What If You Take Your Blogging Shot and Fail?

At least you won’t be left wondering if you should have started a blog or not. You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you gave it an honest shot and it didn’t work. Then you can cross it off of things to try for online money and move on to the next item.

If you did fail, no big deal. A lot of positives came out of it that you can build up on. Certainly, you’ve heard of fail forward, right? All the gurus were larping it several years ago. Even though they are more irritating than chapped lips, they were right about fail forward. If you failed in your blog, you’ve learned some things to take to your next project and I cannot stress this enough: You Are On The Right Path To Gain Your Freedom. Making Money Online Is The Way To Go.

Let’s be honest, we can talk about having a passion and wanting to help people and that can be true (Heck, I’m a child welfare social worker, I’m all about helping people.) But everybody’s goal from Day 1 when launching a blog is to be free by blogging full time. It’s okay to admit you want something.

Did You Really Fail At Blogging?

Before throwing in the towel, let’s make sure you really did fail. The first thing to look at is should you be a blogger? I’ve written this in multiple posts and I’ll keep writing it because it is true. The only people who should be blogging with the goal of making a big profit are:

1. People who LOVE to write (I might even say OBSESSED with writing or, depending on how you look at it, CURSED with needing to write. These people cannot not write. They will spend a lot of time writing whether or not they have a blog, whether or not they are writing a book. They write, write, write because they cannot not write. I fall into this category.)
2. People who LIKE to write and are OBSESSED with a particular niche (This is the guy obsessed with toy trains or gardening or building model cars or whatever. He will be able to successfully launch a blog about his obsession if he also likes the writing process. If you are OBSESSED with a niche but don’t particularly care about writing, then YouTube is absolutely 100% the way to go and you shouldn’t be messing around with a blog.)

The main thing is you need an obsession to carry you forward in blogging, because every single blogger will have to fight through the valley of despair in their blogging journey before reaching success, and it is either the love of writing or the love of your niche that is going to carry you through. If you don’t have either of those, that is one of the likely reasons you failed.

I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule that can be found, but you’re not it. I’m telling you, if you don’t fall into one of the above categories you need to take your niche to YouTube. I do not turn my nose up at video people. I am jealous of video people. In my opinion, it’s an easier path to online money. The problem for me is I don’t LOVE or LIKE producing video, so I don’t have what it takes to make it through the valley of video despair.

Going back to the original question: Did You Really Fail At Blogging? Because you might not have failed. Let’s do some bullet points:

• Did You Run Out Of Things To Say? You may have answered “Yes, I love writing” but figured you failed because you ran out of things to say. Well, I have good news. First, I wrote a blog post on this topic. Second, it might be as simple as needing to niche up. Example, you were writing about toy trains and ran out of things to say, so you need to niche up and talk about the wider niche of toy vehicles (airplanes, boats / ships, cars, etc).
• Did You Assume You Failed Because You Have No Traffic? No traffic doesn’t mean your writing failed, it means your strategies for driving traffic has failed (maybe you have no strategies to drive traffic at all?) This is a common mistake bloggers make (including a mistake yours truly battles every single day of my blogging existence). “I just wanna write! I don’t wanna spend time driving traffic from other platforms!” I 100% understand the sentiment. We just wanna write. It’s what we do. We don’t want to do marketing for our blogging…but this may be the exact reason you “failed” in your blogging. You gotta get on at least one social media platform and market your blog. It’s icky, I know, but necessary.
• Did You Publish 3 Articles A Week For At Least 2 Years? 3 articles a week isn’t a hard and fast rule. It depends on what you are working on, how research intensive it is, how long your articles are, etc. But if you are writing 1,000 word articles on a subject you know, you should be publishing at least three articles a week for two years before you can possibly determine if your blog has failed. If you aren’t able to hang on for two years and consistently publish, then, yes, you shouldn’t be a blogger. But maybe you didn’t realize you needed to write at least 156 articles a year, in that’s you, get to work and start writing before considering your blog failed.
• Did You Assume You Failed Because You Are Making No Money? We are trying to make money after all. What’s the point in putting in massive blogging effort if no money comes in? That’s a fair question. Before quitting, read my article 9 Ways To Stay Motivated When Your Blog Is Earning $0.00. Understand, blogging is the long game. (Honestly, every online money-getting effort is the long game, but social media, articles, etc glorify the extremely rare overnight successes). If you made no or little money in Year 1, that’s normal. Year 2 you might only make $1,000 but you’ll be seeing blog analytics trending in positive directions. Year 3 is usually the breakthrough year for bloggers, making $20,000 – $30,000 and seeing massively positive trending. Year 4 or Year 5 is often the first “six-figure year.”
• Did You Pick The Wrong Niche? Been there done that, friend. The realization hits of well darn it I picked the wrong niche I’m not even remotely interested in blogging about this. That’s okay! Either 1.) let the domain expire. 2.) throw up Google Adsense and abandon the blog 3.) sell the blog. After that, build a new blog. It’s amazing how quickly you can build your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th blogs compared to your first.

What If You Aren’t Sure If You Love Or Like Writing / Blogging?

You saw me writing about Love It or Like It when it comes to writing / blogging. How do you know if you love it or like it?

Fair, question. A lot of jerk bloggers would be like IF YOU AREN’T SURE THEN BUY MY COURSE. Then that voice in your head probably tells you IF YOU HAVE TO ASK THE ANSWER IS NOOOOOOO. But that’s not true. How did you figure out other things in your life that you loved or liked? Simple: you tried it and then made a rather quick determination on whether you loved/liked it or not. I honestly can’t think of anything in my life that I didn’t immediately know if I loved/liked it within the first 10 minutes of trying it, even if I was terrible at the thing. It has probably been similar for you in your life.

To test it out, it’s as simple as opening a Google Doc or a Word Doc and starting to write about a subject, anything you feel like writing about. If you’ve never really written before you will be TERRIBLE but you will be able to tell rather quickly as to if you like the process of writing or not. It’s that simple.

Also, if you love reading, that’s a pretty good sign you will love writing. Every writer was first a reader. It’s where we all start.

What Adjustments Should Be Made To Succeed In My Blogging?

You KNOW are you supposed to be in the blogging game and you are not gonna give up, in fact, you’re never gonna give up. If that’s what you attitude is all I have to say is good. Then it’s just a matter of making some adjustments and trying a new approach. Here’s some adjustment suggestions:

• Write Long Form Content While not a 100% hard and fast rule, I make an effort to never publish an article under 1,000 words. 1,000 words is my minimum word count. Blog readers love to read. Don’t be afraid of writing a lot of words. I’m not talking about writing fluff. Readers hate fluff. Advice often heard is “normies are stupid write at kindergarten level” and such. Maybe normie is stupid, I don’t know. Blog readers are not stupid. People attracted to blogs and the written word are higher intelligence. Also, Google desires thorough, long-form articles. Google is phasing out 500 word articles in the SERPS. Write long.
• Write Content Clusters With A Pillar Holding It All Together Google and people want authority (EEAT–Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). To show authority you cannot do a one off article on a subject and move on. You need to do a dozen or more articles, tie them together in a pillar post, and cross link on your blog like crazy. (E.g. You do 20 deep dives on toy trains and then tie it all together with a mega ultimate guide to toy trains article, linking out to all your 20 other articles, and each individual article links back to the pillar post “check out my ultimate guide…”).
• Make Sure Your Website Is Lightning Fast Keep your blog lean and mean. There’s a reason my blog looks bare (under the hood it’s V8 beast though), it’s because every additional element added slows it down and that leads to bounce rates which leads to Google penalizing your website. 90% of people read blogs on a phone anyway and don’t even see all the extra fanciness. All websites practically look the same on those devices. Why slow it down with unnecessary elements?
• Drive Traffic From A Third Party Platform While we should honor Google in our blogging, we should never rely on them. Take direct action to drive traffic to your blog. You must get on a popular third party platform and drive traffic –yes, this means social media and/or YouTube. Doesn’t matter if you want to or not, you have to. You cannot merely rely on Google, it is a fickle master.

I Took My Blogging Shot And Failed, Now What?

You only fail if you quit, and there’s nothing wrong with failing or quitting. You can either decide to double down on blogging while making adjustments and trying new approaches or you can find another way to make online money, or you could go and live a life of quiet desperation, I guess. But I doubt that is an option for you, friend. Personally, I think you should continue with blogging because if you made it this far down in this big article about blogging, you are probably a blogger at heart and need to keep pushing. Get back on the horse!

• No Bloggers Hit A Home Run On Their First Try There are exceptions to the rule but it is better to ignore it and hammer in your head the 99% truth that no bloggers hit a home run on their first try, most bloggers strike out terribly their first outing and then quit forever. Moving forward after striking out increases success odds significantly.
• Only 5% Of Bloggers Make A Full Time Income I’ve often seen this stat used in a discouraging way, however, I am elated because there is no way 95 out of 100 bloggers are gonna beat me in the blogging game because they can’t outwork me. These are odds I am happy about, you should love these odds too. Honestly, much higher than I thought they would be.
• Persistence In Blogging Is What Leads To Winning Persistence is rewarded in blogging, not quitting. Persistence is what wins in life. Everybody knows this but so few execute this and I don’t know why. It’s a tried and true formula to winning. Maybe a recommitment to persistence is all you need to take blogging to the next level. Who knows? But probably, yes.
• Retool Your Blogging With Superior Knowledge, Skill, and Tools I was clueless when I started. I didn’t know about properly structuring posts with header tags. It’s just a click of the button and it’s blogging 101 but I didn’t know! But I learned because I failed. Retool your blog. Get the good stuff, get the knowledge, get the skills. It’s all out there, easy to find in a search. Just have to get beyond the “I just wanna write!” attitude, there are layers to the blogging game that can’t be ignored. I ignored them. That’s why I have a lot of failures behind me. I’m not ignoring anymore and I’m starting to win. You will not ignore them either and you will start winning.

What Are The Next Steps?

Only you can know for sure what you need to do next, it might be dusting off the blog, it might be starting a new blog, it might be diving deep to educate yourself on how the blogging game really works. It is a game. And you are playing it whether you like it our not if your desire is to go pro and blog full time.

Actually, I know exactly what the next step is. Sign up for the email list to learn the blogging game and get to work!