Every day hundreds (if not thousands) have the idea to start making money with a blog. While this is possible, it's still very unlikely. Of the 300+ million blogs that are currently out there, I would say less than 1% of them actually make any real money (at least $1,000 per year).
Before we break down why your blog isn't going to make money, we would first need to look at why people are starting blogs in the first place and to also think outside of the “WordPress training” and “make money online” niche blogs.
First thing first… it's easy to make money in the “WordPress Training” and “Affiliate / Make Money Online” space because everyone is kind of swapping the same information and we all have the same goal — which is to create a successful online business and make money. To make money in this space, all you need to do is look at successful sites and try to replicate their success and content, while building a brand following of your own.
Jump outside of these niche markets and you have a whole new world of people that are just creating content and really have no idea on how to effectively build backlinks, monetize their sizes and bring in new advertisers — herein lies the problem with most bloggers.
Without getting too overly complex and wasting your time, I'm going to break this concept down into three key points — which can be applied to EVERY failed blog out there.
Creating Content Will Only Waste Your Time
Blogging is all about “creating content”, right? Well, kind of… but creating content will only get you so far.
Back in the day when the web was young and there wasn't 300+ million blogs to compete against, relying on just content might have allowed you to build a successful web site or blog — today it WILL NOT.
Now bloggers need to focus on CONTENT PROMOTION and not just CONTENT CREATION.
The business model of creating five very high quality articles and spending the majority of your time promoting them, getting backlinks to them and spreading the word through social media will win almost every time versus writing a 500 word article everyday on your blog.
This is something I talked in detail with during my discussion with Brian Dean — who is one of the best sources out there for content promotion and what's currently working best.
Don't get me wrong, CONTENT IS STILL KING… but without content promotion, your king will be alone by himself in the kingdom!
[tweet_box design=”box_09″]Bloggers need to focus on content promotion and not just content creation![/tweet_box]
Your Content Has No Call to Action
Once again, I have to stress the importance of the content found on your site. If you don't have a call to action, what's the point of spending a couple hours on a killer blog post anyway.
I can't tell you how many blogs I see on a daily basis that don't have proper social sharing buttons on their site (which is a big mistake in itself), but even worse… quality blog posts with no call to action.
Recommended Reading: Content Machine: Use Content Marketing to Build a 7-figure Business With Zero Advertising
In most cases, people are reading the content on your site because they want to get better at something or find a solution to their problem. If you are giving away the answer or leaving them hanging, you are just hurting yourself.
This is the same principle I try to follow with all of my sites and blog posts.
A call to action can be any of the following:
- Share this post with your friends
- Subscribe to our mailing list below
- Click here to download my favorite blogging tools
- Recommend another service or product to solve a problem
- Provide a follow up / autoresponder service to keep them coming back
As you can see, you can really go multiple directions with your call to action — it's just important that you have one!
You Picked a Niche Without a Business Model
The last point is probably the most common cause for not making money with a blog, which is choosing a topic without any research and just creating content.
This one actually happens all the time. You get excited about a new idea, you then register a domain name and you start blogging and writing content. A new post is published every few days for a couple months… and still no money is made. Weeks later and your traffic still hasn't picked up, you are now miserable and decide to quite.
I'm sure many of us can relate with this concept.
The takeaway here is that if you want to make money with a blog, you need to TREAT IT LIKE A BUSINESS.
Here's a perfect example.
In my make money blogging guide, I lay out the complete process for how to create a blog, find a niche, how to see if it's profitable, building out your content and links… and then ultimately making money through the use of affiliate marketing. This is a business model that works, but you need to put in the time and effort to plan it out before just registering a domain name and hoping for the best.
Here's Your Call to Action!
Like I mentioned earlier… a post without a call to action is pretty useless. However, since I'm contributing to Ileane's blog, I'm not going to try and push my own services or offers! 🙂
My call to action is to look at your existing blog and write down a list of why it's currently failing or – not at performing at the level where it should be. This means going back and looking at all of your most popular and heavily trafficked posts and seeing if they each have a call to action.
After that is done, then think about the content promotion for your site. Are you focusing on just content creation and leaving out content promotion? If that's the case, you need to get to work on your guest blogging efforts and offering something of value to get your site visitors to join your mailing list.
I leave you with this…
It's easy to make a blog, but it's not easy to make money with a blog. If it was, 99% of the blogs out there would be making money… not just 1%.