Five Reasons for your New Blog to Fail

This is a Guest Post by Samuel Ryan. Samuel Ryan is a web freelancer who thoroughly enjoys creating websites and making cool Flash things. His own freelancing blog called Wake Up Later covers all things related to freelancing and passive web income. It is also home of Free Junk Fridays, where he gives out useful Flash files and other random things.

I am continually amazed at the sheer amount of people who have begun blogging within the last year, all trying to build an audience and make some extra cash while they’re at it. Unfortunately, most of them don’t seem to get beyond a handful of subscribers and visitors. There are a variety of reasons for not being able to build a consistent audience, but here’s a list of five ways that will ruin any new blog.

1. Making it Personal:
No offense, but unless you’re Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, few people really care about what you’re thinking or what you did last weekend. If I were to blog about random things in my life, there are maybe a couple dozen people who would care. But if I blog about freelancing (which I do), I have a potential audience of dozens of thousands. Determine an area you are expert at (or can become an expert at) and blog on that topic. No more, no less.

2. Cut Costs:
If you really want to build an audience, then I suggest you have a blog that is professional and audience-ready. This means no blogspot domain, but your own (it’s not that expensive, really). You should also make sure you have a nice template and have a designer friend to verify this. You should have the ability for users to do all the standard fare like searching, subscribing to your feed, linking their comment names to their own sites, etc. Now you can certainly do most of the above yourself if you’re good, but don’t try to save a few bucks at the expense of your blog looking like a high school project.

3. Advertise
Yes, advertising will ruin a new blog. I see this all the time on new sites. There are 3 units of Adsense, affiliate banners, etc. But when you have a new site, advertising turns off visitors, plain and simple. It tells potential readers that you don’t care about them - you just want to make a buck off them. Yes, I know that it’s exciting to know that you have ads on your site, ads that people might click to earn you cash. But really, is it worth a few quarters a week to turn off most of your visitors in the early stages? Now once you have the visitors, then you can let loose on the ads.

4. Neglect to Blog
If you can’t blog at least twice a week starting out, don’t waste your time. This is something I personally struggle with, and have found that my best subscriber surges ALWAYS come during a frenzy of blog posts. Not only does this keep current subscribers, but it will produce more content to draw new subscribers, give Google more content to index, and give you better search engine traffic from long tail searches.

5. Keep to yourself
Yes, even in blogging, you have to network. You have to know the players in your industry and you have to be active in the relevant communities. Comment on other blogs, get involved in forums, etc. My greatest traffic influx this past week was from a comment I left on a thread at a larger website. My second greatest influx this past week was from a posted link from a blog whose author frequents the same discussion board as I. So get out there in the communities and good luck!