Even wonder why blogs fail? Even more interesting, why they succeed?
Competition: According to Technorati, the blogosphere is doubling about once every 6 and a half months, with about 175,000 new weblogs created each day, that’s more than 2 blogs created each second of each day. There are over 70 million blogs out there. Who are you to think your upstart blog has any right to earn any share of those readers? No matter who you are, someone always has something more interesting to say, writes better than you, or knows more.
Answer: 99% of those blogs are utter crap. They aren’t even blogs, they are scripted sites made for AdSense, affiliate sites that just link products, or worse. The fact that you are a real person, trying to provide an interesting website, puts you in front of all the fake sites. Also, Technorati is quick to quote those stats, but what about blogs that haven’t updated in 6 months? Domains that expire? Blogs abandoned or parked by their host?
Lack of time: I spend anywhere from 8-18 hours a day working on blog related activities. The rest of the day is spent consulting, exercising or sleeping. (Shower? Whats a shower?) I even eat at my computer usually. If you work full time, have a family, and an active social life, no way you can compete with the Turnip, let alone the A-list bloggers.
We are your blogs. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us”
Answer:Time spent on the computer hasn’t changed. Whether it’s playing counterstrike, World of Warcraft, messaging, following the stock market, or blogging, you would be online anyway. You do not have to make 5 posts a day to succeed. Anywhere from 1-3 posts a week is plenty. It gives your readers time to comment, too. My tip is to structure your time online. Set aside one hour for critical tasks like checking if a sites down, inactive AdWords, paying bills, or whatever. Then another hour answering comments and emails on your own blog. Maybe a third hour browsing forums and casually dropping and commenting. Finally a fourth hour finishing up dropping your 300 cards. Argh! We just spent 4 hours online and haven’t even written a post! No fear, that whole time you spent doing other things online should have triggered something in your mind to write about. Now spend the fifth hour writing. You see how I can waste a whole day online? If you don’t have an hour for email, then unsubscribe yourself from some auto-mailers and focus on those that need to be addressed. The key is setting a block of time for that activity and then moving on. Blogging can be a full 8 hour a day job, if you let it. Don’t think you are going to reach a certain level of success spending 1 hour a week online either. Set aside a block of time, divide it among your tasks, and stick to it.
You Write Like Crap: I studied English Literature in college, studied teaching English in graduate school, taught English at every level including college. I even took copywriting courses in New York. Don’t even think you know the difference between writing and typing!
Answer: None of that matters. Trends in writing style come and go. Shakespeare was great, but if you wrote like that now you might lose your readers. Write the way you talk, in a manner that everyone can understand and you can’t go wrong. Writing style is never an issue unless you venture out of your niche. The problem is when you don’t care what you write. If you slap words on the page and click “publish”, the reader knows it. Treat each post as a work of art. Reread it, walk away from it and come back. Don’t publish it until you’ve uploaded the proper picture to accompany it. If you enjoy reading it, others will too. Spellcheckers can help, as would a basic composition class. But those just cover mechanics and not the art of writing. Be passionate and your chance of writing something great goes up. Any site can generate traffic; A good article stops traffic.
Measuring Success: Has your blog failed because you don’t know how to measure success? What metrics do you use; PageRank, Alexa rank, visitors, RSS subscribers, Technorati rank, something else? In some cases, there is only one measure that counts. Dollars. If you got into blogging thinking it would be your only source of income, then that should be how you measure your success. For most of us, that wasn’t the case. We started blogging for fun, and then decided to monetise our blogs afterwards. I’ve been to successful blogs where there were only 4 readers/commenters. I call them successful because they were a great resource, interesting to read, and kept me coming back for more. Unless you are in the Internet marketing niche, you shouldn’t be concerned with gaming all the ranking services. That includes Entrecard. Being active in the forums and dropping on those sites that drop on you is plenty.
Answer: Think about this, we all know that Entrecard is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If there are 70,000,000 blogs out there, why are there only 3000 Entrecarders? Even if we discount 1000 tech blogs, 1000 blogs too good for Entrecard, and another 1000 bloggers who make money and don’t care, that still doesn’t account for all those missing blogs. Of those 3000 Entrecard blogs, how many are complete spam, 1000? That means if you use Entrecard, blog regularly, care about your posts, and participate in the community, you are almost guaranteed to be in the top 3000 English speaking blogs in the world. Now don’t confuse that success with making money, they are unrelated. Just because I like your blog’s opinion on the New York Yankees this year doesn’t mean I will click on your AdSense, or maybe I will!
Thanks for the post, it gives some sort of encouragement to us bloggers!
Visiting, commenting on, and dropping cards on blogs I found through Entrecard takes me probably 1-2 hours a day. But that’s not really additional computer time. It simply means I’m spending less time reading Digg and Fark threads.
This is definitely the healthier alternative.
Cromely, I too take about 2 hours to drop and comment, but I’m dropping about 400 cards. I also post way too much on the entrecard forums, but I like to have a say in how things develop there.
You make blogging sound so SCARY but still it is fun isn’t it? My wife reckons all bloggers need to get a life and do something constructive with their time. She might be right!
I think’s she’s right too, but you could say that about any hobby.
Turnip, you say, “Don’t publish it until you’ve uploaded the proper picture to accompany it.”
I laughed when I read that comment, because Michael Martinez of SEO-Theory fame says that a blog is for writing and you should not have ANY images.
Just for the record, sometimes I use images and sometimes I don’t for my web site.
blogs fail because the owners have very high expectations. Maybe some well-meaning friend told them, blogging can be your side business, your source of income etc.
They don’t have the patience to do the stuff that really earning blogs do.
Thanks for this excellent post Turnip. I was wondering a little if a bizarre, opinion-loaded, snotty, foul mouthed blog such as mine could succeed in getting and keeping readers, and now I believe it can!
I think of my blog as without a niche, and having seen what a lot of the money-making blogs actually look like, I seriously doubt mine will ever be cash-successful. I get carsick when ads blink and roll, and if your ads take up more space than your posts, what possible reason could people have to go there? Habit? Futile Hope?
Figure that out and we’ll both laugh all the way to the bank. Oh yeah baby!
Very helpful article Turnip and so true. I have a very successful blog that doesn’t make much money, partly because I haven’t figured out how to monetize and partly because I don’t want to sacrifice the verse for the rhyme- do you know what I mean? Turnip of Power is going to help me though, I just know it!
Have a great day, Turnip~
Ann
Kex: The picture vs non-picture issue is a subject I’ve given much thought. If you publish 5 articles a day, then don’t use pictures. However, if you have people linking to your articles, then I think pictures really add value and showcase that article. When I publish an article pictureless, it just looks there so plain on the page. SEO-theory does have a lot of great articles on SEO. But visually, it looks and reads like a textbook. Blogs are emotional, even marketing blogs.
Edit: One more thing on using pictures. SEO-theory does not account for the entrecard factor. I’ve got all these bouncy card droppers flying through my site and I want to grab their attention. Google search engine results are very secondary to me. I stand by my statement that the average blogger should add a picture to try and capture interest.
Woobie: Even the big blogs usually don’t make most of their money form their blogs. They run other sites that bring in the cash, and you never know who owns them.
Now that was a good read but I had to go back to see what image you used after reading the comments, I see it now.. I think your right, I get put off by too much type but also get put off by too many adverts, I try to keep mine in the sidebar but I still don’t think I have the balance right yet.
I am glad about one thing you mentioned in your post, and that is, type as you talk – I do think it is very important to spell check and to NOT USE mobile/cell phone talk in a blog (I have seen that, puts me right off as I have to figure out what the hell they are saying before I can take in what they are saying) – I have found my most successful (as in gets most comments) posts are those that I just typed as I thought so to speak. A bit like I have done here LOL
Anyway, thanks for a good read and by the way, I am new to Entrecard, finding it a little confusing but willing to take the time to see what it’s all about.
Cheers
Sue
Nice points Susanne. I moved the picture in this article from the right side over to the left. No nobody should confuse the article image with an ad, not that I’m above sneaking the occasional adsense or affiliate ad there.
Its a comforting thought to know that there arent as many blogs as first thought competing with you. Sure, there a thousands, but using the right avenues to promote your site is key as you have said. Entrecard is good for that, and that is my main avenue for success with my blog at the moment also…
Great. Now i know the secret to success
I am really astonished why blogs have became so commercial these days. It used to be a tool for online diarist and journal writer as an expression now it totally have a new spin. Perhaps it is really high time to distinguish blog for profit (commercial endeavors) and just personal blog for expression. I do wonder why ordinary website won’t just suffice for those kind of endeavors so it is really creating pressure for personal blogs to join the bandwagon. Although I welcome it as newness and let us see what will be the next trend. I would always check out the archive of these blogs and 90% of these money-making blog are relatively new. Well although my personal blog is now replete with ads (ugh), I still consider myself as a blog romantic and not a blog pragmatic. But I do test out all things new to promote my blog and indeed entrecard is a new tool that is drawing readers of my blog and finding this blog entry where I am posting a comment now.
Peter, Blame Google! I tried blogging many years ago. There was no easy way to monetize then. The closest thing was banners that you could get 1/100th of a penny for each click. There was also no incentive to update your site, which was much harder work in those days. It wasn’t until google adsense monetized every site on the net. Now everyone thinks making money online is so easy. Something new will come along and we’ll look back and say “remember when everybody had a blog and thought they would get rich online?”
I hate going to blogs and scrolling below the fold just to get to the article. If that’s the case, chances are, I’ve left that blog for green pastures.
IAAdmin: Are you referring to blogs that put ads that above their first article and use giant headers?