Why Do 80% Of Blogs Fail Within The First 18 Months?

Forbes/Bloomberg say 80% of blogs fail within the first 18 months, which is a stat they pulled out of their ass. However, it is true that many, many blogs fail to gain traction and fail to make money and then fade away into the ether. This is an article about your blog not failing.

Why Do Blogs Fail?

• No Promotion Plan The days of build it and they will come were over ten years ago, sorry blogmasters. Sorry for me too. I hate social media. You probably hate it too. A blog without a promotion plan is a failed blog. The needed promotion plan is setting up an account on a popular social media channel and driving traffic. A blog will fail without this. I hate it. I just want to write, man. Too bad so sad though.
• No SEO Plan There is a game called SEO and it’s a game everybody in the blogging game is playing whether they know it or not. If you are blogging, you are in the SEO game. Most failed bloggers had no idea they were in the SEO game or felt that they did not have to play the SEO game. A blogmaster not playing the SEO game is a blogmaster about to have a failed blog. A blogmaster cannot be “above” playing the SEO game. A game requires strategy and making moves. Failed bloggers do not do this. You have to play the game if you are going to win.
• No Personality Nobody wants to listen to a lecture from a boring history teacher and nobody wants to read a blog article from a blogger with no personality and no OPINION. You gotta have personality in your writing. You gotta have an OPINION, preferably a STRONG OPINION all across your blog. If people want bland personality they’ll go to ChatGPT. If they want human connection they’ll go to a blog, but it’s gotta have a non-neutral personality. Most of us pull ourselves back in our day to day lives but you gotta lean hard into that Idiosyncratic personality in your blogging. Turn the volume up to 11.
• No Persistency The 1950s self-help scene is foundational to our current self-help industry, and persistency was often talked about, maybe most talked about. Take note, this is hard-learned wisdom came from winning WW2. They came back from the war and were like “Yeah, persistency, man.” Persistency is what drives bloggers through the valley of despair, a valley all bloggers must pass through multiple times. Persistency is that voice that says keep on going. Most bloggers quit to soon. Success usually arrives between years 2 and 3. Bloggers without persistency fail. Humans without persistency fail.
• No Artificial Intelligence Plan When people see Blogger + AI they immediately think “this blogger uses AI to write all their articles” which makes me hesitant to even mention AI, but we’ll talked about it because it’s a needed part of the blogging game. DO NOT USE AI TO WRITE YOUR ARTICLES. Most readers can spot AI articles a mile away. Google severely penalizes blogs with AI articles. AI articles are bland, anyway. Instead, use AI as an energetic, mildly intelligent assistant who can extremely quickly outline posts, suggest edits, research, and find relevant resources. All BIG NAME authors on the NYT Bestseller List use a team of writing assistants, they even have assistants write portions of their books. Yes, even THAT author. And now, all the rest of us have access to those same resources via AI. You are still writing and creating articles, you are still the brainpower behind everything, but now you can do it quicker. AI is a tool, just like the word processor you use. A blogger that does not utilize AI in crafting a blog will be left behind in the dust.

How To Win In The New Era Of Blogging

There is a lot of good information in the above section but now let’s look at more good information for making sure your blog does not fail.

• Pick A Small Target Audience And Serve Them My target audience is smart people who read and are interested in writing. If you’re worried you aren’t smart, don’t worry, if you are reading books and reading blogs you are smart, certainly smarter than the Netflix drooling, binge-watching population. Figure out who your target audience is. It can’t be “everybody.” Since we are solo-bloggers we don’t need a massive audience to make six-figure income from blogging. A small audience that you relentlessly help is all you need.
• Commit To Relentless Persistency Persistency isn’t just “showing up” it’s continuing to educate yourself on what works and what doesn’t work for internet writing, it’s educating oneself about SEO, AI strategies, and self-promotion on third-party platforms. Persistency is a north star value in our blogging. It’s learning how to optimize structuring your posts for people reading on phones and for machines crawling your writing. It’s a commitment to serving your audience information that is going to have a positive impact on their lives.
• Treat Old Posts As Living Documents And Not As Static Evergreen Posts Everybody knows we need to write “evergreen” posts but there is no such thing, when was the last time you did a Google search and landed on an “evergreen” article from 2013? It’s rare! Keep updating old posts. Not just for Google, but the more you write the smarter you become. You’ll look at your earlier efforts, groan, and will add another 1,000 word section. Before you know it your blog will be 5,000 word articles jam-packed with good stuff and readers will love it. Google loves it too. Google wants big articles filled with minute, useful details.
• Spend 30 Minutes To An Hour Daily Learning About AI To start, this is as simple as downloading a chat bot like ChatGPT or Grok and playing around with it. Ask it to outline an article entitled “How To (your blog subject).” Ask it how to better promote your blog, SEO strategies, etc. You’ll immediately see many of the AI’s suggestions should be ignored, but there will also be many helpful suggestions. That’s why I say you are the brainpower and AI is your mildly intelligent yet enthusiastic assistant. The chatbots are free, by the way.
• I Hate To Sound Like A Broken Record But Third Party Platforms You have to choose a popular third party platform and go all in on building a presence there which funnels traffic to your blog. Options: X, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Linkedin. Cannot be ignored.

A New Call To Blogging Action!

Pick one thing in this article that has been holding you back from blogging success and focus on turning it into a strength. If you love/like writing and make a commitment, you can achieve blogging success, defined as being able to blog full time.

What I Will Be Working On

For me, I have three areas I know I need to improve in my blogging game: SEO, Promotion, AI. I’ve always been reluctant to get into SEO because I always felt like it cramped by writing style. Promotion I’ve struggled with because I am very introverted, and for some reason my introverted personality carries over to social media. AI because it’s a writing tech that is not going away. Not getting a basic grasp of AI chatbots is the equivalent to the people who refused to learn computers back in the day. So you can expect future articles on those subjects!