Top 10 Reasons Most Blogs Fail (& How to Fix Them)

Content –

1. Blog without goals
2. Choosing the wrong niche
3. Starting to blog on a free platform
4. Joining the information overload
5. Failing to solve audience issue
6. Wanting to have instant gratification
7. Not promoting on important platforms
8. Not blogging consistently
9. Not having an encouraging design
10. Not believing in one’s potential

Why bloggers fail?

Why the blogs that were thriving previously stopped existing or exist without fresh posts for years?

Why they are forgotten, left on their own and one day get abandoned completely?

Where people who start hopeful blogs suddenly go?

Interestingly, the prevailing reasons for blog failure are directly tied with human psychology and fortunately, they are repairable. 

Some of the most common reasons why blogs fail include –

1. Blog without goals

Most blogs that fail, fail due to the lack of clear goals. Not having goals and investing your time and effort on it is like embarking on a directionless journey that will possibly never end.

Now, blogging goals could differ depending on many situations, including a blog’s niche, target audience, their challenges and the blog owner’s personal priorities.

Whether it is a personal blog or otherwise, these are a few achievable goals a serious blogger may have –

• Build your own personal brand
• Attract new customer for your product/service
• Share your own experiences about something
• Drive active/passive income
• Build a community

If making money is your ultimate goal, your efforts should be aligned with raising the numbers of email subscribers, owning lifted rank in SERP, having more quality backlinks, increasing blog-wide engagement in comments, likes and page views, getting more staying time, controlling bounce rate and earning more desirable social media mentions among others.  

While setting profitable goals, make sure to postpone make money ambitions. Making money is not a realistic goal actually. You will eventually earn money as a consequence of all the dedicated blogging activities.

So rather than thinking about money at the outset, focus on creating value-added blog content. All those astonishing income reports are food for the eyes, but they did not grow without struggles and wait.

2. Choosing the wrong niche

Why blogs fail? Most blogs fail because they chose the wrong niche. Now there is no more profitable or less profitable niche. Nearly all niches have the potential to fetch you success. All you need to do is to choose a niche sensibly. Someone told this niche is profitable does not mean this is good. What worked for them may not work for you.

Rather than thinking about make money niche, think about a potential niche that you can actively write about.

These steps may help choosing a niche for beginners –  

• Take a topic you know, and want to talk about
• Do your market research to identify –

   1. The search volume in the niche

   2. Is audience interest in the niche is stable and rising?

   3. Does the niche have popular physical and digital products?

• If the niche is competitive, it’s usually good to choose a smaller niche to drive targeted traffic, who are more likely to convert

It is not always necessary for a blog to have huge traffic to become successful. It can become profitable by targeting a small number of people with serious buying intentions.

3. Starting to blog on a free platform

New bloggers – for obvious reasons – often want to host their blogs on free platforms that save them money. This is also a very good way to learn and experiment with their blogging skills. However, blogging on free sites has a saturation point.

It looks unprofessional to host your blog on a third party domain, you cannot execute advance level customization on your blog, means to monetize a blog also get restrictions. All these factors stop a blogger from reaching his desired level – eventually prompting him to abandon his blog.

The Internet is populated with millions of abandoned blogs on third party domains that could have a different story today had they opted for their own domain and hosting plans.

4. Joining the information overload

Most possibly what you want to talk about has already been told by many others.  So what will you do by starting yet another blog with the information that is publicly available? This is a very serious issue today’s bloggers face and many fail because of it.

The problem with our time is that we are approaching to a tipping point when an overload of excessive information is going to become an unimaginable challenge.  

To beat this unpleasant situation, bloggers need to be unique, pick carefully chosen subjects, and they should try to present interesting, often uncovered aspects of a topic. This may help to reduce reader distractions.

In the absence of fatigue, readers can take informed decisions, including the conscious reading of your blog posts and alertly subscribing to your emails.

5. Failing to solve audience issue

Many blogs fail because they address the author, not the readers’ intentions. This may sound harsh and shocking to some, but it’s a fact that people read blogs to solve issues, not to appreciate the writing quality of a new blogger.

Every reader who is coming to your blog comes with a problem in the first place. As a blog writer, take their issues and offer actionable solutions in realtime to make their life better.

Incorporate a sense of trustworthiness by providing free but insightful information that’s easy to consume, and different than others. Most importantly, understand the intentions of your readers and address them.

6. Wanting to have instant gratification

Another reason why blogs fail is probably people’s intention to receive instant gratification. Quite frequently this is tied with making money – a lot of it within a few days of starting a blog. It is highly unlikely that a  new blog starts earning money immediately after its launch. But people do expect result right here, right now – that too red hot! And thus fail!

Instant gratification is the tendency to forgo a rewarding future benefit to own a less rewarding instant benefit. This is very prevailing in the blogging world, whether using PPC just after starting a blog or requesting for affiliate links without creating content around the product.

To beat this, the first thing is realization. The realization that blogging is not going to fetch me money immediately. I have to add small, steady and effective steps to reach my goals and getting an instant result is not going to stay forever without hard work and determination.

7. Not promoting on important platforms

Good content drives engagement, but for the content to be read by your readers, your readers must find it. New bloggers often fail because they would populate their blogs with frequent blog posts and wait for readers to come. In order to make a popular blog, you should take your content to the people.

Link to authority blogs in your niche and let them know you did. Doing targeted social media marketing, enabling e-mail subscriptions, participating in thriving online communities, replying to readers’ comments on your blogs are some of the ways to get started.

8. Not Blogging Consistently

Reasons for inconsistent blogging could vary starting from the silly ones.

Committing to more than one blog, focusing more time on design than content, failure to follow a realistic posting schedule, keeping huge financial expectations and not able to achieve them are some of the reasons why bloggers start big but gradually become inconsistent and then totally disengaged.

Few ways to keep blogging consistently

• Manage one blog dedicatedly
• Focus on content more than other page elements
• Gather engaging content concepts that you want to talk about
• Stick to a practical posting limit
• Set realistic financial expectations

9. Not having an encouraging design

Content is the most essential element. But this content needs to be presented smartly to give readers reasons to revisit your blog. While a blog design will less likely to directly impact a blog success, it actually contributes to a blog’s success. Not having a good blog design and format is disadvantageous but having it increases your success potential.

Good design is important becuase –

• It creates a positive first impression
• It increases page load times (good SEO indicator)
• It improves the readability of content
• Good navigation increases your visitors’ on page staying time

10. Not believing in one’s potential

Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme, it can not promise overnight success. The little but steady efforts you put in the right direction will show you success one day. Many talented bloggers quit because they underestimate their true potential after failing to achieve success. And quite often they would tie the failure with their lack of time.

To start a successful blog, it’s not required you leave a job. In fact, it is never recommended because blogs can’t be an immediate income generator. They may not show profit even in the long run if steps are taken in the wrong direction.

But serious bloggers understand the challenges, risks and put realistic efforts to slowly but gradually scale their blogs. They spend the early blogging days in learning new things which never demand full-time dedication.

These are a few reasons why most blogs fail, with ways to fix the issues.  Although sometimes it’s really hard to identify why a blog is abandoned despite having a thriving time.  But that’s the topic for another blog.

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