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There are over 500 million blogs on the Internet. Every single day, 2 million blog posts are published. Most new blogs don’t even last more than a year and never get more than 1,000 new visitors per month. In this post, we are going to talk about why most blogs fail and I am going to share 5 key steps you can take to ensure your blog doesn’t fail the same way the average new blog fails.
Why Most New Blogs Fail
Ok, so why do most blogs fail? Let’s go over the main reasons.
Most New Bloggers Don’t Treat Their Blog Like a Business
The average new blogger wants to start a blog as cheaply as possible. They use a free platform and don’t want to spend money on professional development and business tools.
They Don’t Invest in Learning
I was like everyone else at first. I thought I could manage to blog without spending any money. However, when I started becoming serious about wanting to earn an income, I realized I had lots to learn. I became a course junkie and bought tons of courses. I am grateful I did. In hindsight, I would not purchase all of these courses again, but I think buying at least one good course is essential. I recommend the Create and Go Pro Blogger Bundle or Online Business for Her by Natalie Bacon. Both courses include all the information you ever need to succeed with your blog, but the teaching style of one may work better than the other depending on your preferences.
Personally, Natalie Bacon is one of my all-time favorite teachers. She is warm, concise, and has a way to make the information she presents very accessible. If you check out the sales page of her course Online Business for Her, you will be able to watch her in action.
Lauren and Alex are also excellent teachers. They are a bit more “edgy”, which may appeal to the younger crowd. That being said, I am in my forties and I enjoyed their courses more than most other courses I took that would target “older” bloggers. I enjoyed their no BS teaching style. They are generous with the information they share and they don’t hold back any secrets. Again, you can look at their sales page to preview the course.
They Don’t Invest in Necessary Tools
To become a professional blogger, you need some professional tools. I don’t recommend you use a free blogging platform. Instead, you need a self-hosted blog. I created a free 5-Day Email Course to help you set up your self-hosted blog. You will enjoy it even if you are not in network marketing. Moreover, if you are not in network marketing, you may want to consider using a MLM company to monetize your blog. The commission tends to be better than most affiliate products.
Learn more about tools you may need to purchase down the road in my post 5 Things You Need to Do Before You Start Blogging That Nobody Else Will Tell You.
They Don’t Decide How They Are Going to Make Money
Blogs don’t make money, businesses do. I assume that if you are reading this, you want to make money with your blog, so you need to treat it like a business and decide how you are going to make money. New bloggers give up when they realize they are spending precious hours and money on something that never gives back to them. If you want to make money blogging, you have to know how you are going to make money. I already mentioned that network marketing companies are a good option because they pay a decent commission. You can also sell affiliate products and create digital products. The blogging courses I recommended will take you step-by-step through the process of deciding how you can monetize your blog.
Most New Bloggers Don’t Understand The Importance of a Niche
This point is really really important. That’s why my first few blogs failed. Gone are the days when you could just talk about your life, share a few recipes, and make money from ads on your blog. Now, success in the blogging world is all about your niche. You need to select a niche that is specific enough to help you stand out and become an authority pretty easily.
How to Pick the Right Niche
There was a time when niching down meant picking a topic like parenting, home decor, finances, or healthy food. Not anymore! Now, if you want to see traffic growth with your blog, you need to be even more specific in your niche choice. For example, if you would like to have a mommy blog, decide how you can narrow down your topic even further. You can decide that you will help new moms learn how to be responsive to the needs of their baby. This would involve nighttime parenting, breastfeeding, babywearing, etc. See how specific you have to get? When you choose your blog name, create your categories, and do your keyword research, you always keep this narrow niche in mind.
In my post Top 7 Most Effective Tips to Get More Blog Traffic While Working Less, I talk explain how you can choose a niche and do some keyword research to get the best results.
Most New Bloggers Don’t Blog Consistently
Blogging consistently is critical when it comes to growing your blog traffic. Growing your blog traffic is the only way to ensure you monetize your blog. If you have narrowed down your niche and understand the principles of simple keyword research, there is no reason you cannot grow your traffic unless you don’t blog. I understand how difficult it can be to stick to your blogging schedule. I run two blogs, one YouTube channel, and I homeschool 6 children. Over the years, I have learnt to cut out the fluff. Many bloggers find they are “busy” doing all kinds of unnecessary work. Once you focus on the most important tasks, you can easily limit your work hours. As a blogger, it’s a good idea to stop thinking in terms of hours. Instead, think in terms of tasks. When I schedule my blogging work, I schedule a task, not a number of hours.
Learn more in my post Top 7 Most Powerful Productivity Tips to Increase Your Productivity as a Blogger Within the Next Week.
Bloggers Give Up
It’s OK to give up sometimes. I am not here to tell you that you should never give up on your blog. After all, sometimes it takes a bit of experimenting to figure out what sticks. I had three other blogs that I took offline before working on my two current successful blogs. As long as you realize that giving up on your blog is a surefire way for it to fail, it’s OK to give up. You also need to understand that a blog that fails doesn’t make you a failure as a blogger. However, sometimes, giving up is not the answer.
How Not to Give Up
Becoming a serial blog starter is not the key to success. I understand the excitement that comes with starting a new blog. The hopes and the thrill of setting everything up can be exhilarating. However, a successful blog requires many hours of boring and repetitive work, it’s just a fact. Blogging will not always be fun and exhilarating. Particularly when you niche down enough, you will soon discover that you are always talking about the same thing in different ways. That’s when you need to keep doing the work even though you may not feel like it. If you have selected a good niche that you know well and you have been seeing some traffic growth, it may be better not to quit. I can not tell you exactly when to move on and when to stick to it, but if you feel really tempted to start a new blog with a new niche, I recommend you wait for a few weeks. I have done that twice since creating this blog and both ideas lost their appeal. If you still feel excited about the idea after a few weeks, go ahead! But keep the blog you currently have for at least a year as you may decide to get back to it (particularly if you notice it is still getting a significant amount of traffic).
How You Can Make Sure You Succeed as a Blogger
As you saw, most blogs fail most because of things bloggers fail to do. So to succeed, you got to do the werk! However, there is a little more to it. Let me share 5 simple steps you can take to increase your chances of success as a blogger.
1. Start With a Good Blogging Course
I have already talked about the importance of investing in your business by taking a good blogging course. A blogging course will help ensure your blog doesn’t become one of the millions of blogs that fail because it will take you through the whole process of setting up a professional blog, monetizing it by making sure you get enough traffic and that you take advantage of the traffic you do get.
2. Select Your Niche
Again, I have talked about selecting your niche already, but I want to add a few extra tips:
- Consider more than one niche option and look online for the competition in those niches.
- After looking at other Websites in your niche, think about how you could differentiate yourself. It may be by attracting a different, more specific audience. It may be by presenting yourself as a different type of expert or by just being even more specific in your choice of niche. These decisions are important in making sure your blog doesn’t fail.
- Do some keyword research on Ubersuggest to see what kind of traffic and competition exist in your niche options.
3. Work On Your Mindset
Any successful business owner will tell you that your mindset matters. To create your future, you need to think like your future self because your future self is the one that accomplishes the tasks that are necessary to your success. Your mindset impacts your actions and your actions will create your success. To help you improve your mindset, I recommend the course Personal Development for Her.
4. Do the Werk
There is no getting around this. To get the results, you need to do the work. When it feels hard, when it seems boring and when you don’t feel like it, you still need to do the work! No excuses!
5. Evaluate Your Results
After about a year, it’s a good idea to evaluate your results. If you post only once a week and pin once a week, you should have at least 5,000 monthly new pageviews. Obviously, if you pin a post more often, you can increase your traffic faster. With 5,000 pageviews a month, you will be growing your mailing list and making sales. Not enough to retire from your day job yet, but more than enough to cover all your blogging expenses. If you don’t get these results after a year, you may look into other niche options or maybe a change in direction with your current blog. For example, you could focus on one of your categories for a few months and see if that helps. Or you could try to attract a different audience.
In Summary
Making sure your blog is not one of the blogs that fail is simple enough: treat it like a business and do the work! Understand how you are going to make money and write your post strategically to promote your products and get the most traffic. That’s it! Go do it, girt!
