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Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

I have been having problems recently with my motivation, I need to work harder on this blog and I also need to find a real job in the meantime. I have been struggling recently with both these tasks, but my cash flow is running low and I need to start soon. This got me thinking about why so many bloggers fail in what they set out to achieve.

I do have my excuses, I am currently traveling, which means I have better thing to do than go job hunting or sitting in front of a computer. I also do not have the constant affordable internet access that I used to take for granted. But this is not why most bloggers fail.

It is a fact that the majority of blogs do not make any money. While some do not try, there are many bloggers who try to make money and fail. The main reasons why many bloggers will quit after a few months is because they get bored and impatient, or they run out of things to say. Personally I am not trying to make any money yet, but I’ve made no secret that I plan to do so in the future.

My lack of motivation and internet access lately has made me feel like I’m failing already in what I set out to do. But I don’t want to quit, instead I thought I’d look at why so many other bloggers fail:

• Not taking blogging seriously: blogging for money is not like other blogs, you need to work hard and fill it with content, as well as promote and monetize your blog. Blogging for money is not as easy as some make it out to be, you need to treat blogging as a business that requires work. This has probably been my biggest blogging sin lately.

• Low start-up costs: This is one of the big pluses of blogging or making money online in general. It is also one of the reasons why so many people quit. It is easy to get into the ‘make money online’ business, but because it requires very little investment, it’s also very easy to walk away.

• Blogging and Internet Marketing Problems: There are many blogs out there with great content, but unfortunately not all bloggers know about internet marketing. Blogging and marketing is a fine art (that I’m still learning) and there is more involved that just writing a post and slapping some ads/affiliate links over it. A lot of bloggers are simply not very good marketers, and this is why so many bloggers fail to make any money.

• Blogging for Money and not for Passion: Have you seen how many make money online blogs there are? People are starting them up every day expecting to stand out from the crowd, but nearly all of them will fail. A lot of people make this mistake because they find out about blogging and making money online through reading blogs and then decide to try and follow the crowd. If you are not passionate about your topic or do not possess the expertise you pretend to have, it will show. You may also run out of things to say if you are not passionate about your chosen niche.

I have tried to avoid this last point by blogging about travel and living abroad as well as blogging, because this is what I am doing right now and have plenty to say about the subjects. However I am probably guilty of the first point, I haven’t worked on this blog as much as I had planned.

Hopefully I will settle down somewhere soon and find a real job to keep me going while I work on this blog. I have given myself two years to get this blog to where I want it to be, so I do have time. I’ll keep you posted on what I’m up too, but just recently to be honest I’ve been playing too much and not working enough. Lack of work and effort is probably the main reason why most bloggers fail.

Most people today are familiar with blogging, but I thought I would write a brief introduction to blogging for those of you who are not. These days anyone can start a blog, there are free start up programs like Blogger and WordPress.com that make starting a blog a very easy process. It is also becoming even easier these days to make money blogging, and ultimately that is what I will be trying to do.

The word blog actually derives from “weblog” and it is presented online similarly to a diary or an online journal. You will notice with nearly all blogs that posts are listed in a chronological order, with the most recent post presented at the top of the main page. By scrolling down or looking through the archives you can see some of the older posts of the blog. This is how most blogs are set out including How-To-Retire-Young.com.

Blogs were originally designed to be used as online journals with many bloggers using them to keep people up-to-date with what they are doing. This has changed in more recent years, with blogs being used more often as a source of information.

So blogs differ from ordinary websites because they are set out in this way, rather than having static pages like the other websites. Blogs are usually updated more often, and updating a blog is much easier than updating a normal website, because of the ease of use of programs like WordPress and Blogger.

Blogging has made it much easier for anyone to start up a website. Even a dummy like me with hardly any HTML skills can start up a blog with relative ease. I am actually using WordPress.org for this site, which is slightly more technical than WordPress.com and it is not totally free as you do have to pay for your own hosting. But don’t let that put you off, the current WordPress 3.0 that I am using is really not too technical and is designed for internet dummies like me. The hosting costs can be as low as a few dollars a month, and when you consider a blog can make you money like a business (potentially thousands of dollars a month), the costs really are quite minimal.

If you are serious about blogging and possibly making money from your blog, I would recommend hosting your own blog. I will be going into more detail about this soon, but basically you get more control over your blog when you host it yourself, where as with a free hosted blog, you do not really own the blog and the host can potentially close your blog if they wanted.

But can you really make money blogging?

Yes you can make money with blogs, but it is not easy, and most blogs do not make any significant income. At the time of writing this blog is not making me any money at all, and it probably won’t anytime soon. There are countless ways of making money with blogs, but they all require one thing, Traffic.

Traffic is the number of people visiting you’re blog, and getting significant traffic to your blog is where most bloggers fail. You can write as much quality content as you want, but if you do not have any traffic then you are not going to make any money.

In the beginning it is very difficult to get traffic to your blog and keep people coming back. This blog is still in its early days so I currently have very low traffic. I am not going to kid you, or myself, it is not easy to get significant traffic to your blog. It usually takes several months at least. This is why most people fail to make money blogging, they do not have the patience to keep blogging when they are not making any money.

This is why I’ve given myself two years to build up this blog. I’m putting my life in the hands of this blog, so hopefully this will give me the drive and determination to keep going. It can be quite depressing in the early days of blogging as you are not making money and it feels like you are constantly talking to yourself.

There are many different ways to make money with your blog, but it is important to plan for the long term if you are serious about profiting with your blog. If you want a “get rich quick” plan then blogging is not the answer.

I will be writing a lot more about how to get traffic to your blog and how to make money blogging in the future, but I am not going to go into too much detail just yet as I am still learning and going through this process myself!