Why Your Blog Will Fail - Part V
March 28th, 2008Why Your Blog Will Fail
Part V
Final Destination
(Fifth and final of the five part Why You Blog Will Fail series. Click here for the previous part).
Hopefully you’ve already read Parts I – IV of this series. If not, you might want to go back and do so.
This segment will actually focus a bit less on why your blog will fail, or hopefully why your blog will NOT fail if you’ve followed the previous suggestions. Instead, we’re fast forwarding ahead in time a bit, to discuss the final destination of your blog.
Unless your blog is clearly a runaway success – possibly revealed by visitors, Google PageRank, Technorati links, Alexa rank, etc. – there will come a point where you will need to answer the question, “Did my blog fail?”.
If you’re blog is a runaway success, congratulations. You’ve done a lot of things right, and have probably learned quite a bit from the things you didn’t so quite so right.
If not, you will first need to define your measure of “success”.
Maybe your goal is to have a lot of visitors, or a lot of comments (these do not always go hand-in-hand by the way), or to make friends in the blog community. Your goal may have been to simply get all of your poetry online to share with the world, rather than publishing it in a book. Or, your goal might be to make a living from blogging.
Whatever you define as “success”, remember that you are the only one that will be able to declare that definition for your specific blog.
If at this point, despite all of your effort to avoid it, you feel that your blog has failed, then it’s most likely time to move on. You have a few options – you could just delete the entire blog, you could give it to someone, or you could reinvent it and try again.
It’s also possible that blogging, or writing in general, just isn’t for you. A lot of people buy a guitar in hopes of being a rock star, but quickly realize that playing a guitar is actually quite difficult, and without the passion for it, there will be no success. Blogging is no different.
And, that’s OK. Nobody is good at everything. Just because blogging may appear easy from the outside looking in, doesn’t mean that it is.
However, if you have reached that level which you’ve defined as success, then you should now look for ways to monetize your blog – that is, earn some money from it. You don’t need to think big necessarily, and money might very well not be your goal. But, if you can even earn enough to cover your web hosting, or your Internet connection, with very little effort, then allow the successful blog that you’ve created to pay for itself. You never know, many wealthy people began to amass their fortune quite by accident, just following their passion.
For those of you that have developed the successful blog, your journey is really just now beginning. If you haven’t already discovered this, you are about to. Successful blogging is very addictive. If you can create one blog and nurture it to success, then why not another blog about a different topic?
The answer is - there is no reason why you can’t. In fact, you will find that creating additional blogs is incredibly easy after you’ve become successful with your first one. That’s both the gift and the curse of blogging, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to maintain all of the blogs that you potentially have ideas for. Be selective, and be successful.
No matter your goals with your blog, good luck with it. If you enjoy blogging as much as many of us do, you’ll soon find yourself ruling over a small army of blogs.
