5 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Making Money, and How to Turn it Around

There are many reasons your blog isn’t making money and this post highlights 5 of them!

One of the most appealing options for potential entrepreneurs is launching a blog. Not only are you your own boss with a flexible work schedule but there are many opportunities to earn money.

From hosting ads to affiliate marketing or even selling your own courses and ebooks, there are many ways to turn your blog into a successful and incredibly profitable business.

If you recently decided to launch a blog, but you haven’t seen any significant returns, then you may be wondering what’s going wrong.

The truth is that if you’re not earning money from your blog, the problem might not be with your choice of business – but with the way you’re trying to build your online presence.

While blogging doesn’t give you a guaranteed fast-track pass to business success, it is a great way to develop awareness for your personal or professional brand online and generate more conversions.

If you’re not seeing the results you want, the following five issues could be the source of your problems.

5 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Making Money

1.    You Don’t Have Enough Traffic: Before you can start earning any money from your blog, you’re going to need one very important thing: traffic.

While you don’t need thousands of page views every day, you do need to have at least some people visiting your website. That means that the first step in monetizing your blog should always involve finding as many ways as possible of sending traffic to your website.

The best way to do this? Quality content.

A blog without content is like an all-you-can-eat buffet without any food. If you want people to come and visit your website, then you can’t just post sub-standard blogs once every two months. You need to build a healthy content schedule that pushes you to publish new articles, infographics, videos, and eBooks regularly.

Publishing the right, most relevant content will help to ensure that the traffic you attract is in the right place to buy your products or invest in your services. Additionally, a good stream of regularly-published content can also improve your ranking on the search engine results, making your site easier to find.

The phrase “content is king” exists for a good reason. Indeed, one of the reasons your blog isn’t making money is due to lack of quality content to draw visitors to your blog again and again.

2.   You Don’t Know Your Audience Well Enough:   As I mentioned above, great content is essential to a successful blog, and the only way you’re going to make sure that you’re publishing the right things is by getting to know your audience. When you’re starting your blog, this can be tough, as you won’t have a lot of data to work with.

However, you can always consider using competitor analysis to check out what other people in your niche are posting on their blog pages to attract traffic. You never want to do a carbon copy of their content but your take on a topic that has attracted solid traffic is fine, smart in fact.

As your blog starts to grow, you can use solutions like Google Analytics to learn a little more about the people you’re writing for. By going to the “All Traffic” page, then clicking through to “Channels”, for instance, you can find out whether most of your customers come to you from referrals or social media. This will make it easier to adjust your promotional strategies and place more of your efforts into the avenues that are delivering the best traffic.

Analytics should also be able to show you which of your blog posts or articles are having the best impact on your audience. For instance, if you’re a digital marketing company and you notice that most of your customers convert after reading your article about SEO, you could write additional follow-up pieces on things like link building, domain authority, and other relevant topics.

3.   You Haven’t Got an Email List :  While organic traffic through SEO, PPC campaigns, and even social media are all great ways to boost your visitor numbers and your chances of making money, there are few things more effective than an email list for promoting your blog.

When people come to your website and decide to join your email list, they’re already converting with your business. They’re telling you that they like what you’ve had to say so far, and they’re interested in hearing more from you. As your blog grows, you can even start to segment your email list so that you can send people different messages depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

For instance, you could sign up with a mailing subscription provider like MailChimp and use that to start building your list. Once you’ve got a few people, you can follow their activity on your website and send them messages about new content that might interest them or products you are offering that they could be interested in.

4.   Your Design is Old, Outdated, or Just Terrible:  When it comes to running a successful blog, the design isn’t everything – but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly important. Ultimately, if your site looks ugly or unprofessional, is difficult to navigate or is simply slow and buggy, it won’t matter how good your posts might be. Your readers won’t be interested in a dull or stressful experience and will simply go elsewhere.

Your website design not only helps to show off your personal brand but it also makes it easier for them to stick around too. No-one wants to spend their spare time on a site that’s difficult to use and navigate. Additionally, your website needs to be designed well enough that it’s easy to read your posts on different devices – particularly in this age of mobile browsing.

If it’s been a while since you last updated your site design, or you’ve never been 100% convinced that your site looks great, then it might be time to make some changes. Look for an affordable graphic designer who can create something for you from scratch or think about finding a theme online and updating it on your own.

5.   You’re Not Making the Most of Social Media:  Finally, if you want to make money from your blog, then you can’t just be a blogger, you have to be a content marketer. What this means is that you don’t just spend your time creating incredible posts for your readers to enjoy, you also push a lot of effort into promoting those posts as well.

One of the best ways to promote your content (besides email marketing) is through social media. There are countless internet users out there today who would be happy to follow another brand or individual on sites like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, provided that they know that they’re going to get something valuable back in return.

The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to give anything away. Instead, all you have to do is show your customers that you value them by engaging in regular updates. One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make on social media, is that they try to spread themselves too thinly across multiple channels, and don’t have enough time to properly build their presence anywhere.

Rather than jumping on every platform you can find, pick one or two social channels that you know your target audience is active on, and start there. Create a social posting strategy that works around your content schedule, and stick to it.

These are some of the reasons your blog isn’t making money. Identify what the issues are with yours and address them. Remember, blogging does have the potential to earn you some serious money, but you need to be willing to put the work in.

Ethan

+ posts

This author does not have any more posts.