About 60% of bloggers are able to monetize their blogs in some way, however, only 5%-8% of bloggers successfully make a full-time income from their blogs. The other 95% — 98% of bloggers fail to do so.
Blogging is hard!
It can be so exhausting at times. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I just don’t feel like writing any blog posts at all. But I know how important it is to find the will to start writing again.
In this article, we’ll discuss the 13 reasons why most blogs fail so you can work to avoid these mistakes.
If you can make sure to avoid the things on this list, it’s almost guaranteed that you will see some form of success.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
1. Writing the wrong articles
You can write thousands of articles but if they are the wrong articles to write, you’d never see a penny. This is why you should select the right articles to write.
I go in-depth into what kinds of articles you should write in this article right here. Go check it out.
But here’s a sneak peek. The blog posts you should write should:
- Have enough search volume (Find out how to do keyword research here)
- Should not be too competitive (otherwise you may need a lot of backlinks to rank)
- Should have affiliate opportunity (if you want to increase monetization)
Selecting the correct articles to produce will prevent you from wasting your time.
2. Articles are low-quality
Quality is very important. In fact, it’s even more important than the quantity.
You can have thousands of articles but if the quality isn’t good, you won’t get anywhere on your blogging journey.
Here are some things to consider when assessing the quality of your articles:
- Are there too many spelling and grammatical errors?
You should try to produce blog posts with as few spelling and grammatical errors as possible.
You may miss a few when proofreading. It’s okay. Just don’t have too many.
- Is the article original?
Some bloggers simply summarize other bloggers’ content without adding any original ideas.
This will not get you anywhere if your blog posts are all essentially paraphrased from other people’s blogs.
You need to do original research and include things that aren’t present in other people’s blogs.
If you’re an expert in your niche, this would be easier but if you aren’t an expert or if you don’t know much about your niche, it’d be quite difficult to add on to the knowledge base.
You can, however, conduct your own research to give your article an edge.
For instance, you can do a poll on Twitter or Facebook and include the findings in your article.
Say you are writing an article on how to sleep better, you may include original research on how many hours of sleep people get per day by creating a poll on Twitter and then screenshotting the result to paste on your own blog.
Don’t have a following to do your polls? You can take a look at other people’s polls on a similar topic that you’re working on and include the result in your article, just remember to give credit.
- Are there enough subheadings in the article?
Subheadings make your blog post more readable. Not having subheadings will make your article disorganized.
Aim to have at least 3 different subheadings in each blog post.
Having proper subheadings is the hallmark of a high-quality article.
- Are there enough words in the article?
If your article doesn’t contain enough number of words, it may not be a high-quality article.
Response posts are articles that address specific concerns readers may have and at times it only requires 500–1000 words to finish relaying the knowledge.
In such a case, having just 1000 words would suffice. You don’t want to cramp fluff in there that has nothing to do with the title of the article.
However, you should try to aim for between 1300–2500+ words per article.
- Did you add too much fluff to the post?
Some bloggers would fluff up their articles to make them longer thinking it’ll be great for the SEO.
No.
Adding unrelated fluff to your article will hurt your chance of ranking. It’s best to stick to the topic.
- Are there any pictures to aid in reading and comprehension?
Adding pictures may aid in comprehension of the article and help the readers find the next section when they are skimming the article. It’s part of what makes an article high-quality.
3. Articles are too short
Your articles should not be less than 1300 words.
Ideally, you want your articles to go over 2000 words at around 2400 words but anything between 1300–2500+ words is within the ideal range.
If your articles are too short, it’s unlikely that you covered everything you should cover. Your article may not be comprehensive enough.
Cover everything your readers may have questions about regarding the topic so they don’t have to jump into another article to get the answer.
If you already covered everything you need to within 1000 words, your topic may be too narrow and you should consider broadening it.
4. Not writing enough blog posts
If you only have 100 blog posts up on your blog and wonder why you haven’t made any money, you should realize that 100 articles aren’t nearly enough.
Each article is kind of a hit and miss. Some articles can bring in lots of page views per month while others may bring in zero.
I’ve used this analogy in this article but I’ll relay it here again.
Each of your articles is like a fishing line in the water. The more fishing lines you have, the more fish you catch. Fishes here means pageviews.
You want to have more lines (articles) in the water in order to maximize the chances of you catching more fish (pageviews).
This article goes in-depth on how many articles you should write to go full-time as a blogger.
Click here to read how many articles you should write per week.
Here’s a sneak peek into what you’ll get reading those articles, you should aim to produce 500–600 articles before you could expect to go full-time as a blogger.
Some people make it with 200 articles and some require even more at 1000. It depends on your niche and how well you monetize your blog.
5. Not publishing consistently
When Google’s algorithm realized that you are producing content consistently, your contents are more likely to be pushed up the rank on Google.
You don’t want to produce 10 articles this week and nothing for the next 10 weeks.
You should publish at least one article per week and make sure to update your previous articles as well.
6. Not giving it enough time
It takes about 6–8 months for Google to rank your article. This means that you should give each article 6–8 months to rank on Google first before you give up.
Many bloggers give up on blogging when they don’t see any results in the first 6 months.
It can be discouraging when you’re working so hard and all you get is a ghost town.
Keep at it, as long as you’re doing everything you are supposed to do (this article tells you all the most important things you should do), you’re on the right track and you should give it more time.
If you can make it past the first 6 months of blogging, you should see traffic starting to trickle down into your blog.
If you can make it past the 1-year mark of blogging, you may as well go 2 years.
Once you get past the 2 years mark, you should be making at least some money blogging and if you haven’t made a full-time income yet, what’s one more year of hard work?
If you can produce 3 posts every week, it’ll take you 3–4 years on average to produce 500–600 posts in total.
Try to look at the long-term goal of blogging. Aim to get past the 3 years mark if you can. It may perhaps surprise you how much your blog is able to bring in on a consistent basis.
7. Not monetizing their blogs enough
At some points, we need to start focusing on monetization.
There are several ways to make money through blogging. For instance,
- Affiliate marketing
- Sponsored posts (guest posts)
- Courses
- eBook
- Consultation
- Ads
Some people are able to make $10k — 40k per month with 20,000 page views per month. Their secret lies in their monetization strategy,
They may have an info product to sell.
Selling courses is one of the fastest ways to make a large amount of money.
The same information if delivered in an ebook format can maybe make you $19 per unit sold but if packaged into a course, may make you $199 per unit sold.
At some point, we need to focus less on the amount of traffic we bring in and focus more on monetizing our blog.
If you want to rely on ads to bring in your main source of blogging income, you should aim to have 100,000 page views per month but you can certainly make it with 10,000 pageviews per month if you create info products to sell and/or through lucrative affiliate marketing.
8. Not writing blogs in English for the North American market
Most blogs are written in English for American readers as that is where the money is.
It’s better to write a blog with the target audience living in the following places:
- America
- Canada
- Europe
If you want to increase your chance of making money, make sure you write in English and write for American readers.
If you live in an English-speaking country such as Canada, the UK, or Germany for instance, you really won’t be doing anything too different when you write for an American audience.
The only things you’d be doing differently would be the stats you provide on your blog and the links on your blog.
Instead of providing a statistic of how many bloggers there are in your country, for instance, make sure you provide a statistic of how many bloggers there are in the US.
You can give statistical insights into your own country but the priority stat should be American in origin.
As for links, you gain more by placing a .com Amazon affiliate link (American) than a .ca (Canadian) or a .uk (UK) or .de (Germany) Amazon affiliate link.
In summary, if your goal is to make money, write in English with American readers in mind.
9. Going after mostly competitive keywords
Another reason why a blog may fail is that the blogger only goes after competitive keywords.
If all your articles are targeting competitive key terms, you may find yourself in fierce competition between yourself and hundreds if not thousands of other bloggers trying to rank.
You may end up without any visitors since other bloggers may outrank you on the search result.
Going after less competitive keywords, however, is thus wise. If you can win a few of those less competitive keywords, you may have a better chance of ranking for more competitive keywords.
You can definitely write articles targeting more competitive key terms but make sure to interlink them to articles that are bringing in visitors to your blog.
At the beginning stages of your blog, before you made it, you want to go for less competitive keywords unless you are confident in your ability to create a lot of backlinks to said article.
If you have less than 600 blog posts out, I’d argue that your time is better spent producing more articles than asking for backlinks.
10. Not niching down enough
Here’s another problem bloggers may face, you don’t niche down enough.
If you write articles all over the place with drastically different categories, you may have a harder time monetizing your blog.
Say you walk into a grocery store and there are only two types of dairy products, 3 types of vegetables, and 4 types of fruits for sale in the whole store, would you trust it? Probably not.
Concentrate your energy on producing articles in the same or similar niches in the beginning and once you have enough articles in one category, you can start expanding to other sub-niches / categories.
For instance, say you have a lifestyle niche blog. Instead of writing about DIY, parenting, travel, home decor, pet, tea-drinking, art, and history. Pick 3–4 things to focus on first before expanding further.
You could focus on parenting, home decor, and cooking with the main theme being parenting.
You can write articles on how to deal with parenting stress, how to decorate a baby’s room, how to cook for a toddler, etc.
Niching down and having a main theme can help you achieve authority in space faster which also increases monetization opportunities.
11. Incomplete site structure
If you haven’t submitted a sitemap yet, here’s your chance to go do exactly that. A sitemap helps Google understand the structure of your blog.
Here are some more things to make sure your blog has outside of the sitemap.
- Privacy policy page
- Affiliate disclosure page
- About page
- Contact page
Missing these pages can make your blog appear incomplete which isn’t good for the SEO, ad platform approval, or user experience.
12. Difficulty navigating the site
Visitors gravitate towards blogs with layouts that they are familiar with. This means you should stick to common blogging layouts.
Read this article on choosing a theme if you want more guidance.
Another way to make sure your blog is easy to navigate is to make sure your menu contains all the categories on your blog.
When visitors land on your blog, they can easily tell the structure of your blog by looking at your menu.
Don’t create multiple menus without reason. Aesthetics is not good enough as a reason to create multiple menus, it will only confuse your visitors.
Stick to a simple menu.
Here’s an example of a simple menu:
You can see that the HelloMoneyTree menu contains the home page, the about page, the blog page (that contains all blog posts of all categories), the make-money category, the save-money category, the invest-money category, and the contact page.
For any other categories, I have it all listed under the broad blog category.
Not having a good menu won’t make or break your site but having one will certainly help you retain an audience.
13. Unpleasant looking site
Having a bad design or an unpleasant-looking site will decrease retention rate and increase bounce rate.
Visitors are less likely to stay or return to your blog if your site doesn’t look good.
Lots of new bloggers fall into the trap of picking a theme design that is complicated because they want their blogs to look professional and all the extra features can be enticing indeed.
That’s where they go wrong.
You see, you want to pick a theme that looks pleasant and simple. Pick simplicity over complexity when it comes to blog design.
A simple blog tends to look cleaner and fresher.
If you want some help with choosing a theme for your blog, click here for a quick guide.
Final thought
What do you think?
Your blogging success is literally a few years of hard work away.
Even though only 5% — 8% of bloggers are able to make a full-time income blogging, you may begin to realize that it’s in fact a good sign.
Let me explain, not all bloggers work their hardest on their blogs. In fact, lots of bloggers never make it past 6 months before quitting. Many of these bloggers never produce more than 50 posts let alone 100 blog posts
For those who are serious, they have a pretty good chance of making it, especially if they know exactly what not to do.
I hope I have given you some insights on how you should proceed from here on.
Click here to read 11 places to promote your blog posts.
Good luck!
I agree with what you said. Articles should also provide experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness content.