Blogging is not a get-quick-rich scheme but a long-term endeavor.
No doubt, we know that already, but it can be really frustrating putting all the effort with no return.
Earnings from blogs serve as a motivation to keep going, and every blogger needs this type of motivational funds to make basic renewal commitments like hosting and the likes.
In this article, I’ll expose 13 core reasons why your blog isn’t making a dime and how to get that fixed today.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
1. You Don’t Have a Plan
A goal without a plan is just a wish – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Planning entails the step-by-step decisions you need to achieve your goals.
In this case, your goal is to make money via blogging.
Thus, before starting your blog, you should have a clear-cut plan on how to make money.
This scenario is prevalent in every business, whether online or offline. Consider, for example, an electronics tool retail shop in a suburb.
The electronics shop owner must have researched to ascertain whether electronic enthusiasts or technicians are in the suburb.
Also, they must ensure that their target audience is willing to pay for the product. Most importantly, the shop owner must know the electronic tools, equipment, and materials their audience is willing to buy.
All these efforts are invested in ensuring profitability.
Contrastingly, most bloggers fail to plan. They start a blog, post content, and hope for good results.
As a blog owner who intends to make money, you must craft a plan that projects the decisions, resources, and timing you need to make money from your blog.
2. You Don’t Know Your Target Audience
It’s challenging to gain readership if you post random content without identifying a specific target audience.
Blogging is about proffering solutions to real-time problems. Different people have different problems.
However, you must identify a person, group of persons, or demographic before you know their problems.
Hence, the average person will ignore content that doesn’t satisfy their needs, desires, or curiosity.
In other words, people will ignore your blog if its content is not specifically tailored to solve their problems.
One of your primary responsibilities as a blogger is to identify your target audience.
This information will help you provide targeted, valuable, and engaging content that suits their needs.
3. Your Content Is Bland
Content is king.
Factually, content alone isn’t enough to drive significant traffic to your blog. However, without quality content, almost every other effort wastes time.
In fact, according to GrowthBadger, “quality of content” is the most critical parameter in the blogging sphere.
Therefore, poor quality, unengaging, and shallow content is probably one of the reasons why your blog isn’t generating significant traffic.
Then again, another content-related problem affecting your blog could be poor grammar, spelling errors, and improper blog writing tone.
The good news is that there are lots of writing tools to help you identify grammatical errors, spelling errors, and writing tone.
Combine these tools with good proofreading, and your content will be perfect for publication.
4. You Aren’t Blogging Consistently
Here’s something interesting: bloggers who publish articles two to six times a week are 50% more likely to report strong results.
This means writing a blog post when you deem it convenient will not cut If you want to make money from blogging.
Conversely, consistently churning out quality content will hook your readers and increase your engagement rate.
A high engagement rate boosts your blog’s ranking on SERP. Thus, increasing blog traffic and potential income.
One way to improve your blogging consistency is to create a feasible schedule and stick to it.
In other words, you need to allocate time in your schedule to blogging and eliminate every form of distraction within that period.
5. You Don’t Optimize Your Content for Search Engines
Believe it or not, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the silver bullet you need to ensure a profitable blog.
However, this silver bullet is tough to get.
You don’t believe me, right? Check this out…
68% of all online experiences start with search engines. Also, bloggers earning $50,000 per year put lots of effort into SEO, and their primary traffic source is Google’s SERP.
However, only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 spots of search engine report pages (SERPs) within a year of publication. To make it worse, 90.36% of blog pages don’t get any traffic from Google’s SERP.
So, what’s the meaning of all this?
These statistics indicate that SEO is a surefire path toward making money via blogging.
However, it’s a slippery slope. It will take time and dedication to achieve your goal.
Additionally, SEO practices are ever-evolving. So, there’s no time for stagnancy.
As a blogger who intends to make your blog profitable, you must stay up-to-date with new and trending SEO practices.
6. You Aren’t Self Hosting
“Sooner or later, there will always be a cost for “Free Stuff” ― Will Leamon.
No doubt, hosting your blog on a free platform like WordPress.com, Blogger, or Squarespace is the fastest way to get your blog up and running.
Regardless, these platforms make it challenging to grow and monetize your business.
For instance, some of these platforms do not allow affiliate links.
Also, customizing your blog to suit your brand will be a tall order.
Branding helps you build authority in your niche, and a generic blog will not attract traffic.
In addition, blogging with a free blogging platform grants you little to no control over the technical SEO of your website.
All in all, these limitations ensure you earn little to no money from your blogging efforts.
As a result, subscribing to a web hosting plan is your best option. A web hosting plan allows you to implement, modify and scale your blog monetization strategies with no ado.
7. You Have a Poor Marketing Plan
At first glance, blogging appears to be a one-person show. However, it isn’t.
You don’t need people to build a blog. Albeit, you need people to monetize your blog.
Good content will keep your audience, but it won’t bring them. Therefore, you need a great marketing plan to monetize your blog.
However, at best, most bloggers create content, share it on their social media handles, and hope for the best.
Truth is: Except you’re Seth Godin, arguably America’s most prolific blogger, that strategy is doomed to fail.
Bearing that in mind, as a blogger, there is lots of work to do before you earn your pay.
To earn from blogging, you must build relationships with established bloggers in your niche, write guest posts, and employ social media marketing, amongst other things.
8. You Don’t Have a Consistent Marketing Strategy
Understandably, your content marketing strategy must evolve to suit current consumer behavior trends.
However, constantly changing your content marketing strategy does more harm than good.
It leaves you with no clear-cut objective and measurable goal. Therefore making it impossible to gauge your progress.
As a blogger, implementing new content marketing practices has few demerits.
Regardless, incorporating these practices into your content marketing plan without a proper appraisal is far from ideal.
For example, assume your plan for the month is to create five top-of-the-funnel articles to improve your blog’s traffic.
However, your competitors are creating video content due to new data on customer behavior.
As a result, you create five videos for the month without knowing how it affects your content marketing plan.
At the end of the month, you’ll have no way to measure your achievement because your actions during the month don’t match your long-term goals.
Therefore, before incorporating any marketing decision into your to-do list, you must ensure it helps achieve your immediate and long-term goals.
9. You Don’t Have an Email List
As a blogger, your basic intuition is to create as much content as possible.
However, the basic rule of thumb in the blogging sphere is to spend at least ⅓ of your time creating content.
The remaining ⅔ of your time is better-spent marketing and monetizing your blog.
One of the best ways to get new leads who are likely to become repeat customers is via email marketing.
Email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers in 2020. They had a 15% conversion rate.
Look at it this way: When visitors subscribe to your email list, they like your content and are interested in future publications. This scenario helps build a form of brand loyalty.
Consequently, the visitor becomes more likely to trust your recommendations on products and services in your niche.
10. You’re Relying on a Single Source of Generating Income
Attracting traffic to your blog is half the job done. You must leverage this traffic to earn money.
As a blogger, there is more than one way to leverage your blog’s traffic.
However, for inconceivable reasons, most bloggers rely solely on ads.
Ads are indeed a great way to make money. Regardless, after all the effort, I’m sure you want to harvest every penny from your investment.
If so, ads are barely enough.
This conclusion can be seen in the fact that high-income bloggers rank AdSense, the most popular monetization method for bloggers, third in their list of blog monetization methods.
Also, bloggers who make between $7,500 and $25,000 get 42.2% of their income from affiliates.
Similarly, 45% of bloggers earning at least $50,000 yearly sell their products or services.
Inferring from these statistics, if you want to become a high-income blogger, you must consider monetizing your blog via:
- Affiliate marketing
- Selling your products or services
11. You’re Not Selling Any Product or Service
Blogging entails proffering solutions to people’s problems in specific demography, and money is a reward for value.
If your blog has no solution or value, people won’t part with their cash.
When someone visits your blog, they are probably searching for information about a problem, product, or service.
Thus apart from offering this information, you can offer a solution. One way to offer this solution is by selling your product or services.
Take, for instance, Neil Patel, a blogger who offers SEO tips and updates to his audience. He owns Ubersuggest, a SAAS used for keyword research, site audit, competitor analysis, and more.
With Ubersuggest, he’s selling a solution to many problems in the SEO/digital marketing niche.
12. Your Leads Aren’t Converting to Prospects
Ads will earn you money, but to maximize your blog’s earning potential, you’ll need to incorporate other sources of income, such as selling a product or service.
However, here’s the problem: how do you get visitors to buy from you?
Well, the answer is you need a content marketing funnel.
Content marketing funnels help create content that’ll attract visitors with different search intent.
Your content marketing funnel must ensure your leads sign up for your newsletters and freebies. If not, you’ll continually lose prospects.
One way to achieve this task is to break your content to suit the different types of search intent. That’s to say:
- Your top-of-the-funnel content must capture visitors with the informational type of search intent.
- Your middle-of-the-funnel content must attract people with a transactional type of search intent.
- Your bottom-of-the-funnel content must capture readers with the commercial type of search intent.
In addition, you must include explicit calls to action (CTAs) and subtle incentives to encourage readers to take action.
13. Your Prospects Aren’t Converting to Customers
After all your efforts, it is possible to acquire massive blog traffic and subscribers, but no one is buying your products.
Frustrating, right?
Here are some reasons why you are stuck with this problem:
- Inappropriate pricing plans
- Little or vague call to actions
- Lack of trust
To solve these problems, you’ll need to:
- Create a portfolio and social proof
- Research the financial background of readers in your niche
- Use explicit calls to action
I’ve created a complete guide on starting a blog, you can see it here:
How to Start a Profitable Blog: A Detailed Step-By-Step Guide
– Why am I not making money blogging?
The reasons why you are not making money from blogging are:
- Lack of blog traffic
- Inconsistency
- Impatience
- Poor marketing plan
- No specific target audience
- Poor quality content
- Lack of clearly defined blogging goals
– Why do most blogs fail?
Most blogs fail because their owners don’t understand what it takes to grow a successful blog. To grow a successful blog, you must consistently:
- Create engaging content.
- Craft unique content.
- Utilize a content marketing strategy.
– Do Beginner Bloggers Make Money?
Yes, beginners make money from blogging. However, it takes careful planning, effort, and patience to earn enough to replace a full-time job.
The fastest way to make money via blogging, and display ads, requires at least 1000 viewers for around $20 – $50+ depending on the advertising platform, niche, and audience.
Final Thoughts
Blogging can be a lucrative venture, with some bloggers earning an average of $8,000 per month, which may lead to a comfortable life.
However, earning money from blogging requires well-planned and deliberate monetization strategies, which isn’t implemented by over 30% of bloggers, earning them nothing from their digital space.
So, consider implementing the tips discussed, such as building a solid marketing strategy, providing quality and helpful content, and practicing SEO optimization.
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