start with a few most important things.

Testing CTA’s

CTA’s mean call to action. For a blog, that would be a click on an ad or affiliate link.

Testing Ads

You should test your ad placements and the type of ads you publish for maximum revenue.

9. Not Approaching Advertisers Yourself

Advertising
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If you have just started blogging, then it would take some time for you to get your AdSense account opened, place ads and see the revenue flow.

If you have a niche-focused blog, you can make money faster by approaching advertisers yourself.

This may seem intimidating, but the worst that can happen is you can get turned down. No harm was done there.

Also, you can make much more money by focusing on a specific niche and then asking advertisers in your niche to advertise on your blog. This is because you will have a chance to get a better click-through rate, if your ads are highly relevant to your niche.

Look at this screenshot from ShoutMeLoud Advertising Page:

SML Ad Prices
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Also, you might have read about Harsh making 650$ from promoting X theme, where he contacted the company.

So how do you start approaching advertisers

1. Set up an advertising page on your blog

Look at your traffic numbers, audience engagement and decide on pricing. Your pricing should be moderate enough to attract advertisers and enough to make it worth your time.

2. Contact advertisers

Ask yourself this. What products would my readers be interested in? Since Harsh writes about blogging and making money, his readers are interested in setting up blogs, SEO tools, traffic tools etc.

Similarly, you can look for products in your niche that your readers would like and contact those companies to ask if they would like to advertise on your blog. You could be surprised by the results.

10. Not Promoting Your Blog

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“Content is King”.

I am sure you must have heard this hundred of times. I agree with that statement, but content alone will get you nowhere.

If no-one is reading your blog, the best content in the world will not help you.

The secret sauce of all the successful bloggers is a promotion.

You should spend as much time promoting content as you do in creating it.

Without great promotions, your great content will stay mediocre.

With mediocre content, you will get mediocre results.

But if you are spending time reading this post, I’m guessing you don’t like mediocre results.

So how do you start promoting your blog?

1. Get Social

Develop an active community on Facebook or a following on Twitter.
If your blog is already successful and has a big following, you can start a forum just like ShoutMeLoud Forum.

2. Engage with other successful people in your blog niche

Relationships with your readers are important. Relationships with other successful bloggers are equally important.
A good relationship with other bloggers will open new avenues to your blogging career. You will have more channels to distribute your content, be invited for guest blogging or more.

3. Find out where your target audience asks questions and answer them

There are many places where people ask questions about specific. There is Quora, Yahoo Answers, Ask.com and many more. There are many forums as well where your audience will spend their time.

Find the relevant questions that people ask and answer them there.

11. Not Creating a product: (From Harsh’s column)

I have been blogging for 14 years, and the only products I have released are info products. However, the world we know is evolving, and SaaS product is perhaps the best way to make that life-changing money. Looking back, I believe not having a SaaS-based product is one of my biggest mistakes.


While blogging about new technology or internet marketing utilities, I have come across many opportunities to launch a product that solves problems, and I didn’t. I missed the boat. I have often limited myself as a blogger and never focused on establishing a product that could become big with time.
However, the silver lining in this is; that I did launch a few info products, such as an online course (pro.shoutmeloud.com) and eBooks.

What should you be doing?

Well, you should consider launching your products. That could be info products or SaaS-based products. If you don’t have the technicality to launch something of your own, you can always partner with other entrepreneurs and help them market the product (early stage) and get a shareholding in the project. This way, it’s a win-win for all.

Bonus Tip

12. Not adding value to your reader’s lives

 
This is the most important tip. Whatever your blogging goals are, if you are not adding value to your reader’s lives, you are not making any progress.

Remember, adding value always doesn’t have to be in learning. Adding value can mean anything. It can mean giving them a good time, adding a new perspective, teaching them something new, making them aware or anything else.

Successful blogs don’t have to be always about teaching or blogging.

Remember, Viral Nova got sold for 100 Million $.

So go ahead, give your best shot and add value to your users lives.

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A newbie blogger, an SEO expert and an e-commerce enthusiast.

36 thoughts on “12 Blogging Mistakes Beginners Bloggers Must Avoid & How To Correct Them (2024)”

  1. Chetan Gupta

    Hi Yuvraj

    Thanks for sharing such a wonderful article here with us.

    Actually these are those mistakes which almost every blogger do.

    I had also did so many mistakes like copying articles from other blogs.

    I can remember those days when I was very much new to this blogging world and I purchased a domain name without thinking about the niche of the blog.

    I purchased the domain name and then I thought that On which topic, I should make my website then I thought that I’ll create an another Wikipedia.. Haha Lol

    And I started copying articles from Wikipedia. After putting efforts so many days, When I saw that no result is coming out then I decided that I’ll make a top 10 lists site where I can list top 10 things of every topic and again I started copying articles from a site named Listverse.

    I did like this till 7-8 months because I was very much new to all this things and I even don’t have any experience of writing articles. My English was also not good.

    Haha I know It still not good But currently I am able to write few lines But at that time, It was so difficult for me.

    I did copy pasting till 7-8 months and when I noticed that I am just wasting my time and nothing then I started finding the reason behind not getting traffic on my site.

    Then somewhere I found my mistake i.e. Copying articles from other site.

    On that day, I learnt that Google never ranks copied articles.

    So I made a decision that I’ll never copy any article and will write article myself.

    In starting days, It was so difficult for me to write an article. I first write article on my notebook and then later type in WordPress.

    After doing this few days, I tried writing directly in WordPress and any how I completed my first article in WordPress. Later I continuously did practice and it became common and easy for me.

    Now I am complete able to write in WordPress directly because Practice makes perfect. Right? 😀

    There are also so many mistakes which I am still making which you have listed in this article and I am trying my best to stop doing those mistakes.

    Thanks for sharing such a great piece of content with us.

    Happy Blogging 😉

    1. yuvraj wadhwani

      Chetan,

      That’s an interesting story. I believe every blogger will make mistakes and that’s good. Without mistakes we won’t learn, and constant learning is a key ingredient in success everyone.

  2. Festus Akingunsola

    Though I am still new to blogging,but your write-up is very educative and quite interesting. I hope to keep your instructions handy to serve as a good guide for a starter like me.Thanks a lot for the guide.

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      I’m glad it helped you out, keep blogging and growing 🙂

  3. Rajarshi Manna

    Hi! Yuvraj. Nice informative tutorial. I learnt a lot from this tutorial.very interesting specially email subscriber and CMS. I m also new in blogging world.
    I follow all points what are discussed in the article.

    Regards
    Rajarshi

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Rajarshi,

      That was what the post was intended to do, help other bloggers. 🙂

  4. M.Jyothiprakash

    Great Information resource, all the best topics are covered ensuring any newbie to improve to great extent.

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Jyotiprakash, I am glad you found it helpful 🙂

  5. sai

    ahh ..Seriosly great info buddy.. i was making few mistakes of them.Now will be correcting them
    thanks a lot for this worderful post

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Glad that I was helpful Sai.

  6. Shivangi Varshney

    Its a very informative and nice blog especially for those who are new to blog writing. Thanks for sharing. The best part I liked was how to build relationship with the readers.:)

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Shivangi, that’s one of the most important points. Good catch 🙂

  7. Shivang

    Very Informative and Effective article, thanks Yuvraj 😀

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Glad you like it Shivang.

  8. MINHAJ UDDIN

    Hi Yuvraj,

    Definitely a very informative post you shared with us.

    Yes, we need to choose good CMS for blogging. And fast loading server helps us in many ways,

    We need to create high quality content to get top rank on the SERP. After all this guide is very helpful for all bloggers.

    Thanks a lot for sharing this article.

    Happy blogging.

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      I’m glad that you liked it Minhaj. Hope it helped you learn something 🙂

  9. Muhammad Imran

    After reading this, I can say this is really a great guide for newbies. Every single buddy who wants to learn blogging should read this article. Thanks for sharing 🙂

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Thanks for the kind words Muhammad, hope you get success with your blog.

  10. Nisha

    After reading this great article, I found something missing.
    Surely I will okey these.
    I think it is one of best guide for newbies.Commendable work.
    Thanks Yuvraj for your great effort for bloggers.

    1. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Thanks Nisha, glad you liked the article.

  11. Indra Kant

    Very good topic cover in this post especially important of mail subscribe. And I want to ask you one question I am using Tiny Letter as a email service providers for my blog. not Mailchimp, Aweber, GetResponse etc. Is it good or may I shift to another one?

    Thanks

    1. yuvraj

      Indra,

      If it fulfills your needs then there is no need to move. If you outgrow your current provider then you can check these out.

    2. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Indra, if it fulfills your needs then there is no need for you to switch. Otherwise there are hundreds of options out there for you too choose from. 🙂

  12. Gurmeet Singh

    What an Article! 🙂
    But the Good thing is this that I am already taking care of all these things. That’s why feels like I am going at the right path to grow my blog.

    1. yuvraj

      Glad you liked it Gurmeet. Lets grow together 🙂

    2. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Awesome going Gurmeet! Your blog looks great too! All the best.

  13. Yogesh Khetani

    Creating email list is the biggest thing for bloggers. I am sure following all the tips will ensure proper growth of my blog. But One or the other we miss something.

    1. yuvraj

      That’s great Yogesh, which tools are your favorite?

    2. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      Glad you liked the article. Hope you grow a big email list. 🙂

  14. Favour Abalogu

    Very Informative post bro….I’ve saved this article for future “reads”….But,I have a question/request still…
    .
    .
    Will SML/her Contributors write an article on how to approach Companies telling them about your blog…. for Sponsored posts,Referrals e.t.c….
    .
    .
    I hope to get a positive response soon …

    1. yuvraj

      That’s a good idea for a follow up post. You can also read the article that I have linked about Harsh contacting the X – Theme guys. That’s how your typical conversation will go. But if your blog audience is smaller then your prices should reflect that. 🙂

    2. Yuvraj Wadhwani

      That’s a good idea for a follow up post. I will try to write one article about it 🙂

      Meanwhile you can read the linked article about how Harsh contacted the makers of the X theme, its a good start.

  15. Vardaan

    Very Informative. Cleared all my doubts. The best thing I liked is learn to story tell . It will create a relationship between you and your friends. I will definitely apply this to my blogs. Thanks Yuvraj and Harsh for sharing this informative post.

    1. yuvraj

      Glad that you liked it. Even I am learning copy writing by reading books and practicing. 🙂

  16. Vivek Bisht

    Hello Mr. WADHWANI
    Very nice tutorial, this is a guide also to improve blogging with some little and important points.
    Thanks for sharing

    1. yuvraj

      Hey Vivek,

      Glad you liked the article. Thanks for taking the time to read.

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