11 Common Problems That Cause Most Bloggers to Fail

What better way to kick off the 31 days of blogging challenge with a post about why blogs and bloggers fail?

Before I even thought about starting a blog, I’ve seen successful bloggers with crazy income reports and a massive amount of people posting on forums asking questions about how they should start a blog, how to grow traffic, how to build their email list and whatever other newbie questions you can imagine.

I guess it’s a nice dream, right? Sit at home in your underwear, watching TV while blogging and making money doing it. Have a successful blog and travel the world, never waking up to an alarm clock for the rest of your life.

The unfortunate reality is that 90% of blogs fail to generate even $100 of income. That means they MIGHT be lucky enough to break even on 1 year of hosting and a domain name. The statistics vary depending on the source you look at, but for the most part, the numbers are not in your favor!

There’s a lot of ways to make money both online and offline. It seems like blogging is one of the most popular choices, but it’s also difficult.

Having a blog isn’t just about generating income though, it can be used to enhance engagement, repurpose content for backlinking, or social influence. Repurposing content for lead nurturing and lead magnets. You can use a blog for your business as part of an inbound marketing strategy and generate leads.

Even then, chances are your blog will fail.

13 Reasons Bloggers Fail, and How To Avoid It!

Making money online is not an easy task. If it is, then I’m just someone that isn’t enlightened to the guru ways of life. I think it’s much easier to make money offline, than online, and while I’m not a blog guru or expert at all, I think I can see a common theme why people fail.

#1: Not Connecting With Your Readers

You surely aren’t creating content just to look at it right? If the goal is to bring in revenue or if it’s a business blog and you want to create additional relevance for local SEO purposes or generate leads, then you need to be able to connect with your readers.

I think this comes back to identifying your buyer persona’s or defining your target market / audience. It’s not about what YOU want, it’s about what THEY want. If you can’t give them what they want, then you’re never going to gain traction.

With this blog, I like to think that I produce engaging content, but I also respond to emails quickly, I started a Skype Mastermind Chat with regular readers of the blog and it keeps people engaged. Implementing webinars every other week has been a very engaging way to connect to the readers as well.

#2: They Aren’t Building an Email List

If you spend time reading blogs, or forums you surely have heard the catch phrase “The money is in the list”. It’s almost at the point where I want to reach through the screen and slap everybody that says it because people say it way too often.

Anyway, I guess it’s such a played out cliche because it’s true. If you build a list, you have an instant audience every time you publish a new piece of content. You have people that trust you and your recommendations, whether you want to sell your own product, or recommend affiliate products or simply promote new blog posts.

It’s easy, you can start building your list right now using forms provided by your autoresponder service. Aweber offers a free trial to get started.

Speaking of Autoresponders and building your list… you should be entering your email below, right about now.

#3: Failing Bloggers Aren’t Using Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is something you create that is valuable enough to be a bribe. You’re bribing your visitors to give you their email address in exchange for their email address. This is definitely crucial when it comes to building a list.

To give you an idea, a simple subscribe form like the one you saw above has only provided me 10% of my total subscribers. The rest of the subscribers come from lead magnets, like the one you’ll see at the bottom of this post.

Once you create enough content, you can repurpose your blog posts or other content as a lead magnet.

10% of my subscribers from simple subscribe forms vs. 90% from lead magnets. If you’re just asking for emails, with a “subscribe to my blog” heading, you’re missing out on the majority of potential subscribers.

What I’m using on this blog, is magic action box. They have a free version available that ties into Aweber as well.

#4: Being Too Dependent On Google is a Recipe for Disaster

Every time there is a big algorithm change or adjustment, people come out everywhere crying about their income source being destroyed. Their traffic only came from Google and now it’s almost depleted.

It’s unfortunate, and I’m glad it’s never happened to me. Once you are somewhat established you need to be able to diversify your traffic and marketing efforts in order to increase revenue but also minimize your exposure to risk.

Right now Income Bully has a very diverse traffic chart. I need to improve social traffic but referrals, direct, and organic traffic are all pretty even. I suppose once you reach a certain level and your organic traffic takes off it would be hard to maintain an even ratio of traffic but you need to always be thinking about the future and minimize your risk.

#5: Bloggers Fail When They Set Unrealistic Goals

You can’t launch your blog, spend a couple minutes spinning some already spun and regurgitated content, go to fiverr for backlinks and expect to be an overnight success.

In fact, no matter what you do, you can’t expect to be an overnight success.

I’m an overnight success, but it took twenty years. – Monty Hall

Instead of setting goals based on income when you aren’t generating income, or goals focused on traffic when you have no traffic, set goals on actions you can take. Goals that are up to you to complete, and not an unknown variable.

For example, instead of your goal this month being 5,000 unique visitors and 2,000 in income, set your goal to 15 new pieces of content, and implementing a content promotion strategy. Make your goals based on action and you’ll be more likely to succeed.

#6: They Don’t Work To Improve Their Metrics

I’ve seen some bloggers who get 30X the traffic I have but aren’t making more money. I think a common issue with a lot of beginners is that they aren’t paying attention to important metrics.

Sure, they pay attention to monthly traffic and constantly are trying to increase their traffic but ignoring important things like bounce rate, or time on site. They’re not looking at the amount of returning visitors.

If you have 1,000 visitors but you’re wanting to increase that to 1,500 but have a bounce rate of 90% that means 900 of your 1,000 visitors are just leaving after one page view. Focusing on traffic doesn’t fix the problem. If they got to 1,500 visitors, then only 150 of those 1,500 are visiting more than one page. It makes more sense to try to lower your bounce rate and get your visitors more engaged.

Lowering your bounce rate from 90% to 60% would quadruple the engagement of your existing traffic.

Every month, I’m analyzing my traffic but also important on page metrics and testing to see what I can do to make those numbers better.

I’ve also seen bloggers that get a lot of traffic but lose out on engagement because of the horrifying loading speed of their site. Sometimes focusing on the smaller metrics allows you to actually grow your traffic due to the good user experience you’re providing.

#7: Quitting Too Soon

I think this is a common one, not just for blogging but pretty much everything. Often times when people quit, they were very close to success.

Blogging is not a short term strategy. It is not a get rich quick concept. You have to be in it for the long haul if you want to expect success from it. This is the case whether you are implementing a blog for your business, or a blog to generate side income.

I guess that’s why people are always suggesting your blog be in or about a niche you’re passionate about so it will be easier to keep up with and continue publishing.

#8: Lack Of Consistent Posting or Content Creation

If you’re trying to build up traffic to your blog, one of the worst things you can do is be inconsistent in your posting schedule. Your readers expect new content when they come back!

This 31 days of blogging challenge is forcing myself and others who are taking part in it to have a consistent schedule, by posting daily but you don’t need to post daily to be consistent. You can post once a week, twice a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, whatever you can commit to, be consistent.

Bloggers that end up failing, have an outdated blog, no consistency at all. How many times have you seen a blog that looks like it was once active but now a ghost town? I saw one the other day that had 200+ posts but the last 3 posts were made in a span from 2013-2015.

Stay consistent! It’s how you build a following that keeps coming back for more.

They say 80% of people that visit a blog are first time visitors, meaning only 20% are coming back for more content. Here I have about 50% that are first time visitors, which means 50% are coming back for more content. It makes it much easier to grow when people continue coming back for more.

#9: Not Having a Content Promotion Plan

Writing consistent content is only part of the battle. What use is slaving away at writing and publishing content if you have nobody to read it?

You must be able to promote that content in order to reap the rewards that blogging can provide.

If you have identified your buyer personas or defined your target audience then you should be able to choose the proper mediums to promote your content.

If you have a blog for your business, then look into promoting your content on LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, and maybe Google+ Communities. If you have a visually stimulating niche, then you can’t go wrong with instagram or pinterest.

You should also consider reaching out to experts in your niche for guest blogging opportunities, or expert roundups (like this one I did on Marketing Your Local Business Online ). Not only are these great opportunities for backlinks and authority building, but it gives you exposure to a different audience that you may not have.

People say you should be spending the majority of your time promoting the content, not creating the content, which is something I definitely need to improve on. It’s easy to see how this can cause many bloggers to fail.

#10: They Get Lazy!

I see a lot of top bloggers, or people that were top bloggers at one time get lazy and the laziness ruins their blog.

This is really common when you see a well known blogger allowing their blog to be filled up with content from guest bloggers who clearly don’t put as much time or effort into the content.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of just publishing content that’s submitted to you because it’s less work and one less blog post you have to write. The problem is, if it is of lesser quality than what your audience is used to, they’re going to get fed up and probably stop visiting what they used to consider a gold mine of knowledge and information.

Another form of laziness is not keeping up with a consistent blogging schedule, promoting content, or working on improving their metrics, which are other pitfalls that bloggers fall into that are mentioned in the previous points.

11: They Aren’t Making Money

It’s great to share your knowledge and “give back” to the community. Passing the torch along to others that are learning or seeking your knowledge is good karma and the right thing to do.

The problem is, if you aren’t getting paid for your time then you’re not going to be able to justify the time invested and efforts involved in running your blog and giving away that information.

Monetizing your blog is what you set out to do right? If you’re running a company blog, you should be generating leads or nurturing leads through your blog. If you’re running a niche blog, you need to be able to monetize your readers.

Implement some lead magnets, build your list, promote affiliate products you believe in, use adsense, buysellads or many of the other monetization methods. Maybe you can create your own product to sell, like I did with my Ultimate Blueprint.

Some people get paid to write reviews, sponsored posts, there are a lot of options available, just remember the importance of diversification.

Either way you decide to go, making money while sharing information and helping others will give you the boost in motivation to continue on.

Why Do You Think Blogs Fail?

That wraps up the 11 reasons why blogs and bloggers fail. Anything you think should be added to that list? Let me know in the comments below!

Why don’t you join in on the 31 days of blogging challenge? You can set up your blog with a free domain in a matter of minutes. Any hosting company will do, but read my review of Arvixe, get a free domain and $200 worth of ad credits! Let me know if you get started, I will feature your blog in a weekly roundup!