Personal Thought:Why New Bloggers fail

It has been three months since I started this blog. So far, no success, no money earned, no significant follower list. My articles were not mentioned in any other blog sites, I sure am failing in blogosphere.

Image courtesy myblogiseasy

I am failing as a blogger

I read a few articles that mentioned techniques to increase viewership, some bloggers even claimed they acquired 0 to 5000 visitors per day in a month/couple of months. I somewhat believed them, employed their tactics, social media promotion, twitting day and night from my laptop or iPhone. I did everything they told me, to become successful.

But at the end of month 3, I am still sitting with less than 50 Rss followers, no face book like, only a couple of retweets on Twitter. No money came either. While I am writing this draft I have total 90 comments, among them 40 are mine written in response to readers’ comments.

Where I am lacking? If my boss would have asked me to explain my failure, imagining he’s my boss at this blog too, I would have answered that I was too much occupied with work and couldn’t spend much time on the site. I was visiting my home country, where all I did was to meet relatives and friends, for 21 days in the last three months as well, that also delayed my progress.

But, I know here, there is no boss, I created the site, I write and I manage it, so, I have to answer this to my self, why I failed to achieve the success the other successful bloggers claim they achieved.

I am not saying those bloggers are wrong, their numbers speak for themselves. See this post from Wisebread, ranks the personal finance blogs.

Not only the numbers, but also my site looked, to me, not a class act to compete with them. It really did hurt, because I am a tech person, I build complex java codes that run on one of the biggest financial company’s servers. In my 11 years of working life, probably, the code written by me was accessed by billions of people at some point or other.

I couldn’t convince myself that lack of time is the only reason, I found it was my lack of imagination too. I needed to do something pretty quick. I wasn’t prepared to spend money on buying fancy themes, after all, I write about saving money!

Light through the tunnel

One fine night, those ones, when you find it difficult to sleep, no matter how many sheep you count, a very simple and well-known management fundamental fact came to my mind. Establishing a blog is nothing other than establishing a brand, like a company who starts late find it very difficult to sustain in the market place due to lack of brand value, a blog as well, can not sustain the lack of branding. My blog has no brand value, even if the domain is catchy, it is not enough to catch people’s attention. And, if you do not get enough followers, in your mind, you start thinking, am I a good writer? Am I inferior to others?

No I am not inferior, I am successful in life, I came out from a college where average people struggle to get in to. But, again, a brilliant CEO can not establish a brand by himself, so am I.

I realized, people reading the blogs have limited time, they will go for the places where they regularly go, or generally like to go, if they find what they are looking for in those places, they won’t venture in to other lesser known blogs.

Upon going though my Google analytic reports, this was very clear to me that I am not getting a repeat visitors. People clicks on my back links, but they simply do not come back again. They will never comeback unless they find something spellbinding. After 5 years of blogging, there is probably next to none possibility of a spellbinding new topic coming to my mind.

What new writers should do now, then? Market, market and market, I spend next few days in marketing my blog.  Number of clicks increased, but, no repeat clicks! I started getting frustrated, started thinking of quitting.

My assessment went on..

At that time I came across a great article by Trent from The simple dollar, this article put me in to perspective. I left thinking about quitting. I decided to not to leave this battle field.I now plan to read this article every two months to get myself in to perspective constantly.

I started comparing other blogs with mine, opening various windows on my Firefox, chrome and IE. My site definitely lacked the finishing touches other had. The depth of materials GetRichSlowly has, is mind-boggling. Why should people come to my site? This thought opened a new vista, what I was doing? I wanted to get successful quickly!  All these blogs are early starters, they reaped in success fairly quickly. When they started providing contents, it was a new experience for the readers, concept of blogging was new. They caught the initial attention and now they are consisting with that.

Then opened the door to wisdom

I have to be consistent, I am a late starter, that’s alright. If I stay consistent one day I will have a depth of materials too. But, that doesn’t mean I will continue to write no matter if readers don’t read. I understand readers are needed for me to continue with writing. I need to be a good writer and first and foremost need to enhance my blog site.

This week-end after sitting for marathon 16 hours with my blog, I now have a completely enhanced look on my website, I removed all advertisements, as they looked ugly on my site. More over my experience with Adbrite, Infolinks and Chitika were horrible. I earned whooping  $0.29 so far on all three combined. To say the least, they must have depleted probably half of my readers from visiting my site, specially because of Adbrite’s full-page ads. And I kept getting rejects from Adsense, probably they only cater to big fishes.

The resolution

So, here is my site, in its new avatar, with zero advertisements and no book-promotion. I even enabled mobile theme, any one accessing this site from their smart phone will be treated with a nice look-n-feel, which is quiet easy for your small screen phones.

From now on, I will concentrate on providing good contents only and in a very presentable way.I will continue to promote the site, continue to write, continue to build back links. I plan to be consistent in writing and it’s quality and win hearts of my readers. At the same time, I will constantly ask myself for that revolutionizing new topic, only problem is, I have to bring out new ideas fairly regularly. If I do that, my readers will automatically twit my posts and like them on Facebook, and that is very much need for survival.

The inspiration I take, is from my experience. I opened my first mail account with Yahoo, and never looked in to other mail providers, never ever went to see what other look like. One fine day, after using yahoo for 5 years, some one referred me to open, then restricted, Gmail, and , since then Gmail is my primary mail account, I changed my commitment towards Yahoo mail.

If you are a start-up blogger like me, do not lose patience, don’t feel rejected, be consistent with writing, and concentrate on better writing.

Analyze other successful blogs, see their writing style, then decide on your style. Experiment with various styles of writing and site look-n-feel, closely monitor the result, something or other might click. Ask your close friends to check the visual aspects of your blog.

At least this is my game plan. We are not in level playing field, but no one will help us than ourselves.

Game Plan

• I will stick to better writing
• Now the last thing I want to do is changing one strategy to another, I have to stick to this strategy and be persistent with it.
• From now on all my post will encourage readers to leave feedback.I will write to my audience
• I will take every steps to enhance my earlier posts.
• Once I carefully inspected my SEO tags with others, I failed miserably there too, I learned from mistakes
• I will research my topics and only write the topics with very few available blog posts, better, none!

Will it give me my audience? Increased traffic? Let’s see

I sincerely thank all commentators for their excellent comments so far to my other blogs. I do appreciate if you criticize me too, you don’t have to be always nice, I have a thick skin!

I sincerely urge my readers to share the topics they want to be covered on this site. I would appreciate your suggestions. Let me do research on your topics, it will be a good learning for me. Hopefully I will be able to write as per your anticipation and exactly what you want to know.