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The joke 15 years ago was “everyone and their dog has a blog.” That was 15 years ago and it’s more true today than it was then.
In that time, blogs have become a keystone content form to build SEO for a business, establish an audience, and create a connection with others. Hubspot, Gary V, Minimalists, Health Gurus, Gamers, Podcaster, everyone has a blog.
So what makes a blog successful and why aren’t people reading yours? I have found 5 key reasons why people stop reading blogs and why bloggers start failing to create content. Here’s the reasons:
1) Don’t Mentally Block Your Best Content
“I’m too busy, I’m experiencing a mental block, I can’t write that, I don’t know how to write about x, I have to go to the dentist right now”
I once heard that “the more excuses you have not to do something, the less appropriate they are as an excuse”
I’m sitting in bed right now, writing this blog post on November 29, 2021, at 10:36 p.m. My cat is closely nestled into my shoulder and I have work promptly at 9 a.m. Now should be the time I kick out the cat, turn off the lights, throw the phone on the charger and go to sleep. I don’t even know at the time of writing if this article will ever get posted. But I have an idea that I want to write about.
The proof is in the pudding
If there’s anything I have learned from blogging about my life, it’s that when an idea starts to inspire you, you drop everything and start writing that idea down. Because the start of that idea can blossom into a massive 700-word blog post. But if I don’t start writing about it right then and there, it’ll never grow out of the idea stage in my head.
Look, I know there are real-world excuses that should give you hesitation to drop everything and write. Sometimes you are driving, Sometimes you are sick, and sometimes the world is yelling at you to continue on the predetermined path.
That’s OK. But in the beginning, always take the time to nurture and cultivate your ideas when they happen. Do you believe in a muse? Neither do I. But if you take time to nature your ideas about the world, they grow. They start out initially as ideas about how things are, or how they should be, to massive complex systems of order that require an entire blog post to formulate.
2) Hold yourself to a reasonable standard
I’ve set it before and I’ll stay it again. Nobody can create content 24/7.
Everybody needs to take time and take a break from the things they do all the time to do things that they only do some of the time periods we all have a limited amount of bandwidth and the time that we spend exhausting that bandwidth shows.
Find a rhythm and flow that connects with your natural creative tendency. Is superior for me which means that whenever an idea strikes, I instantly start writing about it. Maybe this means that you instantly start recording a video on your phone or recording a Podcast or you reach out to somebody to schedule your next creep’s next creative episode. Ever it means for you, Foster a schedule and a time land that allows you to create effective work within your own creative bandwidth.
Yet for me, that means every time an idea or inspiration strikes, I take the time to write it down even write it down either on my phone or on a laptop. Both of these devices are generally within 10′ of me give me so I make it a daily were weekly practice to write as soon as the inspiration strikes.
3) Don’t be afraid to cut a content piece that doesn’t work
When it all comes down to it karma all of us have content pieces we’re not proud of period maybe we’re feeling great that day or maybe we just had an idea that we couldn’t capitalize on. Maybe one day we felt like we needed to write for clicks (more on that in reason 4).
It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but sometimes we do feel ashamed of it. We feel like there’s still something to get from that piece of content or we feel are we feel like there’s potential in that topic so maybe I’ll just post and then come up with the idea later.
As someone who’s been down that road before, a comma doesn’t hold your breath that the keys to your creative future lie in content pieces you couldn’t quite flush out in the past. Creation is a process that requires instantaneous spontaneity and is a tenacity for is tenacity for capitalizing on the moment.
At the time of writing this blog, I have 20 plus articles that are half-baked, half-finished 1/2 written sitting in my drafts. I’d bet you by the time this article posts, I will have another 20-plus articles in my drafts. And for the most part, they will sit there in my drafts for all time and eternity. That’s not because the ideas were bad or because or because my ability as a writer failed in those moments, it’s because sometimes an idea floats by you that isn’t ready to form. This is why it’s so important to constantly treat your content creation as a delicate process that requires is requires your constant dedication.
Some of the articles in my drafts, are are duplicates of the same idea that I still haven’t been able to get a good hold of. I have multiple articles in my drafts about cryptocurrency and content creation that will never see the light of day because they just they just aren’t finished. I’m confident most of them will never see the light of day because they don’t have anything left to finish, but the content itself didn’t warrant an entire blog post so I considered it do I consider it rude to actually waste your time with a blog post on it.
The point that I’m making here, is that we all need to take the time to adequately self-assess the content that deserves to make it live, in the content that deserves to stay private.
4) Allow yourself to Occasionally Neglect SEO
I am especially passionate about this one. Content creation requires you to be passionate about what you do… otherwise you will become bored very very quickly. The content creator industry thrives off of individuals that create irrationally. Streamers game 8 to 10 hours every single day, mama hoping that they can make it big as a content creator yesterday on the platform that they enjoy most.
Now, this might sound like an absolute paradise, who doesn’t want to play video games all day long?
But take it from somebody who tried to be a video game streamer is streamer and content creator during the pandemic… It is not life for everybody. I realized very quickly that the amount of work involved in running a stream, dedicating video content to your video platform of choice, and constantly marketing yourself within the gaming community is very hard continuous work. In that field you will be constantly making below minimum wage as you attempt to break through the mold is the mold with little to no guidance on what works and what doesn’t work.
In a way, the advice I would give to somebody who is trying to make it as a video game streamer is the same advice I would give to somebody trying to be a video game content creator. Do what you enjoy, comma do it consistently, and do it without reservation.
The most successful content creators share a bit of themselves, of themselves, while constantly promoting their content, and simultaneously constantly creating new content.
This is the magic formula to becoming famous on any content platform. The problem is that it takes time and a massive investment no matter the platform.
But then people usually ask, well how do you not get burnt out of that? The answer is to only do it under your own rule set… where you is that where you only do what you enjoy.
If you spent enjoying the game you play anymore, change games. If you no longer enjoy the niche you built up in writing, change niches.
There is a false idea in the content creation space that you have a set audience and that audience cannot change in order to grow. When in fact, the only way to grow is to allow your audience to change with you. Many of us look at content creation as a road is this a road with only 1 is 1 path for success? When in reality the road to success has many paved, unpaved, and untraveled pad adds let all lead to many unique destinations. Just because you may lose some of your success with one audience type does not mean that you won’t gain it within another audience type.
I encourage everybody I know to be constantly learning and adapting and yeah it’s been an adapting and becoming interested in new things. Everything is of the nature to change… especially in the Internet content creation industry. So instead of following your audience or following your numbers, I encourage every content creator to follow their creative desire to build.
I originally started this Podcast as a way to write about the metaverse, marketing, and the ways that they intersect in the new content sphere. But the reality is, that people, don’t look for a blog called the metaverse marketing blog… They look for answers to questions they have about topics I write about. If I have a topic exploring the metaverse and cryptocurrency, I might answer a question that somebody has in that somebody has been desperate to answer about is about the way Internet marketing works for small businesses looking to engage in the crypto world.
I’m aware of the topics I write about that bring the most audience type… But I don’t write exclusively about things that bring an audience. I write about the things that make me passionate and excited to write. I write about the things that make me excited to create, and that keep me up for another hour at night to make sure that I get my point across correctly.
I’m also 100% aware that as I stop writing about things like cryptocurrency or video games or the latest TV shows, people will stop listening to what I have to say. That’s OK. As the things that I want to write about change, so will the people that come to my blog post.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Internet is its ability to constantly connect us to the people that care and find interest in the same topics and things that we do.
I still find myself watching decade-old YouTube videos as tutorials for things I’m trying to do today. I guarantee there are people that thought they would just throw this video together and then throw it up on the Internet, and now I’m reading about these things desperately trying to find an answer to a question I have 10 years later.
Since everything in the Internet is permanent, your content can live to answer questions for people for decades, potentially centuries later. Quit trying to hold yourself hostage to whatever’s popular right now… There are going to be people who find your content in the next 5 years who appreciate it just as much as you appreciate it today. Don’t write for the common person that is just getting into crypto today, right for the person 20 years from now that wants to show their buddies that they were reading a blog 20 years ago about the beginning of the new crypto market.
Don’t create for anyone except for yourself. Because if you create for yourself today, you will have created for others tomorrow.
5) if nothing else works, consider a different platform for your content to live on.
When I 1st started in the content creation world, I thought that I would be a world-renowned Blogger or world-renowned video YouTube or a gaming twitch streamer. I have tried all of these and failed at all of them just the same.
I remember when I 1st left high school and wanted to start up a journal again, I remember sitting in my dorm room with some of my fellow college mates, opening up my MacBook air, and throwing together a quick wicks page with my blog details on it. I remember feeling so excited after putting that Wix page together…. that this was the beginning of my blogging Empire.
As far as I remember, I never wrote more than one blog post for that page. Is there a lot of reasons why that original blog post didn’t work for me? 1st I was young and didn’t have a great way of expressing myself online. 2nd is that I didn’t have a ton of things to talk about. I was going to school while working a full-time job at UPS as a day laborer.
More so I was trying to write about topics that I personally didn’t realize had traumatized me too much to constantly write about. The combination of my young naivety and A lack of understanding of why I decided to build that blog, ultimately led to a very unsuccessful failure of a block post when I was 18 years old.
But I’m a big believer that failure is something that you should constantly experience as a learning mechanism for future growth. From there I knew that I always wanted to share aspects of what I do in my life with other people, through some form of content. I continuously explored creating content and sharing it with others
I created multiple YouTube channels and messed with podcasts. But ultimately I think I’ve found the form of content creation that makes the most sense to me. I can write about the things that I’m passionate about here in this public journal and share it with other people who care just as much as I do about these topics. I make sure to pace myself in a way that I never feel obligated to write, but I constantly have things to say.
Little did I know one of the things that I needed in order for my blogging to become remotely successful, was for texts to speech software to catch up. A lot of the time I end up writing my content as a mix between text to speech on my phone, editing periodically on my laptop, and writing up quick little thoughts on my phone in the bathroom. But this content mixture of effective text-to-speech and software that could recognize all the little failures within years within my mobile typing efficiently, On top of me finally finding purpose is purpose in both a spiritual and it’s all and business sense… That took time for me to connect to.
And if you’ve gotten to this point in the article, I sincerely applaud you. Because to me, it means that you are still in the game. If you still care about what it means to get your thoughts and ideas out to the public, that’s all you need to be a successful Blogger, content creator, Instagram, YouTube, or any sort of content creation specialist. Congratulations and keep it up.
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