Challenges in blogging are one of the biggest problems of the bloggers. Besides, the technical and design knowledge that every blogger does not have, there are many other pitfalls or struggles in blogging that you have to overcome to succeed in your bogging and to make a living from your blog.
This blog post is not written to discourage you. The purpose of this post is to familiarize you with the truth of the blogging.
For example: – When anyone asks you, is it possible to make a living from blogging? what would be your answer?
If you are a successful blogger and have overcome all the challenges in blogging, you would say, “Of course, blogging can make a living, I am an example of it.” If you are new, and struggling in blogging then the answer would be umm it can but you have to find the way, you have to work the problems, etc., etc.
Bloggers can earn a wide range of income, from a couple of dollars a week to six figures a year or more when you can manage and tackle the challenges, problems, struggles, and pitfalls of blogging very well.
Statistics also show that, according to SEMrush, bloggers can earn around $8,000 per month from blogging. However, 1 in 3 bloggers make no money, and only 10% earn over $10,000 annually. While around a quarter of blogger make enough to consider their blogging ‘extra income’, only around 13% earn enough to make ends meet by blogging full-time.
Hence, if you don’t want to be that 1 out of 3 bloggers who don’t make any money because of being unsuccessful. You have to face the truth, the difficulties, and the challenges in blogging and develop the courage to face them properly.
Before that you have to know what are the biggest challenges in blogging, right? So, let’s begin and learn the biggest struggles in blogging and how to manage and overcome them.
Table of Contents
The Highest Challenges in Blogging
Source: OrbitMedia
1. Purpose
This is the number one challenge or struggle in blogging to finalize the purposeful blog. It is known to everyone that the main purpose of blogging is to publish your knowledge, and information on your blogging website so that your potential consumers can learn more about your product or service and get the answers or solutions to their queries.
But you will be stuck in:
- What do you want from your blogging?
- What will be your products and services?
- Why you are blogging?
Leaving the exception of hobby bloggers, every blogger including you has to have the purpose or goal of your blogging. It is your first step in your blogging to find your goal, and purpose of your blogging. The purpose gives you the right direction, motivates you in continuity, and finally gives you success.
You may be thinking, obviously every blogger’s main purpose is to make money from blogging. Making money from blogging should be your last priority. First, you have to create and provide value and services, that help your consumers to go from point A (their current stage) to point B (their desired state).
To make money from your blogging, you have to take or treat your blogging like a business, your start-up. When you think your blogging is like your business, your thinking, your purpose, and your way of creating your article will be totally different. Besides, there are various ways (AdWords, affiliate marketing, Banner ads, creating your own products and services, and a lot more) to make money from your blogging. You have to find out which will be your best and right way of monetization so that you will reach your goal, You can get your purposeful blog website.
2. Time
Time management is one of the most challenging tasks in blogging.
Blogging is not just writing, it is about writing quality value-packed articles that require loads of time and effort in researching, formatting, writing, toning, promoting, and many more.
If someone asks you, is blogging time-consuming? You can say “Yes”. Because it is one of the most time-consuming businesses on the internet. A study by Orbit Media shows that bloggers spend an average of 4 hours and 10 minutes writing an article.
The same study also shows that bloggers who invest more time get better results. That is, bloggers who spend 6+ hours are 50% more likely to report strong results from their blogging.
Another factor you shouldn’t forget when it comes to time in blogging is, that most bloggers and marketers suggest that blogging takes 6-12 months to get measurable results. There are countless blogs that took over a year to get some results. So, if you are someone who doesn’t have patience and looking for instant gratification, then blogging is not for you.
Time management is just an ability to effectively make use of your time for blogging and content creation to overcome this challenge. It could be as simple as creating a schedule to get blogging tasks done on a weekly basis, prioritizing your blogging tasks, and figuring out which times of day you are most productive. You can also manage your time for your blogging properly with:
- Building knowledgeability on your topics
- Gaining experience in building and maintaining a website
- Formatting your content properly
- Learning the number and complexity of your content promotion strategies, etc.
3. Content
“Content is king” is true for blogging. It ensures the traffic, engagement, and search visibility of your blog website. But still, it is one of the difficult challenges in blogging to come up with engaging content on a regular basis.
Writing whatever you like, know is not blogging. Creating content for blogging means creating value-packed quality content that can help to solve your consumer’s problems and queries. Your blogging content should be fresh and crisp to stand in the noise and this is the biggest hurdle in blogging. Your blog has to be updated (your old blog posts too) with fresh engaging value-packed quality content consistently. Consistency is the key to your blogging survival and success.
Source: OrbitMedia
To come up with a fresh idea for every blog post, you have to be clear in your blogging niche or topic. It will help you to do keyword research and create plagiarism-free content. Some blogger takes the niche clarity also one of the challenges in blogging. But you don’t have to. You have a full guide on niche clarity. Just click the hyperlink highlighted.
Even though, you are clear in your niche or topic. Most of the time, it will be difficult to come up with fresh content ideas. That’s why you should read competitors’ blogs. You can get new blog article ideas by going through reader comments and understanding their problems and pain points. From niche forums, Q & A websites like Quora, Social media networks, keyword research tools, and many other places, you can find the topic for your blog post.
4. Traffic
Another of the most important challenges you have to overcome in blogging is Traffic. Traffic is the soul of your business as a content creator. In fact, Traffic is the most crucial factor to success in any type of online business.
Traffic helps you in brand awareness, lead generation followed by sales and revenue, SEO ranking, visibility, and a lot more. Without traffic, there will be no engagement, no momentum, and obviously no money.
Therefore, you should focus on and overcome this challenge. To grow traffic in your blog, first, you should know your ideal potential customers (Your customer avatar), then you can create quality relevant content with proper keywords and search queries.
You should then focus on SEO (search engine optimization) to grow your organic blog traffic. It is one of the best and last-long strategies for growing your blog traffic. Although there are many other ways or strategies (for example: viral traffic, paid traffic, guest blogging, collaborating with influencers and experts, social media usage, email marketing, and more) to grow your blog traffic, SEO is the one that helps you in getting people to discover your blog and increasing your readership in a saturated online space.
5. Momentum
Momentum is the opposite of procrastination. Both are the challenges in blogging, but overcoming the momentum challenge is more crucial in bogging. Without continuous momentum, you cannot go forward, if you cannot go forward then how will reach your purposeful goal?
Suppose you have a brilliant blog post idea, but you are stuck on something else. Days, weeks, and months passed by, but you did not take any action. Then what will happen, is you will forget that idea, you will again start to think about the new idea and the cycle goes on. You will never make any progress in your blogging business. This all happened because you don’t keep your momentum in your blogging. You don’t keep consistency, and focus in your blogging. That much is important to the momentum of your blogging business.
Success doesn’t come easily. You need to tackle many challenges and obstacles in your blogging. As Steve Ferrante said, “Success is like a snowball, it takes momentum to build and the more you get in the right direction the bigger it gets.”
Almost half of the blogs in the blogosphere are inactive because they can’t keep momentum in their blogging because of reasons like boredom, busyness, running out of topics, lack of motivation, holidays, and others.
You should not include your blog in that inactive category, you should keep it in good momentum. There are many tactics (you can learn and research on the internet) to keep your blog momentum. Here is one example of that in the form of the infographic from theedublogger.com.
6. Revenue
“Making money from a blog is not easy. It is very hard.” It is another bitter truth and challenge in blogging about revenue.
No matter what topic you choose for blogging about, you will be competing against bloggers who have been blogging for years. There are more than 600 million blogs on the internet and you are just going to add one more. You have to accept this fact and truth and give time and effort in your blogging accordingly.
You should keep real expectations from your blogging. As you have already learned in the Time Challenge in most cases, it will take at least 6 to 12 months (minimum) of consistent blogging and promoting your content to start earning something from your blog.
Although the amount of money bloggers make can vary widely, on average, full-time bloggers make around $ 45,000 a year with most bloggers earning somewhere between $38,440 to $51,906.
Source: ryrob.com
To overcome this money problem in blogging, there are many things you can do and improve. Among them the most important is Traffic and how to overcome traffic challenges in blogging you have already learned above. More traffic in your blog means more engagement, more engagement means more conversion and more conversion means more sales and revenue. So, if you overcome the traffic challenge and succeed in generating loads of traffic for your blog, the revenue challenge will vanish.
7. Perfectionism
While writing this blog post, my mind was saying that the blog post should be perfect. I am expecting the highest standards of quality and excellence in this blog post. Do you know why? Because I want a perfect blog post for you. I am being a little perfectionist.
This is one of the biggest challenges as a blogger searching for perfection in everything. Because of this challenge, it took lots of time and effort to create a blog post. Looking for perfect on everything is one of the biggest time drainers.
Perfectionism is the mindset, it’s your one of traits. For most of the bloggers, it’s the challenge to look perfection in everything. Because perfectionism creates procrastination, fear of failure, anxiety, and stress. It can kill your creativity, can paralyze you in your blogging as perfectionists may struggle to complete tasks or make decisions. They are never satisfied with the outcome being perfectionism. That can hinder your progress and innovation.
Therefore, instead of striving for perfection, aim for excellence. As Henry James said “Excellence doesn’t require perfection” and Sheryl Sandberg said, “Done it better than perfect.”
When you give up your obsession with perfectionism, you will produce and publish a lot more blog posts much more quickly.
Your written and published articles are your accomplishment, it’s more important to be happy and fulfilled than perfection.
Remember that progress and consistency matter more in your blogging to get success than unattainable perfection.
8. Comparison
It is already mentioned that it doesn’t matter what topic you have chosen, you are going to compete with millions of blogs on that topic, which exist already on the internet. So, it will be a total time waste to compare your blog with the already existing one.
But still, it is one of the challenges in blogging. Bloggers are humans i.e., social creatures, and it’s human nature to compare things to each other. While sometimes comparison may motivate you to better yourself, constantly comparing your blog to others (even with successful ones) can lead to negative thoughts.
Continuous comparison with other blogs and bloggers can create feelings of jealousy, frustration, and hopelessness. It can lead to unhappiness, low self-esteem, and even depression. ” Not being good enough” feelings may emerge when you compare with other bloggers and blogs that can ruin your blog creation and the momentum of your blogging business.
However, it can be good for your blogging comparison if you use comparison as motivation. When you compare your blogs with others, don’t just get frustrated thinking other blogs are way better than yours in terms of quality, backlinks, length, traffic, and much more. Instead try to understand and learn how those blogs are so successful, and how those are so popular. What are their secrets – designing, formatting, toning, topics, keywords? Try to find out the way they are doing blogging. Take the comparison as the inspiration.
Most bloggers do competitive analysis, Use the same principles in your blog comparison too. Just pick up the valuable and useable tricks and points from the others’ blogs. Focus on your blogging, your strength, your unique style, and your voice. Remember that the only competition you have in your blogging is with yourself. How will you improve your blogging skills, writing skills, and technical skills, and write better, make better your blog than yesterday?
9. Motivation
It is really frustrating to put in time and effort for years and you can see no result in your blogging. That is why, motivation becomes one of the biggest challenges in blogging.
By going through this blog post from above, you have understood that blogging is not easy. Blogging is a long-term game. It’s not – make money-quick scheme. There are no guarantees that you will make money, or attract readers to your site. Blogging takes a huge upfront investment of time and work. It is a lot more difficult than it looks in the blogging business. It is very difficult to keep you motivated in this situation.
As already mentioned this blog post’s purpose is not to discourage you. Everything has a bright side and a dark side. Even the green grass is not green on the other side. These all are the disadvantages or pitfalls of blogging.
There are a lot more advantages than disadvantages to blogging. What is important to note is, that the disadvantages of blogging don’t necessarily outweigh the benefits of blogging. So, you have to focus on your purposeful goal accepting both the good and bad things about blogging. You have to stick with your commitments and the purpose of your blog.
To keep motivated, you have to learn to celebrate your small wins, gains, and achievements in your blogging. Surrounding and collaborating with positive influencers, connecting with readers, reminding yourself of what is possible in terms of money, taking your blogging as your business, etc., are some other tactics to be motivated in your blogging.
Learning the way of blogging and improving your blogging regularly is the best way to keep on moving forward. Nobody motivates you. You have to motivate yourself by being clear about why you are in the blogging business. There is lots of buzz on the internet about motivation, do this, do that, etc., But it is your responsibility to find out the way of inspiration to blog on a daily basis. It’s upon you to manage your time and effort so that you have the energy to keep going forward in your blogging even if you are demotivated and frustrated.
10. Patience
You can consider all the blogging mistakes are challenges in blogging because mistakes make you fail in blogging. One of the biggest mistakes in blogging is giving up too early by being overwhelmed in the blogging.
Those bloggers who have high expectations from blogging, don’t really understand blogging, and struggle with blogging give up too early. They can’t keep their strength to block the flow of loads in blogging. Those bloggers don’t have the patience to keep moving.
Patience will be your highest challenge in blogging if you can’t tackle the above challenges and keep moving. After years of struggles in blogging, when you see no results, it may demotivate you, it may stop your blogging momentum, it may frustrate you. But you have to build courage to move forward keeping patience on the way.
You have to be a blogger who understands blogging. The process of blogging. You will get that much success when you have to put in the blogging both time and effort.
Instant gratification and quick results are not the friends of blogging. It’s a long-term game, it takes time and you have to be patient to see some results in blogging. So, if you can keep patience to see the results after investing a long time and effort, then only the blogging business is suitable for you.
Final Words
You should remember that these challenges in blogging are not insurmountable, and many successful bloggers have overcome them. It is essential to have a clear strategy, stay persistent, and continually adapt and learn from your experiences to succeed in the world of blogging.
Building a supportive community, staying informed about industry trends, and adapting to changes are your key strategies to overcome these struggles in blogging and thrive as a blogger.
Now it is your turn to share your challenges in your blogging. This is my list of struggles in blogging, what are yours?
Share your challenges and how you overcame them in the comment box.
