We’ve often come across anecdotal stats that say most blogs fail within the first 3 months. Another stat is that apparently most bloggers never make $100 in their journey. These stats help to tell us that a lot of blogs and bloggers fail.
Today we wanted to take a closer look at why do most bloggers fail from the perspective of those who are still inside their first year of blogging but who’ve made it past 3 months and made more than $100 so far. The fact is from the outside that may not seem significant but there have been plenty of times when things looked bleak.
Now the best part of a year into the experience we felt it could be interesting to reflect on why so many people fail when it comes to blogging based on the things that have almost derailed us.
Why Do Most Bloggers Fail? Top 4 Reasons
There are probably thousands of reasons why individual bloggers fail but we’ve looked at what we believe are the top 4 reasons based on our experience so far.
#1 – They Give Up Too Soon
This may seem pretty obvious but we believe the first reason why most bloggers fail is that they simply give up too soon. The 3 month mark feels significant because within that time you’ll probably experience:-
- Elation and excitement with getting started
- Disappointment when you start posting but are getting no traffic
- Temptation to give in
- A decision point – do I keep going and hoping things change OR give up?
That’s a lot to go through in the first 3 months but when you look a it 3 months is not a long time. It’s barely enough time to get your site’s presence felt on Google. It takes on average 3 – 6 months for a website to start ranking on Google. In fact, research by AhRef’s, shows that most articles appearing in the top 10 positions on Google are 2 years and above. It also showed that only 22% pages in the top 10 positions were created within the prior 12 months.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that just waiting and hoping will get you onto Google but what it does mean is that those bloggers who quit within the first few months of starting out never actually give themselves enough of a chance.
#2 – Unrealistic Expectations
The other key reason for failure, especially early failure, is that perhaps bloggers set out with unrealistic expectations of what they’ll be able to accomplish and in what time scales. One of the things that have helped us stay the course thus far is that we set out with big hopes but realistic expectations. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ambitious (otherwise what’s the point?) but what it does mean is that you need to be realistic with what you expect to see in terms of results a month in, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months etc.
If you set out expecting to see 100 visitors from your first post on day one, you know it’s probably not going to happen.
Study the area your going into. See what others have been able to achieve and calibrate your expectations accordingly. It doesn’t mean you should limit your ambitions to those that have gone before you in the long-term but certainly to begin with, you should have a good understanding of what results to expect so that you’re not disappointed when you check your reports for the umpteenth time to find no activity.
From our perspective what helped us initially is understanding that it was going to take at least 6 – 9 months before we started to see more than a few visitors a day and even contemplate a sale. When these things happened a lot earlier than we envisaged it was exciting but we still kept the perspective that it was a long-term play we were after.
#3 – No Strategy Or Process
Another reason why bloggers may fail is because they’re not following any kind of strategy and process. In the past we’ve failed with sites not only because of reasons #1 and #2 from above but also because we had no overall strategy mapped out and no process at all to back up any kind of strategy. When that happens you can find yourself trying out every new idea or tweak you come across in the hope it will bring quick results.
Instead what we’ve seen actually work is having an overall strategy and framework that guides your actions. So for example our first site is built around an SEO strategy that prioritises high user intent over anything else. This may not be to everyone’s tastes as it means we ignore or at least pay little attention to super-high volume keywords if we don’t think there’s a high level of intent and too much competition. This has helped to guide just about every we do and focus on. The process we’ve then built around this strategy is designed to support it in every way.
Now this may not necessarily be the best strategy we could have opted for and no doubt there are plenty of better ones out there. But the key point is that at least we have a strategy to follow and a framework and process to support it. This allows us to calibrate our timescales (#1) and expectations (#2) based on what has worked for others who have followed a similar strategy.
#4 – They Don’t Educate Themselves
When you try anything new one of the best ways to ensure you success is to try and learn as much as you can about whatever it is your doing. This helps you learn the best techniques as well as pitfulls to avoid. Perhaps one of the reasons why bloggers fail is that they don’t take the time to educate themselves in the various tools and techniques needed to succeed. We only speak from experience as our prior attempts with sites were hamstrung by some stuff that now feels pretty basic only because we’ve educated ourselves.
Part of the issue is that when people think of educating themselves, too often they’re taken back to their school classroom and quickly lose interest. In reality self-education today couldn’t be further from that and couldn’t be any easier.
Through podcasts, YouTube videos and guess what, blogs, we’ve managed to pick up enough knowledge and then apply it to be able to give ourselves a much better chance of succeeding.
A prime example of where we previously contributed to our own failure due to a lack of self-education is trying to get on Google. We’d launched multiple websites in the past and then just waited and hoped we would be found on Google. We’d keep checking weekly only to find we couldn’t find ourselves on search engines. Little did we know that the best way for a new website to be found on Google is you guessed it; tell Google you exist! It seems stupid not to think of that but that’s the thing with ignorance; it takes no prisoners. All it would have taken is some quick research to discover what is needed to get on Google.
Conclusion: Why Do Most Bloggers Fail?
So why do most bloggers fail? There are no doubt a ton of reasons why various bloggers fail but based on the albeit, still relatively short, experience we have it seems like a lot boils down to being suitably prepared in various ways. When we look at our top 4 reasons it looks like #4 is the most critical. With self-education you can tackle just about any of the other 3 issues.
Why Do Most Bloggers Fail? Tell Us Your Thoughts.