I personally think that talking about success is just too mainstream. Success is like one in a hundred (or even a thousand), and the sad fact is that most bloggers simply fail. This makes failure a much more interesting topic to talk about.
It is important, however, for you to understand why I’m taking such an angle with this article. It’s simply because every one of us will fail at some point. It’s inevitable. But you shouldn’t have a breakdown because of it … it’s just a step to success.
Actually, I urge you to fail your way to success! The more failure you experience in your blogging career the better. Now, back to the topic. Here’s my list of 3 very simple ways a blogger can fail.
1. Bad SEO
But this isn’t as obvious as it looks. I’m not talking about taking part in some black hat SEO or anything. I’m talking about doing seemingly normal and honest things that turn out to be completely “not OK.”
For instance, have you heard about the recent update of Google, the one called Penguin?
What’s interesting about it is that some shady sites were not the only ones to get hit by it. Also, a large number of completely genuine bloggers lost their traffic literally overnight.
Apparently, Google is now keeping an eye on all link building. So if you’ve been building links on other websites and using relevant keywords as anchor texts, you can be in trouble.
Google pays close attention now to what the ratio of these SEOd links is to normal, brand links. A brand link is one that contains the name of your site in it (or the address). If there are too many SEOd links, you’re in trouble.
And if Google bans you, you’ve failed. As simple as this.
2. Not posting regularly
It’s really REALLY easy to get distracted when you first start blogging. Here’s a likely scenario:
- first you get excited, pick a theme, a domain, and launch a blog,
- you start thinking “okay, what do I write?!”
- you get the initial 5 posts out,
- you don’t blog for two weeks,
- you write one post,
- you don’t blog for another week,
- you either start blogging regularly or forget about the blog completely.
If you manage to get through the initial issues with motivation and regular posting, you should be fine. But if you don’t, you will set yourself for failure without even noticing it at first.
The thing is that people simply won’t pay attention to you if you’re not posting regularly. Being unpredictable works for a small group of highly popular bloggers, but for the rest of us, it’s much better to publish entries on a consistent basis.
3. Using too many ads
Money money money. Most people want to make money at some point of their blogging careers. The hard part is that your monetization method has to be thought through and prepared in detail if you want to get any serious results.
Therefore, in most cases, simply smacking your blog with tens of ads won’t bring much profit. You might make a couple of bucks here and there, but it won’t be a constant stream of nice income.
What you will achieve, however, is alienating your visitors and letting them know that you only care about your ads and nothing more.
The known fact in marketing is that people don’t like when someone tries to sell them something. They like when someone helps them buy.
If you don’t want to fail, simply use less advertising to remain in the “helping them buy” area.
That’s it for my list of 3 surprisingly easy ways a blogger can fail. What do you think would look good as the scenario #4 here?
Karol K. is a freelance blogger and writer. He’s passionate about turning blogging into a business. If you are interested in how you can make money online writing articles feel free to visit him at YoungPrePro.
