So you’ve been blogging for a while but you’re starting to hate it? You thought you could make easy money and order a brand new 24″ iMac to replace your old Windows box in less than a month or two? Don’t wait for the south pole to melt, drop it, there are better things to do.
I came up with different statistical patterns observed through researches I’ve made on the subject and you might be suffering from the Bloginozia virus. It gets transmitted by either visiting Wal-Mart too frequently, or by falling into one or more of the following clinical observations:
1- Blogging For Money
Pro bloggers are constantly saying that if your goal is to blog for money, then you’re almost guaranteed to fail. Inspired by some bloggers’ gigantic monthly revenues, too many new bloggers are jumping head first in the blogosphere hoping they can get their part of the pie. Money is the consequence of success. Success is the consequence of months of quality content. If you think your blog will bring you important revenues in a short period of time, stop snoozing and wake up, this is not the case.
2- Blogging in the Make Money Online Niche
Inspired by clinical observation #1 listed above, have you ever thought how many new bloggers are starting to blog about how to make money online every day? More than you can imagine! What can they blog about? How credible can they be? What tips and money making techniques can they teach you if they are not even making a dime? Worst, they are losing money because they are paying $10 a month for hosting. This does not make sense. The Make Money Online niche is a jam pack football stadium and the only ones making money are the players on the field.
3- Niche Blogging
This one is the continuation of observation #1. Ever heard of the multiple blogging recipes to make a fortune? Pick an empty niche, start posting regularly to optimize specific keywords and search engines will fall in love with your content. As a result, you will magically rank in the first page of keyword-related search results, getting customers to purchase affiliate crap or click AdSense ads. First, let’s say that after a month of research you’ve isolated a low crowded niche. Great, now you need to produce content about cat litter. Do you like emptying a cat litter? Do you see yourself producing 3-4 posts a week on cat litters? And before Google thinks you’re THE cat litter reference, you will have emptied kitty’s can too many times. Blogging about a subject you are not passionate about is not fun. It becomes work and it sucks.
4- The Pressure of Producing Quality Content Regularly
Content is king. A blog that has low quality content doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Producing quality content is vital, and many bloggers are facing this challenge rapidly. True, you can come up with a good post once in a while. But if you wish to get dugg, to get thousands of stumblers visiting your site and reach Del.icio.us’, Sphinn’s and BloggingZoom’s front page, you need KILLER content. Once you start blogging and you see fellow bloggers near you having more success than yourself on social media sites, you’ll start introspecting your content. Look at bloggers such as Skellie or Maki, pillar posts are pouring out of their brain. It’s like they sit, type, and here’s another perfect article in no time. This requires talent. Inexperienced bloggers need hours to produce good content, and this often leads to discouragement.
5- You Feel Google AdSense is Like a Bad MasterCard Ad
- Hosting fees: $10 a month
- Domain Registration: $10 a year
- WordPress For Dummies: $15
- Customized Logo: $100
- Customized WordPress Theme: $500
- Clicking your own Google AdSense banner to increment your total revenues to 1¢ on a payout of $100: Priceless. (Note: Doing this is strictly forbidden by Adsense’s TOS, so don’t do it!)
6- Busted By Crappy Referral Programs
Here’s a good example: A new concept such as DealDotCom is launched. To create some buzz, DealDotCom contacts the 2-3 biggest pro bloggers in the Make Money Online niche to explain their referral program where you get a percentage of all referred members’ sales. When the big guys blog about it, DealDotCom gets hundreds if not thousands of new members in the following days. Consequence? The program is close to saturation. You can decide to add DealDotCom’s banner on your site hoping bloggers will be subscribing under your referral link, but guess who did it first, dude? Who do you think will be making big dineros out of this program?
7- RSS Subscribers too long to increase
Every single day you are looking at your stats hoping your RSS feed will finally display the magical number: 100 subscribers. But nope, you haven’t passed the three figures yet. If on a count of 25 subscribers you remove your 5 web email accounts and 10 of your friends, you are stuck with 10 pure RSS subscribers, and this sucks. You could try opening 75 new accounts randomly on mac.com or gmail, but that would be a real pain. And you would still be talking to yourself… so emailing yourself directly might be a better idea. Increasing RSS subscribers takes time and energy, and unless you are ready to spend countless hours producing quality content, you better stop blogging once and for all.
8- Your WordPress Theme Sucks!
Dude, if you are still using WordPress’ default theme, I honestly don’t know what to say. However, I totally understand why you hate your site. This default theme is the worst thing ever designed in history. Windows 3.0 was fine art compared to that! Two options: either you find yourself a free theme that other bloggers already have, or you break your piggybank to get some dosh and pay for a customized theme. See the Bad MasterCard ad above for a guesstimate.
9- Not Enough Traffic
Yep, 10 visitors a day is not THE best moral booster. You may think Google Analytics doesn’t know how to count visitors, but truth is, it’s known as a pretty darn reliable source. And by the way, don’t forget to subtract visits from home, your job and your friends’ computers where you’ve set your blog as the default homepage.
10- You Got Banned from Social Media Sites
So you’ve spammed social media sites repeatedly only promoting your own content? Man, talk about failing with dignity. You know how this is called? Bonsai Blogging, and I have tremendous respect for Bonsai misbehavers. But if you didn’t know about the Bonsai and got banned, this means you neither read the sites’ TOS nor this article titled Ever Stumbled Your Own Post? Nothing I can do to help, maybe you could try emailing kevin.rose [AT] digg [DOT] com.
This guest post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie.