You’ve heard the success stories of famous bloggers. You’ve purchased that hundred dollars blogging course. You’ve even quit your job because you wants to go full-time. All is going well until…. obstacles blocked the road you took to make money from blogging and you didn’t know what to do. It’s possible that at this point, you’ll write off your career as a blogger, resigned from ever monetizing blogs for money. Whoa! Hang on a sec. I have listed up top 6 obstacles you’ll faced when you’re blogging for dollars and the cure for them. So, please, read them first before you commit any irreversible actions.
1. Lack of motivation
After the honey moon period, where you registered your website name and installed WordPress to your hosting account, reality quickly sets in. You found yourself staring at your computer screen, randomly browsing a bunch of sites that are completely irrelevant to the task at your hand. What happened? Where’s that guy who is so excited about starting a blog and being his own boss a couple of minutes ago? It could be extremely hard to motivate yourself when you are working at home. Your boss is not there to monitor your every moves and there is no risk of being fired.
The Cure: Remind yourself why you start blogging in the first place. Maybe it’s for the freedom to work (not to browse internet) from anywhere and at anytime? How important the work is for you, your personal satisfaction, your life, and for your family? If you haven’t write down your blogging goals, write them down now. Also, read the About pages of famous bloggers like Darren Rowse(ProBlogger), Yaro Starak(Entrepreneurs-Journey), John Chow(JohnChow.com), or others to get inspired and motivated and put your focus back on.
2. Writers’ Block
You are in front of your laptop, your fingers are on full flex, prepared to type anything that pops in your mind. But the problem is, nothing comes up. You wait for a few minutes. Still blank. So, you browse online to find inspirations on what to write about. Before you know it two hours has passed and you’ve only managed to get two words together for a possible headline.
The Cure: Rather than browsing without any direction and time constraint, do some forum search and find some frequently asked questions in your particular market and try to answer them through your articles. Another way you could deal with the writer’s block is by asking open ended question, like Who? What? Why? etc to words related to the topic of your blog. So for example if your blog is related to health and fitness. You could ask, What do men want to know about running?, Who could be women’s role model for fitness? And why? I also find it to be very useful to plan my articles a week in advance. So I would choose, for example, Saturday as the day where I decide and do some initial research for the next 5 articles that I would write for the upcoming week.
3. No Traffic
You have been actively researching and writing articles. And you have published at least 10 articles to your blog. Feeling extremely optimistic, you checked your Google Analytics account, and to your surprise, there’s no visitor today. Don’t worry, tomorrow will be more, you told yourself. But the next day you check, there’s still no one. And after a week of checking your stats, there’s finally one visitor. Oops, that’s yourself using your friend’s computer. What’s wrong?!
The Cure: There are a couple of things that you could do to drive traffic to your website. The simplest ways is doing a proper SEO. If you are using WordPress, you could use the All in One SEO plugin to help you in improving your website for higher search engine ranking. For more useful WordPress plugins, read my previous article, 16 Ridiculously Useful WordPress Plugins. My other article about getting high search engine rankings is also useful to get your blog jammed with traffic. Other than SEO, I would recommend writing guest blog posts for famous blogs in your market and doing some social media marketing on a few core sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Stumble Upon.
4. No money
You have read the success of stories of bloggers who are making six figures a year. So you follow their advice by monetizing your blog, from putting Adsense, promoting affiliate products, to joining all the available ad networks. After a month, you checked your accounts and realize that you are not making a single cent. Even worse, your visitor numbers and subscribers are dwindling down.
The Cure: Be patient. That’s the best advice I could give you. Don’t try to monetize your blog too early, when it’s still in its infancy. Use the 90/10 rule, which I first heard from blogger Jack Humphrey. Give your visitors or readers something for free 90% of the time, where you don’t get any monetary benefit. You simply offering them helpful advice, free tools they can use, probably, in exchange for their names and email address. Then, the other 10 % of the time, you could just ask them for something in return, and they would gladly return you the favors. Try it.
5. Technical problems
How could I make my sidebars wider…? I want to add Google Analytics code, how do I do that? How could I make my logo appeared on top of my blog? Those are some of the questions that you might asked yourself when you just started blogging with WordPress, particularly if you are using free themes. Free themes are good because, well, they are free. But most of them is lacking in documentation on how they could be modified to fit your needs. And even if they do, you’ll need to know at least the fundamentals of website programming language in order to modify them.
The Cure: If you don’t feel like learning any programming languages, like PHP, HTML, and CSS, it might be better for you to use premium WordPress themes, like Frugal theme or Thesis theme. These themes allow you to customize the appearance of your blog without having to go into the theme editor and modify the codes. They allow you to change your page structure, add additional footers and sidebars at a click of a button or two. Your blog design is very important to attracts and retains the visitors of your site, so make sure it is unique and different from the rest of the herd.
6. Distractions
The problem of working at home is there are too many distractions. There is your collection of DVDs that tempt you with their cool covers, your soft comfy bed that you feel like sleeping on, or that tasty Youtube bookmark on your Firefox toolbar. How could you not click on that? It is extremely tough to remove these distractions as well. It’s more than likely you’re connected to the internet when you’re blogging and we all know the internet is packed full of distractions that disguised as research materials and information. You could easily find yourself browsing other people’s blogs rather than working on your own!
The Cure: Try to turn off the internet and finish your writing without it. If you need it to do research, limit the amount of time you spent browsing to probably 10 – 15 minutes. After that, turn it off and start writing. If possible limit how much time you spent writing an article as well. By limiting the time, you would focus more fully to the task and reduce the chance of being distracted.
Blogging, like most things, requires some effort and self-discipline if you are to be successful. So stop making excuses and start taking actions that bring you closer to your goals.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I love that you not only give the problem but also the solution. So often people focus on the negative without giving to the positive. Not you!
I am very impressed with your site and knowledge. Thanks.
~R.W.