July 2009

So, you want to be a blogger, do you?  You think you have what it takes?  It sounds easy, but it isn’t, really.  It takes hard work, dedication, patience and a bunch of other things, or nothing at all!  Here are the 5 reasons bloggers fail at blogging and how to be a blogger.

1. Lack of content. If you want to have a blog that’s successful, you have to have something to write about.  Picking a topic that doesn’t yeild content sort of defeats the purpose of blogging.  When was the last time you went to a successful blog that gets thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of visitors that had 5 articles a month for the last however many months with articles that were 200 words or less?  Probably never.  When you pick your topic, you’ve got to find something to write about that you can write about, and write about, and write about.
2. Lack of consistency. This is the most important, you have to write and write often.  The more you write, the more your readers will read.  If you post once a week, your readers will return once a week to read all about what you wrote about.  If you post once a day, your readers will check back every day to see what you have to say.  If you post 4 times a day, your readers will check back morning, day and night, then on their iPhone as they go to sleep.  You remember the old adage, “if you build it, they will come?”  The same is true for blogging.  If you want to see traffic pick up during other parts of the week, start posting content on those days, and stick with it.  In time, your readers will pick up on that and will visit your site more often to be sure they aren’t missing out on anything.
3. Lack of dedication. What good is consistency if you have no dedication?  I see this time and time again: a new blogger picks up a topic, falls in love, gets caught up in the coolness of blogging, tweaks his site, pumps new content into it for weeks, months even.  Then, it happens.  The blogger hasn’t seen the traffic he was hoping for, or he misses a couple days of posting, or he goes on vacation and never quite gets back into it.  That’s where it FAILS, when in actuallity, had he pushed just a little more, he could have reached The Tipping Point.  Henry Ford once said, “Be quick to make a decision, and slow to change it.”  If you decide to start a blog, dedicate yourself to it.  Everything can succed with persistence and dedication.  Sometimes it may take longer than other times, but just give it a chance.
4. Lack of a good topic. Growing your content is not possible, and consistency and dedication won’t matter if you are blogging on a crappy topic.  But, picking a topic is tricky, because you’ve got to blog about a topic that not only is interesting to a breadth of people, you’ve got to blog about something you have a passion for.  Not everyone can do this; it takes special skills and knowledge.  Your topic has to be one that could capture an audience of significant size, and must provide a way to give you ongoing content in the future.
5. Lack of money. Oh yes, I know money isn’t everything.  I know you have such a passion for something that you never need to be compensated for your work, right?  WRONG.  If you want to be able to justify blogging forever, you have to find a way to monetize your efforts.  But this is no easy task; you need to have a plan.  Are you going to sell ads?  Fine, who’s going to buy them?  What are you going to charge?  How are you going to justify that price?  Selling ads is a fine way to make money, but it can be time consuming, challenging, and largely dependent on the time you can put into it.  Thinking of just adding some Google Adsense to your blog?  That’s fine too, but don’t expect it to yeild much result unless you have tons of traffic.  Planning to make money on affiliate sales?  Great, but again, you need tons of traffic.  Do you have a plan on how to get that traffic to your site?
6. Lack of traffic. Ok, so you’ve got everything else down and you need readers.  Well, the truth is, the traffic will come if you’re doing everything else right and you add in a little SEO.  You’ve got to be sure that in the middle of all that blogging, you are using terminology that people are searching for.  You also want to be capturing email addresses so that you can notify everyone when you have new content posted to the blog.  Using Feedburner’s system or doing a manual newsletter both work wonders.

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