Blogging for a living certainly has its advantages. Choose your topic wisely and you can write about something you love. By its very nature, you can work from home or on a beach in Costa Rica. And you get to work your own hours. One serious problem with blogging for a living however is that not everybody gets paid.
Unfortunately, successful blogging i.e. the kind that turns a profit, requires a number of different ingredients. And when even one of those ingredients is left out, you can be left working very long hours and ending up with nothing but a confused, slightly depressed look on your face.
Should you find that your blogging efforts are barely paying for your electricity, let alone your rent, there are a number of possible causes. Here are eight common reasons that some people find themselves blogging for free.
1. Your Blog is Too New
Most people new to blogging aren’t going to want to hear this but most blogs don’t start making serious cash until they have been online for over a year. This is not to say that money cannot be made in the first twelve months, it’s just unlikely that you’ll be making enough money to pay the bills. Those who had been expecting to be running a profitable blog significantly sooner than this often end up giving up before they get there.
2. You’re Not a Good Writer
You don’t need to be a novelist or an English professor to be a successful blogger but you do need to be able to write. It doesn’t matter how much work you do on SEO or how much you pay to get that perfect logo designed, when it comes down to it, a blogs quality and hence its popularity, is measured according to the quality of its posts. If you cannot write posts that people want to read, it’s time to find a new profession.
3. You’re Not Trying to be a Good Writer
On the other hand, many bloggers have the capacity to be great writers but they simply don’t devote enough time to writing their posts. They get so distracted with things like SEO and social media integration that they forget all about the importance of high quality content. Successful blogging requires that you make your posts your number one priority.
4. You Don’t Work Hard Enough
Blogging is hard work. It requires a significant investment of your time if you want to actually get paid. Many people start blogging assuming that they can throw up a post here and there and eventually the money will start rolling in. Such people don’t make money blogging.
5. Your Blog Is About Rocks
Most people recommend blogging about something that you like and I completely agree with that recommendation. It’s also important however to choose a topic that is commercial enough to monetize. Many bloggers make the mistake of assuming that just about any topic can be monetized and while this is true to a small extent, some topics are significantly easier to monetize than others.
6. You Forgot About Supply and Demand
For a blog to be profitable, there must be demand for the information that it provides. Therefore the topic needs to be a reasonably popular one and it should be possible to offer those interested in that topic something new. Many people forget about the latter requirement. Tech and SEO are certainly popular topics but with the amount of information already out there, do you really think that you can add something new?
7. You Don’t Care About Your Readers
It’s very difficult to build and grow a successful blog without a loyal readership. During the first months of a blog, most bloggers are well aware of this fact and are therefore eager to interact with their readers. When a certain level of success is obtained however, many times, that level of interaction drops drastically. Doing so implies that the readers are no longer cared about. And in turn, doing so leads to those readers going elsewhere.
8. You Haven’t Figured Out How to Monetize It
Finally, how a blog is monetized obviously plays a major role in how profitable it is. It doesn’t matter how many readers a blog gets on a daily basis, if it’s not monetized correctly, it’s never going to be as profitable as it could be. Adsense is not the only option when it comes to blog monetization. And failing to understand this fact has lead to many otherwise successful bloggers earnings cents rather than dollars per day.
