Why do blogging Facebook groups, Reddits, and courses only have noob bloggers in them? If blogging is so easy, where are all the successful ones?
The reason everybody is a beginner blogger is that 99% of new blogs fail. Let’s go over why new blogs fail so that you can avoid making these mistakes!
New Bloggers Aren’t Targeting Google Successfully
I’ve interacted with enough people who are killing it with Pinterest that I don’t want to completely discount Pinterest as a traffic source.
That said, the total amount of traffic available on Pinterest is tiny compared to the amount available on Google. Google now has over 3 trillion searches per year up for grabs.
Google’s 3 trillion searches is over 100x larger than Pinterest’s 24 billion searches. Relying exclusively on Pinterest is like fishing in a pond when you’re right next to the ocean.
New Bloggers Don’t Understand Keyword Research
Even if you pump out a daily blog post about obscure topics like “How to Drink Margaritas Upside-Down in a Hot Air Balloon,” you will fail.
Why? Zero people Google that. If nobody Google’s what you write about, you will never get Google traffic regardless of how many articles you write.
You must do the keyword research before writing every post. Otherwise, it won’t matter how many posts you produce.
New Bloggers Don’t Produce Enough Content
How many blog posts do you need to earn a full-time income?
It’s not an easy question to answer. But, let’s pretend you need 100k monthly page-views to earn six figures. Pro-bloggers hope to average at least 1,000 page views per article. At that rate, an expert blogger would need to pump out 100 posts.
If we assume a noob blogger sucks at keyword research, it could take as many as 400 posts. How long does it take to write hundreds of blog posts?
| Post Frequency | Time to 100 Posts | Time to 400 Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Once a Month | 8 years | 32 years |
| Bi-Weekly | 4 years | 16 years |
| Once a Week | 2 years | 8 years |
| Twice a week | 1 year | 4 years |
| Three Times a Week | 33 weeks | 2.5 years |
If you’re only writing 1 or 2 posts a month, you will fail. You simply need to produce more content than that. Increasing your blogging speed will help. You need to produce 1-2 posts per week to create this amount of content in a reasonable time-frame.
New Bloggers Have No Patience
Most bloggers can’t keep grinding for years before giving up. But, that’s how long it takes to succeed. Don’t get into this industry if you’re not willing to put 1-2 years of your life behind it. It took my blog over a year to start getting significant traffic.
I like to compare blogging to going to the gym. Can you get in shape forever by going to the gym one time and working out really hard? That’s not how fitness works, and it’s not how blogging works either.
Blogging has to be a habit for you to be successful. You need to be on a posting schedule that you can tolerate without burning out. Otherwise, you will quickly burn out and quit entirely.
New Bloggers Have No Monetization Strategy
Most new bloggers think the only way to make money online is with ads or affiliate marketing.
And you can make money with both those things if you have a lot of traffic. But, if your site’s only using ads and Amazon affiliate to monetize, you need 400k visitors to hit six-figures.
The real way to make money online is by having a targeted niche and creating your own product. With this, a $200 RPM should be achievable. At which point, you only need 40k page-views to hit your income goals.
Do you think it’s easier to get 40k page-views, 400k page-views, or 4 million page-views?
New Bloggers are Copying Other Bloggers Instead of Being Original
I understand how tempting it is to find the biggest site in your niche, check out their top pages on Ubersuggest, and then create your own version of that page. It certainly feels like a cheat code.
It’s not. If this is your primary strategy, your blog will fail. Why?
Google largely determines rank by domain authority. Meaning you will never outrank an old site with thousands of backlinks. Even if you produce better content you have no chance.
As a new blogger you need to punch within your weight class. When you target something, you want the SERP to look more like below where there aren’t 10+ great articles from high domain authority websites.
New Bloggers Want To Do Too Much
When you talk to new bloggers, they act like they have a million things to do. They have been convinced that all of the following are essential items.
- Code their website to look perfect.
- Get a perfect 100 Google PageSpeed Score.
- Create a million business accounts and become an accountant.
- Build the perfect Lead Magnet.
- Learn what the GDPR means
- Figure out how to get traffic from Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Facebook, SnapChat, TikTok, etc.
- Buy keyword research tools and become an advanced SEO.
- So much more…
You don’t need to do any of this. You only need to do two things.
- Use my keyword research post to learn how to pick topics Google will like.
- Create quality content as fast as you can.
That’s it. Everything else is a distraction that’s actively taking away from your success. It’s not that all these things have no value. But until you have 100+ posts, creating content is a better use of your time.
New Bloggers’ Write Bad Copy
Your Headlines Suck.
There, I said it. The click-through rate on your articles is very important for ranking on Google. If your headlines suck, nobody will click through. Your Google rankings will suffer and your site will never take off.
But, it’s not just headlines. New bloggers tend to fill all of their content with unnecessary fluff to make it longer. They also like to describe things with text over images or formatted tables.
In marketing, images convert 10x better than text, and video converts 10x better than pictures. Nobody will read a giant wall of text.
New Bloggers Have Awful Websites
New bloggers tend to sign up for the cheapest host and theme. This is fine at first. I recommend doing so until you have 50+ pieces of content and are starting to get traffic.
But, once traffic is coming in, it’s time to upgrade. Google is measuring user experience on your website to determine if they should send more traffic. A better host and theme is an easy way to improve your rank.