8 Reasons Why You Are Not Making Money With Your Blog In 2021
Do you want to start a blog or have started one already and not gotten anywhere? I bet you’re wondering why you’re not making any money yet. Right? I’ll share with you 8 reasons why so many bloggers fail to make money with blogging.
8 Reasons Why You Are Not Making Money With Your Blog In 2021
1. Not Investing Money In Your Blog
Your niche is that particular topic that you want to help people with. It’s the topic that people are asking questions about.
Though many people will say, choose something that you’re passionate about, you have to consider if it’s going to be profitable. I mean, you’re doing this to eventually make money. Right?
Just because you love something doesn’t mean anyone else does.
You want a niche that people are asking questions about, so try using something like Google Trends to search for ideas to write about.
On Google Trends, you can see how an overall niche is doing, so for instance, if you pick a very narrow niche called beaded keychains because you love creating beaded keychains, well according to Google Trends there’s hardly any information on that.
They couldn’t even give you any information. That wouldn’t be a good niche to choose but if you try something like “strength training”, in the Health and Fitness niche, you’ll see how well it’s trending and it’s even going up over time. So this would be a good niche to get into.
It’s also important for you to niche down, in other words, narrow down your niche. Look at the sub-niche ideas also. Now, this isn’t written in stone. These are just what they consider the more profitable ones. Anything about weight loss, but weight loss is much too broad a term for your keywords so here are some sub-niches.
“Weight loss for women” or “weight loss for problem areas” like upper arms “weight loss programs”. Keto is always very popular and or foods and supplements, so this is how you would niche down.
Another one is hosting in VPN Services and they again have sub-niches like “cloud hosting” or “managed to host”, and so on.
“Muscle and bodybuilding” again, a very broad niche but you can niche down to things like “workout videos” or a program “p90x” or maybe the “supplements”. It’s also important for you to choose only one niche. You want your audience to remember you for one thing only. You want to become an expert in your niche and by researching and writing about just one topic you’ll grow to be that expert if you aren’t already.
2. Not Investing Money In Your Blog
First impressions matter don’t you agree? This applies to many things in life and your online impression is just as important for your business. You can do this by purchasing a good Theme like Divi which allows you to build your site with a drag and drop editor.
Generate Press, which is a very lightweight Theme that could really help your upload times, or you could use some excellent free Themes like Colormag Theme from Theme-grill. The Color-mag free Theme is my personal favorite Theme to use. That’s the theme I started out with, for my blog. It’s very easy to customize and quite clean.
Your next challenge is good hosting. It’s important to have reliable uptime, site security, a dedicated email address, and so on. It’s also important that customer service is at your fingertips. You really want someone who’s going to get back to you in a reasonable time and help you out.
If you look online and if you’re like me, I like to compare many of the services to start my research and then break it down. This is a great place to start. Another challenge you might be having is not building a brand for yourself or your products or services.
Take a look at your three favorite blogs, how do they stand out?
Do they have a memorable logo? How about their style of writing or their color scheme? Did you know that your color choice can be a huge advantage for your blog website?
Take a look at this article you are reading right now. The images, subheadings, paragraphs, choice of fonts, and sentences are neatly presented for the readers to enjoy.
The idea is to keep your readers on your site for as long as possible. This strategy will also help to keep your percentage bounce rate to under 25%. The percentage bounce rate for my blog website is under 25% and it has been this low for some months now.
Choosing the right color for your blog site is also important. If you want to be creative use purple. Using blue develops trust and dependability. Peaceful would be green and grey which is kind of a balance. It gives you calmness and this is a great way to think about what your niche is about and what you might want as a color scheme.
3. Creating short or low-quality content
The bloggers who are seeing success are the few who do things the right way. First of all, you have to make sure your content is relevant to your niche. If your website is all about “strength training” for instance don’t write random posts about your dog or cats.
Secondly, your article should range between two to three thousand words. I know this takes longer to create but this is what Google is looking for right now. They will rank you much easier if you have a long article because they’re assuming that you’re providing a lot of value to your visitor.
The other thing is, are your blogs readable? Make sure that your font style and size are appropriate for mobile devices so you don’t want anything too small because if somebody can’t read your article they’re just going to move on. No one likes to see or read a huge block of text.
It kind of reminds you of being back in school and reading textbooks. So make sure you’re spacing every two or three sentences and don’t forget those subtitles because a lot of people like to scan through articles and if you give them subtitles it’s easier for them to scan.
Everyone loves images and videos. Make sure that you use those to help explain your topic. Lastly, can your reader easily share your posts? Make sure that you add a plugin for social media share buttons and have them somewhere on your page. Take a look at this article you are reading right now. You will notice that I always have a header image and I use subtitles. These subheadings are usually H2.
I also insert a video of actually all my blog posts. A number of viewers rather watch a video than read an article. This tactic will help to keep your bounce rate below 5%. My bounce rate has been below 5% for a long while now. Make paragraphs about two or three sentences long. This is one way to do an article that’s easy to read and it gives scanners a good idea of what each section is about.
They can scan through your article and of course, you don’t want to forget your call to action at the bottom. This is where you’re asking your visitor to do something whether it’s clicking on an affiliate link because you’re promoting something or if it’s just to answer a question you may have for them or you want them to comment. You should have some sort of call to action and then your share buttons and this is a great way to have them share with their friends if they like your article.
4. Focus On SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s basically doing everything you can do to make Google like you so it’ll rank you on the first page of the search results. Most importantly, you want to use keywords that people are searching for. There are many keyword research tools online that will help you find those keywords. Just a simple search like “what are free keyword tools online”, I found an article and it listed a whole bunch of free tools. So this is another easy way for you to find those free tools if you don’t want to invest in one right away.
Now the best thing you can do for a newer blog is to use long-tail keywords. You can use the Keywords Everywhere tool or even Google Keywords Planner for your keyword search. Now, if we put in “strength training” which is a very broad term, you can see the monthly traffic, over 13000 per month. That’s a lot of traffic and that’s great but the SEO says 66, so that means you only have a 66 chance of getting on page one with your ranking so I wouldn’t necessarily use this.
It’s too broad and there’s too much competition but if we go down some more and you narrow it down to “strength training workouts for women”, you’ll notice that the traffic is much less but if you look at your SEO, you have a 95 chance of being on page one and your traffic is much more targeted.
If you’re promoting a specific workout offer and you have affiliate links for that, this is more likely going to get you the kind of traffic you’re looking for. You should also remember that for all keywords, you should put them in your title, somewhere in the first paragraph of your article, and also in the first alt image tag, and maybe near the end of your post. If you do too much, then Google might think it’s keyword stuffing and they might not be pleased with that.
Another important thing that you should be adding is your meta description. If your blog is on WordPress then the Yoast Plug-In tool is a must-have. This tool will help you to optimize each article you upload, which includes your meta description, keyword phrase, readability, and so on. It’s a great tool to optimize your article for Google ranking.
Another thing is that you want to make sure you are adding your alt tags in your images, alternative text, image description, and so on. For every image that you have, always add text to the back of the image. Your visitor won’t see it, this is just for SEO purposes. Don’t forget to add internal and external links to your articles, as doing this will also help with your ranking. Backlinking is also very important especially for organic traffic but this might be a topic by itself.
5. Always Consider Your User Intent
This is again relating to those long-tail keywords. Consider the consumer life cycle and it’ll help you find your best keyword. This is how the consumer life cycle works, the user intent is that everyone who goes online to shop for anything, typically goes through this cycle. The first phase is the research phase. This is when they’re just researching a general broad topic like, “what is strength training?” For instance, this is very broad and they’re just at the beginning of their search.
They’re not ready to invest in anything just yet. Your next phase is your decision phase. Now, this is where they’re starting to research products and services. They know what “strength training” is and now they’re starting to look into what they can use to be able to perform strength training exercises. So they might be using keywords like “strength training workouts at home”.
Your last phase is the purchasing phase. This is the phase where you have the opportunity to make some money. This is when your visitor is ready to buy. They’re basically searching online for a specific thing and their credit card is in hand and they’re ready to buy.
They might be looking for keywords like “five best strength training exercises” so this is something that you want to consider when you’re brainstorming for keywords.
The “five best strength training exercises”, is what they would call a long-tail keyword and the same with “strength training workouts at home”. It’s much more narrowed down than just “strength training”. I would consider going for either of these when I’m doing my content because both should bring me much more targeted traffic.
6. Not Being Consistent
There are many detailed strategies for consistent blogging but what’s important is just to be consistent which means posting relevant content on a regular basis. You can’t write three or four articles in a week and then not touch it for a month. Google won’t reward you for posting erratically like that. They want to see consistency and it’s not only good for your SEO but it builds trust with your readers as they develop expectations from you.
You’ll see a rise in returning visitors if they know you’ll be posting each Tuesday or Saturday or whatever days you wish. A simple way to do this is to just follow a schedule. For instance, if you want to post three times a week or just once, make sure to add it to your schedule and if you’re on a roll, create several at once and schedule them to post over a series of days or weeks. This is a great way to get ahead of the game if you plan on going on vacation. That way, you always have something being posted on your website. This leads me to the next point.
7. Monetizing Too Early
It’s always best practice to not add advertising to your site before you’ve built a brand or have a loyal audience. I know it’s tempting to want to make some money right off the bat but ads are a real turn-off to your readers especially if your site is small with very little content.
Your visitors will bounce if they don’t know you or your content, and yet you’re bombarding them with Ads. Once you build up a solid relationship and trust and have significant traffic, you can start out with Google Adsense and as you start earning some money, you might want to scale up your blog with increased traffic.
To be qualified to run Ads on Platforms like Mediavine, you would have to be doing 50,000 sessions per month on your website for them to accept you into their Ad Program. Google AdSense does not require that many sessions so you can always start out with Google AdSense. You need to be qualified for Google AdSense though.
Another thing you shouldn’t do is place a lot of affiliate links in your post. Again, I know it’s tempting but this will just backfire on you. Let’s take a look at what Google says in its guidelines for affiliate programs.
They say that sites featuring mostly content from affiliate networks can suffer in Google search rankings because they don’t have enough added value content that differentiates them from other sites on the web. Some years ago people used to just throw affiliate links onto short articles and get away with it and make money but Google is a lot smarter now and they’re more concerned about the value that you provide to your readers.
So, if you had an affiliate link on every article on your website they’re going to think that you have a low content site that is not offering a lot of value and they’re not going to rank you. On the other hand, if you have a 3000-word article and you are providing value then that’s a little bit different.
So here they’re saying that good affiliates add value by offering product reviews, ratings, navigation of products or categories, and product comparisons. So basically, what they’re saying is that your content shouldn’t be only a minor part of the content on your site.
Here’s an important question, ask yourself why a user would want to visit your site first rather than visiting the original merchant? So that means that you know if you’re not giving value why would they want to be on your site, to begin with? If Google figures that out you won’t be ranked.
8. Lack Of Patience
Now, this is probably the biggest reason why marketers aren’t making money with blogging. Making money takes time, it involves a continuous process that builds traction over time. It requires you to have a long-term vision for your business.
This is certainly not an overnight get-rich-quick scheme. No matter how many of those scammy marketers promise you that you can get rich quickly, this is the trap that so many beginners fall into.
They see these shiny product promotions pushed by these dishonest marketers promising them that their products can start making you five hundred dollars a day overnight.
It’s just a huge lie yet people will spend thousands of dollars on these crappy products hoping to find a loophole or the secret to make it easier. There’s no such loophole and there’s no such secret website. You want to create content but you have to rinse and repeat rinse and repeat continue creating content and then your results will start to show in three to six months. That’s when you can expect to start seeing a six-pack if you can get your mind wrapped around this truth. You’ll be able to get past those negative emotions when you’re frustrated or fed up with no results.
Conclusion
Once you learn the basic rules of SEO, WordPress content creation, and all those things, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating over and over again. If you don’t quit, the snowball effect starts and you’ll reach the success you hope for.
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