Hi, I’m Praneeth Kumar.
In this blog post, you will learn how hard is it to have a successful blog and what makes a blog successful and how difficult it is to make money blogging in detail.
So without further ado let’s get started.
Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog post.
What makes a blog successful?
According to Ahrefs, 90% of the content on the Internet does not get any traffic from Google.
So, it is very obvious to know whether a blog is successful or not by knowing whether the blog is getting traffic from search engines like Google or not.
How do you get traffic to your website from Google?
Through creating and publishing quality content.
Other than getting organic traffic, there are few other signs that determine whether a blog is successful or not, they are,
- Are users engaged with your content like dwell time on your website(the higher the dwell time the better it is)?
- Are your website visitors getting converted into customers or leads?
- Are you making any money from your blog?
- How well known and popular is your blog in your industry?
- How unique, different but helpful your blog is compared to other blogs in the industry.
All these factors help you understand and figure out whether your blog is successful or not.
How difficult is it to make money blogging?
Believe it or not, It is not difficult to make money blogging if you have traffic to your blog.
If you have decent traffic to your website from search engines consistently like let’s assume, 25000 visitors to your website every month.
You can easily monetize your blog and earn money through the following ways,
- You can join an ad network like Ezoic and earn money displaying Ads on your website.
- You can join an affiliate program or network like Clickbank, recommend and promote any product on your website relevant to your niche audience, and earn a commission.
- You can sell any physical or digital product like an ebook, course, premium content, or a shirt and merchandise created by you on your website.
- You can accept and publish sponsored content on your website from companies.
- You can offer consultation to your clients for hourly rates depending upon your niche and skills.
As long as you are getting traffic to your website from search engines it is not very difficult to monetize your blog and make money.
So you must think about how you can drive more traffic to your website because more targeted traffic from SEO almost all the time leads to more money.
How hard is it to have a successful blog?
Making a blog successful is a process that requires a lot of hard work, determination, consistency, and patience in creating Quality content consistently, and a lot of networking skills, and promotion activities like keyword research, building backlinks, etc.
To get your blog successful you need to figure out the most important task you need to do and do it immediately.
What makes a blog successful and drives traffic to your website from Google?
The answer is simple, create and publish Content and few other things that make a blog successful.
Ultimately content is what drives traffic to your website from Google so you need to prioritize creating content as 70% of the work to be successful in blogging.
Many people understand the importance of content and they know that they can drive traffic to their website through content but they do some serious mistakes which stop them from driving traffic to the website.
So to avoid that thing, follow the things below.
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Create content that matches the search intent.
I have explained how you can create content that matches the search intent clearly with examples here.
In short, whenever you are writing a blog post on your website, make sure to ask yourself some important questions like,
- What is the keyword/topic that this blog is targeting?
- What does the user mean when he searches for that specific Keyword or query in Google which you are targeting?
- What is the problem which the user is trying to solve by searching that query in Google?
- Does your blog post help the user solve the problem?
- How can you create a better resource for users that clears all the queries about that issue to users?
By asking the following questions you can create content that actually ranks on search engines and drive traffic to your website and get yourself in the remaining 10% in Ahrefs study.
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Create content where you have the chance to rank.
Whenever you are creating content for your website it is also equally important to see and make sure that you actually have a chance to rank in the top 3 positions of Google for that Keyword in SERPs.
Because according to backlinko study, the top 3 positions of Google take more than 70% of organic clicks and traffic for any Keyword.
There is no point and use in ranking a keyword in Google if you can’t rank in at least the top 3 positions of Google because that is where the majority of traffic is at.
You can click here to learn how to do competition analysis of any keyword manually and decide whether you should target the keyword or not for your blog post.
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Create content that is good for users.
In the end, you should create content for users not for search engines and User experience is an important ranking factor of Google.
So you should create content for humans and you need to follow some best practices like,
- Your blog post must be easily readable.
- Use lots of multimedia and data in your posts to make your blog more helpful.
- Use a short paragraph in your blog post to make your content easy to read.
- Use Bullet points and subheadings in regular intervals to make your blog easy to skim.
- Use examples and stories in regular intervals of your blog to make your blog engaging.
You can click here to learn how to write a blog when you are not a writer.
This is the 70% of action you need to take to make your blog successful and the other 30% action is about other things mentioned below.
Some changes to make to get your blog successful other than creating content which is remaining 30% action.
- Make your website mobile-friendly.
- Make your website load fast.
- Repurposing existing content into other forms of content like video and podcasts.
- Remove and solve all the technical issues of your website.
- Build quality backlinks to your website.
- Build and grow an email list of your audience.
- Do the promotion of your blog on social media and other places.
- Check your analytics and measure the performance and growth of your website.
- Engage with your audience in blog comments and social media.
- Monetize your blog.
All these things are the remaining 30% things you need to do to make your blog successful apart from creating content.
This is it, this is how exactly you can make your blog successful and get traffic from Google.
When success in blogging becomes hard to achieve?
Blogging is going to be tough and hard and gets hard to be successful for people who follow the things mentioned below.
Let’s see the reasons in detail.
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Selecting the wrong niche for your blog.
Your Blogging niche is the topic on which you write blog posts.
Your niche lays the rock foundation for your blog to get traffic to your website.
Whenever you are selecting the niche for your blog, make sure that you select a topic that you have at least a little interest in.
Your interest in the topic is important because,
You will have to write and publish lots of blog posts on that topic on your website to get traffic from search engines.
If you are not interested in the topic that you’re blogging about,
you cannot create content that is good and helpful for users because you are not interested and you don’t like the niche and topic on which you are producing blog posts yourself and
you will do less research for the post and the reason why most people give up in Blogging is that they don’t like the writing process or don’t like the topic they are writing about.
And if you cannot create better resource blog posts for your audience that is more helpful, different, highly researched, and better than other blogs on the internet,
there is a hard time for you to grow and achieve success because your content is not different and better than others so it won’t stand out in the competition.
The other thing you need to make sure of is, the niche has long-term potential.
Don’t try to select a niche based on trending topics.
Trending topics always change and if you have a niche that talks about trending topics,
you won’t get traffic to your blog from google consistently because nobody searches what was trending one month ago today.
The trending topics for 2020 will not be the same for 2021 and further.
Make sure that you select the topic which is evergreen, for example, topics like health, business, and marketing, fashion, and food.
Before selecting the topic ask yourself a single question.
- If I write a blog post on this topic and publish it on the internet, after three years from now will this blog post still get traffic to my website or not?
If yes, that means the topic is an evergreen one and you can choose it if not avoid it.
You can click here to learn how to select the top profitable blogging niche for your website.
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You take blogging as a hobby.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that many people do which causes their blog to fail.
Don’t take your blogging as a hobby.
Take Blogging as a real online business.
Like any other business, blogging also takes time to be successful.
When you start looking at blogging as a business.
Like any other online business, You need to put a lot of work and time, and energy into working on your blog to get your blog successful.
You cannot expect your blog to succeed by posting a couple or like 2 and 3 blog posts a month.
The fact is that,
The more quality blog posts you publish the better because it correlates with the increase in traffic.
- Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get nearly 3.5X more traffic than those that publish 0-4 monthly:
- And Backlinko found that the number of domains pointing to a particular page (as well as your overall site) correlated in higher rankings:
- Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month received about 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0-4 monthly:
To publish such High-quality content on a regular basis takes a lot of hard work, determination, and dedication like any other business.
Apart from creating content, you need to also build quality backlinks for your website and do promotion of your blog post on social media to help your blog reach the right audience faster and speed up the process of ranking in Google.
You can click here to learn how frequently you should publish blog posts on your website?
Don’t take Blogging as a hobby, like any other business blogging is also an online business, and treat it like one if you really want to get success in it.
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You don’t publish unique and engaging content.
If you’re someone who is still publishing short 500 words blog post on blogs and expect to succeed, the time has gone for 500 words post.
The fact is that,
- Blog posts over 2,000 words have been steadily increasing, while short blog posts under 500 words have been declining.
- HubSpot’s analysis of their blog posts showed articles with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 earned the most organic traffic:
- Backlinko found the average word count of a top-ranked post in Google is 1,890 words:
Stop publishing short blog posts and start creating longer in-depth posts and guide on your blog.
Don’t obsess too much about word count, it’s about how much value you are providing to the audience.
More word count in blog posts almost all the time correlates to higher value and more information in the blog post.
To make your blog post unique and different from other blogs on the internet on the topic, you can include some amazing things like,
- Use stats and case studies in your posts.
- Use lots of multimedia.
- Format your blog post to make it engaging for users to read.
- Explain a point with lots of examples and different angles.
- Use a lot of examples and embed personal stories in your blog post whenever possible.
You can click here to learn how to write a blog post when you are not a professional writer?
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You have a lack of knowledge of Blogging.
The other reason why people have a hard time making their blog successful is that they have a lack of knowledge in Blogging and SEO.
Many people in blogging do lots of mistakes and never recover their blog from those mistakes,
Some of the popular mistakes that people do in blogging that cause their blog to fail are,
- Buying backlinks from other websites to get traffic from Google faster is against Google guidelines and this can lead to a penalty to your website from Google.
- Building backlinks to websites very soon and very fast on a new website, makes your backlinks profile unnatural to Google which can also lead to a penalty.
- You tend to write blog posts on topics related to health and money without having enough or no expertise on the topic, you can click here to learn why it is important and why you should avoid it.
- You don’t update the content regularly, sometimes updating an existing piece of content is more beneficial and drive more traffic than creating new content.
- You are not aware of the popular SEO techniques, algorithm changes, and trends, you need to update yourself with regular information about SEO.
You can click here to learn all the blogging mistakes you should avoid doing to grow faster in Blogging.
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You are not willing to invest money.
The last reason why people have a hard time making their blog successful is that,
They want to make thousands of dollars investing no money into the business whatsoever.
There are some important places where you need to invest money in blogging like,
- Webhosting and domain name for starting a blog on WordPress, click here why start on WordPress?
- Investing money in SEO tools like Ahrefs, learn about SEO tools here.
- Investing money in graphic design tools for your blogs like Canva.
- Investing money in some important content marketing tools like Trello.
- Investing money in website design and structure like premium themes.
- Investing money in buying email marketing tools and software like Convertkit and Optimonster, click here to learn by email marketing is important.
So overall, because blogging is an online business you must treat it Like An online business and invest money before making money and profit like any other business.
These are all the five things you need to avoid to achieve success in blogging.
Ending remarks.
There you go I have answered everything related to how hard it is to have a successful blog.
Do comment down what you think about the blog post in the comments section below.
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Read my other blogs,
- Things to know to be successful in blogging.
- How to start a blog on WordPress.
- Reasons to start a blog.
I will catch you next time till then,
Keep learning and keep growing.