Starting your own blog can sound intimidating, but the truth is that it’s not hard to set up your very own blog. The difficult part is making it a success. The cold hard truth is that most blogs will fail within a year.
But with the right mindset, enough determination, and thorough planning, your blog can make you enough passive income to quit your day job.
To make your blog a success, be sure not to commit the newbie blogging mistakes listed in this post.
Table of Contents
8 reasons why blogs fail
You Don’t Have a Clear Objective
This is the single reason new blogs fail. The whole aim of having a blog is to present people with an objective. If you have a weight loss blog, everything on your blog should have something to do with the subject. Posting cat pictures and travel stories to a weight loss blog is a great way to lose readers. Stay focused!
You Don’t Have Your Own Domain Name
Another easy mistake to make (and avoid) is not having your own domain. If you want to succeed as a blogger, you need to establish credibility, and you can do this by having your own domain name. While it’s perfectly fine to start a blog without a domain (just to test the waters), you will need your own domain to have any success blogging.
You can get a free domain name at HostGator when you get hosting for your blog.
You Write Great Content, But You Don’t Share It
How can you expect people to read your blog if they don’t know it exists? Many blogs fail because bloggers believe that quality content is all it takes to succeed. The fact is that content is only 30% of blogging. Promotion is the other 70%.
Get traffic to your blog. Otherwise, you’ll be writing a personal diary, not a blog. So guest post on other blogs, promote your blog on social media, and learn about search engine optimization.
You Believe You’ll Be A Millionaire
Something that stops many bloggers in their tracks is the belief they can be a millionaire in a month. Some blogs bring in a lot of money, but it takes at least three years to reach that kind of revenue. You might not have such lofty goals but understand that any level of success takes time and effort. Blogging is not a get-rich-quick method, that’s for sure.
You’re Inconsistent
To succeed at blogging, you need a clear and defined regular blogging schedule. You can’t succeed by writing posts only when you feel like it. Blogging should be considered a job, and, just like any blog, you need to take it seriously to succeed.
To post on a regular schedule more easily, you can schedule your blog posts to appear in the future. That way, you can work on your blog one day per week yet schedule three posts per week.
Every successful blogger who has made money knows a good part of it came down to regularly posting quality content on a set schedule.
Your Blog Looks Amateurish
Something that hurts a blog more than bad content is a bad design. Nobody will even get to your content if your blog is not visually appealing. On the other hand, you only have one chance to make a first impression, so make it a good one!
A shoddy-looking site will turn people off instantly. If you’re serious about your blog, then you should consider investing in a paid theme rather than a free one that makes your site look unprofessional.
You Put Up Ads Too Soon
When starting a blog, it’s important to build up trust with your readers. That starts with not putting ads on your blog right away. Ads are spammy and turn people off. Unless you’re an established blog, readers will see the ads and then think your blog is just a ploy to make money.
Remember how Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram started? They all started with no ads, then established a huge following, then finally introduced advertisements that didn’t turn off their visitors.
You Don’t Let People Subscribe
Building up an email list is one of the first things every new blogger should do. Getting emails should be a top priority for you. Why? Because it’s not the job of the reader to remember every site they visit. It’s your job to make your blog memorable.
When your visitors subscribe to your email list, they receive an email alerting them when you make a new post so that they can’t forget you.
There you have it, 8 surprising reasons why blogs fail. Steer clear of these pitfalls, and your new blog will surely be a success!