Blogging takes A LOT of effort, time, and energy.
I can’t even imagine how terrible it would be to be sabotaging your blog’s success unintentionally and still putting in 40+ hours per week to grow your blog.
Today, I wanted to break down 5 surprising ways you might be sabotaging your blog’s success without even knowing it (and what you can do about it):
- Making your audience too broad
- Having too much content
- Not using the right keywords
- Monetizing too early
- Relying on one traffic source
If you want to become a successful blogger, then there are certain things you might want to know.
My friend Debbie Gartner from The Flooring Girl has put together an awesome eBook on 45 Not So Obvious Lessons I Learned on the Way to $20,000/Month that’s definitely worth checking out.
I always believe that learning from pro bloggers is the best way to make sure you’re blogging the right way.
Let’s explore these 5 ways!
5 Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Blog’s Success Without Even Knowing It
If you’ve been at the blogging grind for a while and haven’t found success, you might need to take a step back and analyze your blogging business from an outward perspective.
I know it can be challenging to make those critical decisions, but there are critical business mistakes you could be making.
In this article, we’ll be discussing these 5 mistakes:
- Making your audience too broad
- Having too much content
- Not using the right keywords
- Monetizing too early
- Relying on one traffic source
Let’s explore them a little more!
1. Making Your Audience Too Broad
Regardless of what your blog niche is, you’re never going to be able to reach everyone with what you’re talking about.
It’s simply impossible.
Making your blog audience too broad is almost one of the biggest cardinal sins in blogging.
With a tightly defined niche, you can generate content that is going to be geared toward that demographic. You can also use this information to promote your blog through certain social media accounts.
So, what qualifies a niche as too broad?
There are two schools of thought when it comes to your niche:
- Your niche is your audience
- Your niche is your subject matter
With the first school of thought, I mean, for example, creating content that fits a middle-aged suburban mother. You might discuss topics like saving money, recipes, and parenting.
When your niche is your subject matter, a blog about lead-generating quizzes is a blog about lead-generating quizzes. It stays confined to one main topic.
A niche that’s too broad is one that tries to serve multiple kinds of audiences or discuss too diverse a set of topics.
2. Having Too Much Content
You want to keep your blog updated, but repetitive and spammy content isn’t going to help the cause.
Overproduction is a waste and not worth your time or energy in the slightest.
Try to stick to a regular schedule of posts, but be sure that each one is completely unique. You want each of your posts to be concise.
Include plenty of brand-new information that you haven’t talked about before.
If you think you have too much content that’s unrelated, performing an audit might be the strategic move you need to do.
It’s something discussed in Stupid Simple SEO, but here’s a free workshop by Todd Tresidder from my favorite blogging conference to guide you down the right path.
For reference, Todd deleted 1/3 of his content and his traffic increased by 300%!
Watch the video below.
3. Not Using the Right Keywords
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a practice of getting organic search traffic from search engines, such as Google.
To find success with your blog, you’ll want to choose SEO keywords that make sense. If your content lacks these terms, you’re not going to end up very high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
People will pass over your blog very easily, which can completely sabotage the success of your blog. You need traffic to get new visitors and make sales.
Before you sit down at your computer and start churning out posts on a weekly basis, think about slowing things down a bit.
Plan your content out ahead of time, do some research to bring new information to the table, and make sure you’re utilizing appropriate search terms.
If you need help with this, my friend Trinity Owen from The Pay at Home Parent has a great inexpensive eBook called Get Your Keywords Together.
What I love about this eBook is that Trinity discusses only free tools.
I think it’s a common mistake for newer bloggers (and even some intermediate ones) to spend hundreds of dollars per month on expensive SEO software only to misuse it.
That’s why Get Your Keywords Together caught my attention…
It’s a simple solution to get coveted organic search traffic.
Trinity’s methods closely follow mine, so I know they work 🙂
4. Monetizing Too Early
It’s understandable to want to make money blogging and to do it quickly.
But, sometimes, in our zeal, we rush the process and actually ruin our chances of successfully monetizing a blog.
What do I mean by this?
Until you have a clearly defined, sizeable audience to promote your products to, you may experience crickets and get poor reception for a great product. You could also create a product no one is interested in or exhaust your email list so much that they’re not interested in hearing anything from you anymore.
Monetizing is an art and it’s one that should be learned before trying to scale your blogging business.
You’ll probably be uncomfortable when monetizing your audience the first time. I know I was. That discomfort is common and not misplaced.
But, there shouldn’t be discomfort from launching a product to an audience that hasn’t expressed an interest in it.
That’s a big no-no.
You may have heard of the term product/market fit before and monetizing too early can be a perfect example of destroying that fit.
So, what can you do instead?
Great question!
Start with affiliate marketing.
You can try out certain product ideas on your audience through opt-ins leading to email funnels with affiliate products. If they don’t sell, no biggie.
Just try a different one 🙂
If they do sell, then now you have a clear idea of what kind of product to create for your audience.
5. Relying on One Traffic Source
Raise your virtual hand if you rely too heavily on Pinterest traffic?
While Pinterest traffic can be great in the short-term, it shouldn’t exclusively be your long-term strategy.
Relying on an algorithm (whether it’s Google’s or Pinterest’s) is not ideal when all of your income is at play. You need to diversify your traffic streams to make sure your eggs aren’t in one basket.
You should at least be going for:
- Pinterest traffic
- Google traffic
Not sure where to start?
Carly Campbell has a great Pinterest eCourse called Pinteresting Strategies. I’ve personally taken it and can assure you that in my opinion, it’s the best Pinterest eCourse out there. And, I’ve taken quite a few.
Mike Pearson has a great SEO eCourse called Stupid Simple SEO. I’ve personally taken it and it’s one of the best SEO courses out there, complete with a $7 solution to getting thousands of viable keywords to rank for, plus how to get enviable backlinks.
Conclusion
As a blogger, you need to know how to communicate with your audience and how to genuinely connect with them.
But, here are 5 mistakes that may very well be sabotaging your blog’s success:
- Making your audience too broad
- Having too much content
- Not using the right keywords
- Monetizing too early
- Relying on one traffic source
Are you making any of these mistakes in your business right now? If so, what are you doing about it?
Let me know in the comments below 🙂
Also, don’t forget that if you aren’t seeing success in blogging yet, you might want to check out Debbie’s great eBook, 45 Not So Obvious Lessons I Learned on the Way to Making $20,000/Month.
It’s kind of foolish NOT listening to someone making that much money per month blogging.
Cheers to your blogging success!
