Blogs fail because of mistakes. It seems an obvious answer, right? Wrong……………
You know that It is a simple theory people fail in exams (businesses) when they make mistakes, give the wrong answer to the question, or leave blank (don’t have or give an answer).
Not only making mistakes, bloggers do fail, but also their blogs fail because they don’t understand the purpose, reason, and main point of blogging.
If you start a blog thinking it is easy and will make money easily, you are in the wrong direction. Blogging is a long haul. You need patience, consistency, creativity, time and effort, dedication, and much more to succeed in blogging. The number one reason why blogs fail is misunderstanding blogging and taking it lightly when you are starting.
Table of Contents
The Competition and Rate of Blogs’ Failure & Success
Before going to common mistakes that most bloggers should avoid to get success in blogging, you should know about some stats about blogging. The stats could also help you to see the big picture of blogging and why blogs fail.
You see, blogging has become very saturated. It is extremely difficult to survive as a blogger because the competition is very high. The estimated blogs on the internet currently are more than 600 million out of 1.9 billion websites. And if you considered the U.S. alone, the number of active bloggers projected is 32.7 million and this number is increasing every year. So, the competition is very tough and you have to have a unique angle and creativity to create quality content for your blog post. Then only you will be able to stand out in the ocean of blogging at this time.
Does this mean blogging is dead?
Is blogging, not a good career choice?
Does this mean blogging is not relevant or famous at this time?
If you are also thinking this kind of question and afraid of starting a blog. Then the stats below, you are going to learn to show how a blog is still powerful and relevant to the business as well as marketing. By going through the stats, you can say, nothing can and will replace blogging for a very long time.
- 92% of content marketers use blog posts as part of their marketing strategy
- Approximately about 70 million posts are published each month on the WordPress website.
- 77 million new blog comments are generated by readers each month
- Websites that also have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites
- 77% of internet users read blogs
- 22% of bloggers post every single week
- More than half of content marketers say blog content is their top inbound marketing priority.
- The most popular type of content produced on the web is blogs. But nowadays visual content has increased in popularity.
Source: firstsiteguide
Blogs fail and success rate
It is very challenging to determine your blog’s failure and success rate because there is no central authority tracking all the blogs on the internet. Besides, your blog’s success and failure rates can vary significantly depending on the criteria used to measure your success, the niche of your blog, the quality of your content, and the persistence of a blogger like you.
Blogging is a highly diverse and dynamic field. The landscape of blogging is always evolving and you still don’t know where it is going.
So, there is not much about the blogs’ success and blogs’ failure rates exactly in number and percentage.
Different sources may report varying statistics. When you research on the internet, you will find that 80% of the new blogs will fail within 18 months to 5 years. It is an assumption answer given depending on the statistics of small business failure rate in the U.K. and taking blogging as a small business or small startup.
It is for sure that when you measured your blogs’ success with sustainable traffic, engagement, and revenue over an extended period, the failure rate of blogs is very high.
According to firstsiteguide.com and their blog, 12.38% of bloggers who spend at least 6 hours writing a post report great results. An average of 30% of bloggers report success, while 38% is well above the benchmark. Successful blogs often have high-quality, valuable content, consistent updates, effective marketing, and a dedicated audience.
The common reasons why blogs fail: Common blogging mistakes
It is already mentioned that while doing anything if you make mistakes, you will be failed. The same principle also applies to blogging. Blogging is not for everyone and everyone can’t succeed in blogging.
You have already learned the fact that blogging requires consistency, dedication, persistence, patience, time, effort, and a lot more. It is a long-term business and you should take it seriously.
Mistakes are just one part of blog failure. The most important part of blog failure is understanding the purpose of blogging. It will be a long blog post if you try to elaborate on every common mistake of blogging. For your assistance and easiness, here is another blog post for you that describes blogging mistakes from every perspective. You can go through the post and learn. Your first step and easy way to turn your blog’s failure into success is trying to not make most of the mistakes mentioned in that blog post.
Besides here is the summary of common blogging mistakes pointwise in short that tells you why most bloggers (like you) fail in blogging:
- Lacks a content strategy and quality content
- The blog isn’t optimized for search
- The blog is not well-designed
- Inconsistency
- Not setting a clear target
- Thinking it’s all about the money
- Impatience
- Lack of persistence
- Chasing money too early
- Copying other bloggers to win
- Blogging for yourself
- Paying concentration on quantity -not quality
- Trying to do blogging all alone
- Have no interest in blogging education
- Entering a wrong blogging niche
- Scared of investing
- Promoting your blog, the wrong way
- Believing blogging is easy and requires little effort
- Lack of creative juices and blog ideas
- No collaboration
- Lack of engagement and interaction
- Unrealistic expectation
- Monetization challenge
- Lack of differentiation
- Technical challenge
The main reasons why blogs fail
Now you have learned the common reasons or mistakes because of which your blogs fail. You can rectify those mistakes by going through other blog posts and doing research. There is a lot on the internet.
What you are going to learn as the main reasons blogs fail in this blog post, are the ones that are looked at less valued or under-valued by most content marketers, digital marketers, and bloggers.
When you go deep into understanding blogging, why blogs fail, and why bloggers fail, you will find that the top reason blogs fail is a misunderstanding of blogging.
Into that misunderstanding, many things are undervalued. But you should not. This blog post makes you clear about the reasons why most blogs fail and why most bloggers fail providing detailed elaboration of those undervalued aspects of blogging.
So, let’s begin the path of success in blogging by understanding the misunderstanding.
Not understanding the compound effect of blogging
Source: Medium
You may be heard about it – the compound effect. There is also a book “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy. The theory of compound effect is taken from that book and you can apply this theory in every aspect of your life. So why not in blogging?
As the book describes the key to success in anything in life is harnessing the power of the compound effect, which means the effect of small, everyday choices will compound over time, leading to success or disaster depending on your choices.
So, the Compound effect simply means small smart changes that give you big results. It means if you make incremental changes across any of your processes over time, they will yield large results.
The two key elements of the compounding effect are making smart choices and consistency. Even the most minimal changes will start to build up and yield great results as long as your decision adds value or improves your process or function and is applied consistently over time.
And you have learned or heard many times that blogging is a long-term investment, a long-term game. It is a game of quality and volume. The longer you are in it, the more benefits you’ll reap. The growth of your blogging business is directly correlated with the number of high-quality pieces of content that you can put out regularly.
Even the top bloggers and business blogs follow this principle of sustainability and compounding. You can see the proof from these examples.
Not having a Blogging goal clear
Why do you want to start a blog?
What do you want from the blog?
If you have answers to these questions. You have a clear goal. But most of the bloggers don’t.
It is most important to have a clear goal for your blogging. It is your first step in the journey of blogging success. Your blogging goal is your vision of your future in this business.
For the ones who blog for a hobby or to influence people with the knowledge they have, the blogging goal doesn’t matter. But you are learning blogging goals considering blogging as a business in this post.
Your primary goal of blogging should be acquiring new customers daily basis. There are also differences in blogging, like blogging for a hobby, blogging for business, and blogging for a company.
For a blogger like you, who blog for business, and someone who blogs for his/her company, the primary blogging goal should be sale and revenue. Because without a transaction, the business can’t survive for a long time. Therefore, your primary goal in blogging should be acquiring new customers daily so that you can sell your products and services. This means your blog should be a customer acquisition channel, not a traffic acquisition channel.
On the other hand, if your monetization channel is banner ads, Google ad sense, and affiliate marketing, then you should shift your primary goal from acquiring new customers to generating more traffic in your blog. More traffic means more clicks on banner ads and affiliate links which automatically leads to more sales and revenue.
Traffic is a vanity metrics
When you are talking about blogging for business or blogging as a business with products and services, what you should understand is traffic is a vanity metric. Most of the bloggers who blog for business or as a business with products and services, don’t understand this simple principle and thus their blogs fail.
You should not focus on Bad KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of your blogging related to traffic when you blog for your company or when you blog as a business. Bad KPIs such as:
- Number of published articles per week
- Number of blog visitors per month
- Number of email subscribers per month etc
Unless you got any transactions for your business or company through your blog, these numbers don’t add value. Therefore, you should focus on the long sustainable strategy of acquiring new customers, not the traffic and its numbers.
You should focus on your target customers and your blog growth with the right strategy for getting new customers. According to your business or company’s products and services, you have to apply the right strategy of both traffic sources – viral traffic and SEO traffic in your blogging. Both sources play have importance in their places for your blogging.
Once again, if you are blogging without the products and services, and your revenue model is a banner ad, Google AdSense, and/or affiliate marketing (Which considers not much good model for the long term), then the above sub-heading or statement comes to fail. Because for this model of blogging, traffic is everything whether it comes from viral traffic strategy or SEO Organic traffic strategy. More traffic means more clicks, the more click means more revenue from blogging. Therefore, if you don’t want your blogs to fail, you should understand the traffic and its metrics depending on your blogging business model.
Spike of Hope celebration
This is characteristic of humans. Bloggers like you and me, like instant gratification. Our mind is always searching for reward and the spike of hope gives us that reward. But what you have to understand is, that is not the kind of reward you are looking for in your blogging business.
As shown in the picture by Ahrefs, the spike of hope is very relaxing and rewarding when you see your traffic grows like a mountain peak. But after sometimes that traffic faded away and you have a flatline of nope means your mountain peak traffic faded away.
This is where you have to understand why you shouldn’t celebrate the spike of hope. You have to understand the anatomy of the spike of hope. Why you have got the mountain peak traffic? Where they come from and why they have faded away after some time. Let’s understand the spike of hope…
The anatomy of a spike of hope
The first section of the spike of hope in your blogging comes from your existing audiences. From your email subscribers, social followers, regular readers, etc. you share your new blog post with them. You are asking for your audiences to come to your new blog post which means you don’t have any new audiences or readers.
The second thing you do to bring traffic to your newly posted blog is to share in your niche communities—for example, Reddit, slack channels, Facebook groups, forums, etc. When you shared on those platforms for the first time, loads of traffic may come because you are new to them. But over time, this tactic doesn’t work because all those traffic already have known you. So finally, again you don’t have any new audience.
And the third section of Spike of Hope is word of mouth. This is the section where your friends and followers from the above two sections share your content with their friends. This could be a good thing but the sad part is: your followers don’t have large followers so the new audience will be less. On the other hand, the big influencers who have large followers, don’t share the blog posts of new bloggers like you who have just started. That means it is challenging to bring new audiences to your blog.
In order for your blog to grow, you have to be reaching new audiences all the time. Your blog growth happens when the traffic to your articles doesn’t fade over time. What you have to know is if your blogging efforts don’t add up over time, you are doing it wrong. So passive consistent traffic is the key to growing your blog and that comes only from your effort, and time in SEO. Thus instead of celebrating the spike of hope, you should focus on the SEO part of your blogging.
Other Lesser-Known reasons why blogs fail
Besides, the main reasons why blogs fail and the blogging mistakes you have learned till now. There are many other lesser-known reasons that most bloggers don’t know about. Because of these small lesser-known reasons, blogs fail before they start.
Analysis Paralysis: Beginner bloggers like you get caught up in overthinking and overplanning the blog. They spend excessive time researching, strategizing, and perfecting every detail but fail to take action. Analysis paralysis can hinder progress and prevent bloggers from gaining momentum, resulting in failure before they even start.
Lack of Authenticity: In an attempt to emulate successful bloggers, some beginners may lose their own authentic voice and style. Failing to express your true personality or perspective can make your blog appear generic and uninteresting.
Neglecting Personal Growth: Blogging requires personal growth and continuous learning. When you neglect to invest in your own development and you don’t expand your knowledge, refine your writing skills or explore new ideas, you are going to lack growth in your blogging.
Comparison and Imposter Syndrome: Beginner bloggers often compare themselves to more established and successful bloggers, leading to feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome. Such kind of mindset can undermine confidence and motivation that cause you to doubt your ability and ultimately give up on the blog.
Insufficient adaptability: The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and bloggers need to adapt to stay relevant. Failing to embrace new technologies, platforms, or trends can result in a blog becoming outdated and overshadowed by competitors who are more agile and adaptable.
Burnout and Overwhelm: Blogging requires consistent effort and commitment, which can lead to burnout if not managed properly. Beginners who take on too much, set unrealistic expectations, or neglect self-care may find themselves overwhelmed and eventually lose the passion and motivation to continue their blog.
Failure to evolve and Pivot: As bloggers gain experience, their interests, writing style, or target audience may change. Failure to recognize these shifts and adapt accordingly can lead to a disconnect between the blogger and their readers, resulting in decreased engagement and eventual failure.
Final Words
Each blog’s failure can be attributed to a combination of the above reasons, mistakes, and factors. You have to understand these common reasons, lesser-known reasons, and the main reasons or factors in your blogging business. So that you can avoid those potential pitfalls and increase your chances of building a successful and thriving blog.
Although you have learned most of the reasons and factors that contribute to the failure of many bloggers in this blog post, It is important to note that there are also numerous successful bloggers who have overcome these challenges. By learning from these reasons why blogs fail, adapting strategies, and staying committed to your blogs, aspiring bloggers like you can increase your chances of achieving success.
