The Key To Blogging Success? Being Practical.
Practical solutions win.
What many people forget is still a business. And what is a business all about? Right, solving the problems of your customers. Delivering real, measurable results in terms of solving the problems of your customers.
What does this mean?
It means that each of your articles needs to be written in a way to solve customer pain points.
Fail at this and you’ve got a hobby. Not a blog that has the potential to become profitable for you. Now, you obviously don’t have to provide the whole solution in your free blog posts.
But you nonetheless need to create value.
Why my blog wasn’t profitable for years.
I have been blogging for five years and, for the most part, failed at making any money from this. Imagine this: five years of doing something for many hours every single day, but not getting anything out of it.
What was the problem?
The problem was that I didn’t really solve any specific problems for my audience.
My blog posts might have been interesting for them to read. But they were primarily personal stories that had some nuggets of learning within them. People read them and then that was it.
You see, I’ve recently realized something. Within those five years, nobody has ever contacted me saying things like:
“Hey, I’ve got this problem. Can you help me solve it…?”
Then, I compare this with my partner. She started running a hobby Instagram account about vegetarian cooking 3 months ago. Within maybe two or three weeks of starting this account, she has had people contacting her, asking whether she is also offering this and that service (e.g. cooking classes).
It is crazy!
If she took it seriously and saw this as an actual business, she’d probably be able to make a full-time income using only her Instagram account as a lead generation tool. She’d succeed at something that I failed at for over five years.
Simply by offering practical solutions.
Avoid ‘fluffy’ topics.
You might be passionate about a topic like personal development, relationship advice or something of the kind. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to measure outcomes in these kinds of fields.
Here’s what I mean by that:
- Marketing bloggers can easily prove that they are able to increase the traffic of their clients by 300% over a certain time frame
- Small business bloggers can easily prove that they are able to increase revenue of their customers by 30% over a certain time frame
- Language learning bloggers can easily prove that they have taken their readers from one level to another over a certain time frame
These bloggers address a very specific problem.
And they can prove that they will help their readers achieve real, tangible results.
Your passion probably won’t make you money anytime soon.
I am not saying that “follow your passion” is bad advice under all circumstances. But often, it is. And that is if your passion is not grounded in market realities.
Why are most creatives broke?
Because they are creating stuff that they are passionate about, instead of creating stuff that the market wants/needs.
Sometimes, you are lucky.
Sometimes, you are passionate about things that can easily translate into a perfect product/market fit. But that certainly isn’t the norm. For the most part, if you are passionate about something, this means that they are thousands of other people who are passionate about this thing, too.
Just look at travel blogging, as an example.
Who doesn’t want to make their money travelling around the world, while taking pretty pictures of their journey?
The chance that you will be able to make money travel blogging are extremely low, unless you figure out a very results-driven niche within that field. For example, how to build a business while you are travelling.
It is not that you haven’t identified a real problem.
There are millions of people who want to travel the world and who are keen to learn how to do that. Problem is, there are already hundreds of thousands of people who are operating in that space.
Competition is simply too high.
Not only will your blog get drowned by all those offers, but chances are that people won’t be willing to pay you anything. They will simply come for information and a good feeling.
Unless, of course, you figure out how to offer a unique results-driven solution to a problem that people actually need.
Conclusion:
Personal blogs never make money. Now, let me redefine for you what it means to run a personal blog. It doesn’t just refer to those kinds of blogs which are mostly sharing their personal story. It also refers to those kinds of blogs, where the writer focused primarily on what he personally is passionate about.
Just because you are passionate about something, it doesn’t mean that there is an actual need there that people are willing to pay for.
If you want to make money blogging, then you need to treat your blog like a real business.
You need to be very clear on things like:
- who your target customers are
- what problems they are facing
- what solution you are offering to them
- what the value proposition of your solution is
In short, you need a proper business model. Something that is grounded in market realities. Something that doesn’t just exist in your imagination and that you ‘feel good’ about.
A blog is no path to easy money.
It is hard work.
And, most importantly, a blog is never a complete business. It is always just a lead generation tool. You will need to have complete clarity on what you are offering beyond your blog that is going to generate money for you.
Call to action:
I’ve put together a free step-by-step guide on how to build a profitable business around your blog. You can get the guide by clicking here.
