Blogging is one of the easiest online businesses that a senior entrepreneur can start. Not only is it affordable, with a simple dot com domain and hosting plan, but you can install WordPress by just entering some basic administrative information and clicking a button so the system can do all the work.
Unfortunately, many online entrepreneurs fail to earn a living with their blog because they make mistakes that get in the way of their profits. These are strategic blunders that may seem small, but which repel your audience or render their visit to your blog useless.
If you want to earn a living being a blogger on the Internet, you have to know how to run your blog in a way that adheres to the technical elements needed, but also meets the needs of your target audience.
There are 10 things you may be doing wrong that have stood in the way of you earning money from your blog until now. Once you are aware of them, it will be easy to turn things around and open yourself up to more profit opportunities.
You Failed to Make Navigation for Bots and Humans Easy
The first thing you need to do in order to succeed with your blog as a profitable venture is to start off on the right foot in terms of the setup and navigation of your site. Blogs are structural entities that have posts, pages, categories, and tags.
Not only will your human visitors be using your system to navigate your blog the information they need, but search engine bots will be dispatched to your blog to crawl it and identify the topic and relevancy of your content so that it can rank you for their users.
While setting up simple navigation is smart and will help people find the posts they’re looking for, which will in turn increase your profits, you don’t want to get bogged down in uploading too many automated tools on your blog that will slow it down or cause glitches along the way.
You want to have some simple navigation at the top of your blog which directs people to an About page, where they can learn a little about you. You should have a contact form so that they can reach out to you if they have a question or comment.
If you have products or services, you will want pages for those, too. Your sidebar can be a great source of navigation as well. You can have a list of your most recent blog posts as well as the most recent comments, which is a great show of social proof that others are turning to you as a niche leader.
Your Blog Posts Are All Over the Place and Many Irrelevant
Another thing that can harm you in terms of online profits with your blog is if you are scatterbrained with your content. Many people treat their blog almost like a diary or social networking profile, where they talk about anything and everything going on in their life.
A niche blog that is being built for profit purposes is not meant to be all over the place with your topics. You need to have a main slant for your blog and keep everything that is posted there related to it in some way.
Every time you write a new post, ask yourself if it is tide into the original topic in some way, shape, or form. If it is not, then you may want to take that piece of content and share it on your personal social media profile instead.
You’re the Kind of Blogger Who Ignores Engagement
Some bloggers fail to succeed with their site because they are unable to form a bond with their blog readers. Part of what makes bloggers successful is the community that is built around the content.
The community thrives when your audience engages with your post in the comments section, and yourself and others reply back. There are many bloggers who simply never check to see if someone has left a comment or question.
This makes the reader feel as if you don’t care about them. You want to set your blog up so that you get notifications to approve every comment that comes through on your blog. This gives you a great opportunity to reply and form a friendship with your reader.
You Never Promoted It But Expected a Following
Many senior marketers start out with blogging and become frustrated at the fact that no one is visiting. Instead of trying to pinpoint the reason why, they simply abandon the site and try a different niche topic, where the same thing happens all over again.
Instead of walking away, learn how to properly promote your blog so that it does pique the interest of your target audience and make them want to click through to your content.
It is your responsibility to generate traffic to your blog. Some of it will be pulled in organically through the use of strategic keyword phrases and valuable content that a search bot will use to rank your site and send targeted visitors to you.
But you will also want to socialize your blog by sharing the links to specific posts on sites like Facebook. You can also link to your blog home page in your profile on sites like Instagram and Tik Tok.
You’re Either Too Informative or Lack Substance
Another reason many people fail to earn a living with their blog in their senior years is that they perform on one end of an extreme spectrum. Some of them are so informative that they exhaust every bit of information in one blog post, which goes on and on and eventually bores the reader.
Your blog is not the place to thoroughly cover every bit of information on a single topic in one post. You can break that concept up into a series of blog posts that are shorter and easy to devour.
At the same time, you don’t want to be so brief that the reader walks away feeling as if they learned nothing from you. They have to gain substance from your message or they will turn to someone else in the marketplace who does a better job of leading them.
Every niche is different and every individual in your target audience will have personal preferences about how much information they want to consume in one sitting. Over time, you will learn what your audience prefers.
Keep an eye on the statistics for your engagement, which can be both comments as well as social media shares and likes. If your audience proves to prefer blog posts that are more in depth, then you will know what the sweet spot is to satisfy their needs.
You Don’t Stand for Anything in Particular
Readers who financially support bloggers by purchasing their products or taking the recommendations that they made as an affiliate marketer tend to prefer being loyal to those who take a stand on a topic.
There are some online entrepreneurs who will promote and back anyone and any product. As long as they are receiving some sort of monetary perk, they’re willing to sell out their audience.
It’s not only about the money, though. Readers like it when you have a solid opinion that will help them sort out their own confusion or inability to make a decision. If you are wishy washy about where you stand on an issue or strategy, you will leave them feeling alone and just as last as they were before they found you.
This doesn’t mean that you have to publish a bunch of rants or target your competitors online. In fact, that can backfire on you quickly. Just make sure that if there is anything where people have strong opinions, you take a side or at least fairly examine both sides.
You’re Easily Distracted and Abandon Your Readers
If you are a senior blogger who continually abandons your readers because you grow bored with your topic or can’t figure out what to say, only to return months later to try again, you will be destroying your ability to earn profits.
When consumers become loyal to a blogger, they expect to hear from them consistently and frequently. They are relying on you to help them get through their struggles and succeed with whatever problem you promised to help them with initially.
Look at your track record to date. If you have blogged before, write down the dates of the blog posts that you have published in the past and see if there are large gaps in time.
For example, if you blogged for three weeks in January, then quit for eight weeks, and came back to sporadically post every once in awhile, you will never achieve the level of success that dedicated bloggers have.
This is not just a human issue. While your target audience will be annoyed that you tend to disappear, it’s also assigned to search engine bots that you are not committed to keeping fresh content on your site, so they will bury you in the search engine results pages.
You Say a Lot But Never Monetize a Thing
Have you ever looked back at your blog to see if you have even tried to earn a living from it? It’s a serious question. It may seem silly, but go back and look at the various blog posts that you have published and see if you can spot a method of monetization in them.
There are many people, seniors and otherwise, who start a blog and consistently publish valuable information on it. They are confused when money does not begin to flow from their efforts.
However, if you go back and look at their posts, they may be lacking any links that would send visitors to products or recommendations that would help them earn money from their content.
There are different ways you can monetize your blog. First and foremost, you can link to the various digital info products that you have created for your niche readers. Another way you can profit from your content is by linking out as an affiliate to tangible and digital products that you recommend.
Some bloggers like to install a heavy amount of advertising, such as banner ads on their blog. You can do this, but you may be earning pennies compared to the type of money you would be making if you sent them to a sales page for a digital info product.
If you are an affiliate marketer, ask other vendors to send you a review copy of their product so that you can create a blog series where you implement it and conduct a case study about the product.
You Never Have Anything New to Say
One problem many bloggers have, especially after a certain amount of time, is that they fail to have anything new to say to their audience. If you are constantly repeating yourself, your audience will dwindle and your profits will dry up if they ever started at all.
If you’re struggling to find new content ideas, start by using a reliable keyword research tool that can tell you specifically what your audience is looking for online. You can also go to other web sites, such as news sites (depending on your niche), forums, etc., and see what trending topics are being discussed there that you can report on.
If you have older content, that you would like to discuss again, make sure that you put a new slant on it. There are many ways you can freshen up existing topics, such as creating a post that has alternate opinions about the topic, or new facts that back up your position on it.
You can subscribe to both consumer and trade magazines about your niche topic, stay on top of newly published YouTube videos, and join social media groups that continually discuss your niche blog topic.
Your Blog Is Boring to the Eyes
The last reason your blog may fail to turn a profit is if it is simply based on boring text. Today’s blog reader is interested in more than just the written word. While it is equally important, you also want to cater to those who prefer a multimedia approach.
Within the blocks of content of your blog post, make sure you are adding images that will break up long bits of text. You can also add video elements to your blog. If you put yourself on camera, it gives your visitors a chance to know you on a more personal level, but that’s not a necessity if you prefer to use a slide screen presentation.
The main thing you want to remember when trying to build a profitable blog platform is that you are serving the needs of your target audience. They need you to show up consistently, be interesting, and provide value to them and this, in turn, will help you monetize your content with ease.