Why do most blogs fail?
This ReadWrite blog post discusses some factors that cause most of the blogs to fail. These factors include
- Lack of goals.
- Lack of focus.
- Unoriginal ideas.
- Poor research.
- Poor writing.
- Irregular updates.
- Difficult to discover the blog.
- Lack of growth.
Let’s quickly go through these points.
Lack of goals for the blog
What do you want to achieve through your blog? What KPIs have you defined?
By “lack of goals” we don’t mean not knowing what you want to do. If you want to publish a blog to raise ad revenue, then of course you know what you want to achieve.
Similarly, if you want to improve your search engine rankings, even then you know what you want to achieve and what is your goal.
But knowing these alone doesn’t help you much. These are simply outcomes. Higher ad revenue is a byproduct. Higher search engine rankings are a byproduct. What do you actually envisage for your blog?
For example, I want my Credible Content Blog to become one of the known blogs on content writing and copywriting. That is my goal.
I also want to fill my blog with lots of quality content so that other bloggers and publishers have a reason to link to it.
Similarly, what are your blogging goals? Do you want to raise awareness about your technological field? Do you want to establish your authority? Do you want to be recognized as an expert in your field?
These are more definitive goals.
Lack of blogging focus
Every blog succeeds on its niche value.
People want to recognize your blog with a topic or with a field. For example, my Credible Content Blog is known for quality blog posts on content writing and copywriting.
I could have easily gotten mixed up and turned it into a digital marketing blog by publishing posts on search engine marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, landing page optimization, PPC optimization, Mobile app marketing, and such. After all, I do need lots of topic ideas to update my blog regularly.
But I don’t. I stick to content writing and copywriting, and at the most, content marketing.
Even when I talk about something like email marketing and SEO, it is vis-à-vis content writing.
Unoriginal blogging ideas
If you’re writing about something that everybody is writing about, you don’t offer something original. There is nothing to draw people to your blog. You need to stand out. You need to offer something that is not being offered by other bloggers. Something valuable, yet unique.
Poor research
It is important to do good research if you want to establish yourself as an authority blogger. People respect facts and figures that are verifiable and credible. If you are simply interested in throwing around numbers without verifying them and without linking to original, reputed sources, you lose credibility and people stop visiting your blog.
Poor blog writing
Writing is the backbone of your blog.
Unless you publish a visual blog (that has just images and videos), writing doesn’t matter, but if your blog contains lots of writing then make sure that either you are a great, expressive writer or the content writer that you hire is a proficient writer.
If the sentences are muddled, if the paragraphs are disorderly and if the writer doesn’t take much care about the sort of language he or she uses, visitors begin to get put off and then eventually, they stop visiting your blog.
Disinterest begets disinterest. Apathy attracts apathy.
Irregular updates or intermittent blogging
To publish a successful blog, you need to be regular. There needs to be a pattern. You must have a calendar. If you publish a blog with prolonged intervals, people are either going to lose interest or forget about your blog.
You may like to read: Are you blogging regularly? Here is why you should.
If you don’t publish regularly, it means you are not much interested in your blog. Therefore, if you’re not interested, why should anybody else be?
Difficult to discover your blog
Even if you are publishing great content, even if you are publishing content regularly, if people cannot find your blog, all your effort is going waste.
Simply publishing your blog regularly doesn’t prevent your blog from failing. You need to take measures to bring people to your blog.
Pay close attention to your SEO efforts. Establish a presence on social networking websites where you can share your content. Publish a newsletter to broadcast the latest content that you are publishing. Encourage people to link to your blog.
Blog marketing is an integral part of blog publishing.
Repetitiousness
This means publishing the same old stuff repeatedly. Many bloggers do that to improve their search engine rankings. If they think that they publish the same content with little variations, they will cover more keywords.
Your human visitors can obviously make that out because they are smart, but these days, even search engine algorithms can make out that you’re basically publishing the same stuff over and again. Bake fail.
Lack of growth
Growing your blog is a serious business. Take active interest in it. Observe the metrics. Get your blog hooked onto Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Observe the sort of traffic you are attracting and take note of anomalies.
If you think that your blog isn’t getting enough traffic, get to the drawing board again. What are you doing wrong? What sort of content are your publishing and what sort of content you should be publishing? This is an ongoing exercise.
How do you define success and failure of your blog?
I will give you my own example.
My Credible Content Blog doesn’t attract mega-traffic. If I started publishing advertisements, I would hardly make 1-2 dollars every month.
Still, I have been publishing my blog for many years now. Sometimes I go on a hiatus, but as soon as I observe that my traffic is going down, I increase the publishing frequency.
I’m not interested in advertising revenue. Yes, I want to improve my search engine rankings and whenever I increase my publishing frequency, I succeed in that.
My blog brings me visibility. Of late it has also been attracting lots of backlinks, which has improved my search engine rankings further. I don’t actively monitor my backlinks, but I can make out by the number of pings I’m getting in my dashboard.
So, in the conventional sense, my blog is not enough successful, and many may even term it as a failure.
But for me it is a successful blog. It helps me maintain my search engine rankings. It attracts paying clients. It generates work for me.
Define what makes your blog successful or a failure. You might be surprised.