Failure at blogging is very common unfortunately, especially if the idea is to monetise the blog and make good money with it. But in this article, I’m going to put forward 4 ways to avoid failure as a blogger based on my own personal experience and the collective wisdom of other bloggers.
1. Keep Learning About your Niche and About Blogging
Keeping your knowledge sharp in regard to your niche as well as websites and blogging in general, is really going to help you stay on top of things and help you perform efficiently as a blogger.
People can fail through being too lazy to carry out research before they write blog articles.
You want to stay in the know with whatever your blog is about by doing routine research on your niche. Checking out interesting facts and related products that you have not yet reviewed, gathering useful information so that you can write more naturally; as someone who really knows what they’re talking about.
Always remember that writing comes from knowledge and the more knowledge you have, the more you can write. And the less knowledge you have, the less you’re going to write. You’ll be less informative and less interesting if your content is general, confused, vague, etc.
Interesting blog posts come from thorough research or firsthand experience. This needs to be able to come across in what you produce.
What this boils down to is: the more research you do, the better your blog content will be.
It’s also a great idea to keep up with how blogging works. You can follow helpful channels and blogs that keep coming out with fresh tips and ideas for optimising a website.
Blogging needs to become your passion, your hobby, the thing you geek out on and know all about.
As the good old saying goes, knowledge is power.
Failure usually happens for 2 reasons:
- Lack of patience/being lazy
- Lack of knowledge
People often fail because they don’t really know what they’re doing or they are too lazy to commit to something long term.
2. Keep Producing SEO Friendly Content
When it comes to blogging, you can’t beat just getting your content out there on the regular. New bloggers can sometimes get very caught up in making their site look flashy and nicely designed, when what they really need is to focus on just producing content.
Just keep posting and people will come to your website. The numbers will grow, the success will climb.
You just need to make sure your content is SEO friendly.
This isn’t the place to delve into SEO but here are a few pointers to make sure your content is SEO friendly:
- Have a focus keyword that isn’t too short or competitive
- Include the keyword in the first paragraph of the article and one or two other places while still allowing for a natural flow
- Add internal links within your article to other content from your site
- Add a link or two to an external site, such as an authority site like Wikipedia
- Make sure your content is relevant to the title and readable, such as by avoiding big clumps of text
- Add quality images and sometimes link to a YouTube video (perhaps you also have a channel?)
Write both informative posts and review posts (if you are blogging as an affiliate). It’s all about writing SEO friendly articles relevant to your niche.
The traffic comes with the amount of content you have. But poor quality content won’t rank at all, so the important thing is good content, but lots of it.
Getting into a writing rhythm is where you want to be and you will see results.
Stay Passionate and Produce Value
Passion is powerful, for everything, and in this case for blogging. Lack of passion can easily lead to failure as a blogger.
But this passion needs to be combined with delivering real value. Some use that inner spark to lead people into scams. We don’t want that.
We want passion combined with giving accurate and useful information – whatever our audience is actually looking for.
A key to staying passionate is picking a niche you love to begin with. You love what you write about and you want to get what you know out to other people.
You want to spread knowledge and make legit, tempting offers.
A passionate person is always going to succeed. They’ll be persistent because they love what they do.
If you add to this, the giving of value to your target audience, you’ll be well ahead of the game so to speak.
Don’t Blog Just for the Outcome
That’s another big cause of failure among bloggers: they focus too much on the outcome of their labour – the money outcome that is.
But there is also a reward in just having helped other people who are interested in your niche.
Concentrate on reaching out to them with your site and the reward will follow naturally.
Ideally, the money should be a side benefit to a passionate undertaking for OTHER people.
That’s what Adam Enfory said: it gave him a greater sense of fulfilment and reward to actually help someone than simply to make money online with his business.
That is one of the biggest secrets to successful blogging and the same would go for YouTube and other forms of business.
Thank you for this great reminder on how to avoid failure in your blogging. I think that the most common cause here is definitely giving up too soon or not putting enough work in.
You are also right when you say that you need to focus on helping others rather than the monetary outcome. The money will come naturally as you continue to help more and more people to make informed choices.
Thanks for this. It requires a good bit of self-discipline all the same as you say. People want fast results but we need to play the long game when it comes to blogging.