5 Reasons Why You Fail In Blogging

In this Guest post I’m gonna tell you why you have been failing in Blogging till now. You all might be knowing at least a couple of bloggers who do a living online. What makes them succeed when you haven’t made a penny out of it? The truth is very simple. You were just missing a few points regarding Blogging. I think you all know that sometimes simple things make bigger impact. And this is what you have been missing. Just Reading and following professional Bloggers is not sufficient [ in fact not good at all ] to succeed in Blogging. This is why I have a compiled a short list specifying 5 Reasons why you are still failing in Blogging as a career :

1) Because you were constantly thinking about great ideas and you were constantly dreaming about becoming like Problogger but never took ACTION! In short you were not an ACTION-TAKER. Sometimes you should just stop thinking and do what you thought the earlier day. Else you will be thinking all those ideas without ever knowing if they would work or not.

2) You were afraid you will fail.

3) You never kept in mind that most bloggers failed again and again until one day it clicked for them. Do you think all those biggies earned the name they have now since the first day? Not at all!

4) You did not know what you are capable of? If you are thinking of starting a blog like Problogger then think again and again. Especially if you have just been blogging for a few months and never yet had success in making money online then you should consider this seriously. Because it is really really hard to develop one. There are very high possibilities that you will fail in getting decent traffic or subscribers. And failure will surely make you quit blogging. So decide if you really are capable of doing things and then start doing them.

COOL TIP : Do you want to start a successful blog that could go viral like Darren Rowse? Then you can start a make money online blog with all those screenshots of your earnings from different ad networks and affiliates – I’m very sure it would have tremendous success and you would rapidly develop a huge subscriber base.

5) You got into affiliates without knowing much – affiliates are the best way to make serious money but i strongly believe that generating nice income through affiliates would need you to invest some money. I’m not saying that ALL people who make money through affiliates invest money but the process becomes easier and less tiresome if you do spend money [like you could try out the PPC campaigns and experiment more if you are ready to spend money].

So don’t just stop with reading blogs about Make money online and blogging-related Blogs but try everything for yourself now!! There are very high possibilities that you could set a new trend in blogging rather than following the trends introduced by probloggers. Good Luck!

Ad Swaps: A Smart and Easy Way to Get Free Traffic

After yesterday’s post , I decided to follow up with a strategy you can use to get quality free traffic. One of the easiest ways to get visitors to your web site is to spend money. Nothing is more effortless then paying for traffic. But if you can’t afford it or don’t want to pay, there’s an equally simple but free way to get traffic: ad swaps.

An advertisement swap or ad swap is simply an arrangement where you agree to put up someone else’s ad on your site or email newsletter in exchange for them doing the same.

The goal of an ad swap is mainly to get exposure for a specific purpose, such as selling products/services or improving awareness of your brand/site. This is different from a link exchange because you are not seeking to improve your search engine rank.

The link value doesn’t matter at all. What matters is getting visitors into your web site.

Four Pre-Requisites for a Successful Ad Swap

Image Credit: Erik K Veland

For an ad swap to be successful and fair, there are four pre-requisites to be fulfilled:

1. Equal traffic and exposure: Both parties ought to have websites that receive a steady amount of visitors everyday, or an email list with a decent amount of subscribers. Otherwise, there is no meaning in setting up an ad swap in the first place. Ad swaps are most agreeable when both parties have an equivalent audience reach/traffic count.
2. Fair and Good Ad placement: Traffic flows more easily to you when your ad is displayed in a spot which is easily viewable and accessible by visitors. While site designs may differ, both parties should endeavor to exchange ads that are displayed in a similar fashion. A pop-under does not capture visitor attention in the same way as a site-wide banner, so seek to use equivalent ad formats too.
3. High Relevancy: In the best scenario, an ad swap should occur between websites in the same niche, as both parties would benefit from a trade in visitors with an already established interest on the same topic. But it is possible for trades to occur for sites in different niches. The essential point to remember is that your ad/message MUST be relevant to the page or site where it is placed and vice versa for your ad partner.
4. No Conflicting Purpose. If you’re a merchant selling a product or a firm offering a service, you should not do ad swaps with competitors (other merchants/firms in the same niche). However ad swaps can be done for joint promotion of a specific event or shared project. You also should not do an ad swap with a site that contradicts your brand’s ethos or image (e.g. PETA doing an ad swap with Kentucky Fried Chicken).

There is one more important factor and that’s networking. Webmasters and bloggers are often inundated with requests for link trades: they have a defensive barrier against requests from strangers. Unless your site has some reputation or authority in your niche, ad swaps usually need to be prefaced with an established relationship.

People are far more likely to do ad swaps after they become more comfortable with you, when they don’t see you as a leech but a potential benefit. So keep this in mind as well when you aim to fulfill the four other prerequisites.

Seek Quality Ad Partners, Don’t Settle For Anything Less

Image Credit: andy frankwick

You may be familiar with the traffic exchange networks of the past (and present), places where webmasters can go sign up, submit their site and browse through each other’s websites in order to earn viewing credits that can be converted into pageviews for their own site.

It’s all about trading incentivized glances in a merry-go-round of self-interest. You look at my site, I look at your site. Everyone is happy. And it goes on ad nauseam.

Even though these pageview-trading rings are called traffic exchanges, they aren’t useful because you don’t get truly targeted and interested viewers, people who click through to your site because they were honestly compelled by curiosity or desire, not because they want more hits to their own website.

I bring up the topic of the old-school traffic exchanges to emphasize the importance of having a quality ad swap. One should carefully select ad partners because you need to maximize your returns with a limited inventory: you only have that much ad space to trade.

Your goal is to get the best quality visitors from your ad. To achieve that, you must try to only trade with websites that have a quality audience. Don’t do ad swaps just because someone asked you to, it could end up being a waste of time and ad space.

You probably know how to find quality ad partners already, as you should be familiar with your niche. If not, find them by doing a Google search for your site’s keywords.

If you can’t set up a good ad exchange because your site doesn’t get enough traffic, try again after you’ve developed a greater audience. Or you can negotiate with more popular sites by reducing the display length for your ad against their ad, although even that may not work.

Types of Ad Swaps You Can Set Up

All ad swaps can be measured with tracking links and analytics so both parties can compare how many hits they received with the clicks they sent out. If you’re doing an ad swap with a friend or prefer a looser agreement, you can forgo click data and stats altogether. The choice is up to you. Here are some ad swap formats you can use.

• On-site Banners and Text Links. This includes banners of all sizes and text links on a site-wide basis or on specific webpages. Includes blog post promos.
• Email Newsletters. Involves inserting a mention of your ad partner’s website or product/offer. This can be accompanied by a personal endorsement or not.
• RSS Feed Ads. These are either text links or image banners placed within an RSS feed.

Some Extra Tips and Recommendations

One guideline I follow is to never send traffic to my homepage or any page that is unoptimized. A custom landing page must be created for each ad swap. I can design it for the purpose of capturing leads (freebie + opt-in) or set it up so that it becomes a welcome page (’Hello, visitors from Site A!’) with a short introduction and deep links.

I also pay special attention to the ad banners used. Banners that reference your partner’s site name or brand tend to get better click throughs, although you should get permission first. Sometimes they do not want to appear as if they were endorsing your site, although they are already implicitly doing so by having your ad up.

Ad Swaps Aren’t Hip Now But They Still Work

While it’s a common email marketing practice amongst internet marketers, I don’t often read about ad swaps being recommended as a traffic strategy for bloggers or webmasters. There were a few ad trading networks around but none of them really caught on for some reason.

Perhaps it sounds archaic and boring compared to all the super cool social media viral marketing buzz building tactics being promoted right now by all the experts. Yes, ad swaps may sound dull but they still work if you know how to do them right. If you’ve got ad space you can’t sell, why not give it a shot? You have nothing to lose at all. ^_^

7 Reasons Why A Blogger Quit Blogging

There are millions or billions of bloggers around the world from various countries, various races, various languages, various niche and various purpose. All the bloggers have their unique purposes in blogging, some of them blogging to make money online, some of them blogging for their interest, some of them blogging to note down their personal rant, etc. However, most of them quit blogging due to some reasons.

Image Credit : Laura

I’m a blogger who writes about make money online tips, yet a well known MMO blogger but I enjoy sharing make money online tips, communicating with my readers, sharing experiences and lastly, I make money online. Blogging can be a hobby, but it can be a poison too, you’ll be addicted once you started it. Once you start blogging, you won’t be quitting forever because blogging has lots of fun. It goes same to me, I’ve been blogging for a year and I never think of quit blogging, I love make money blogging and I take it as a business, a job. Hence, I’ll be building more and more profitable niche blogs to make money online.

But why there is still a lot of bloggers quit blogging?

7 Reasons Why Blogger Quit Blogging

1) Laziness
This is the killer attitude of a blogger, quit blogging because of lazy is a stupid reason. I believe that most of the bloggers are lazy to update their blog, lazy to look for resources and write killer articles. I admit that I had this attitude even now, but I never think of quit blogging. Remember, you don’t have boss in blogging, no one force you to blog, you can write whenever you want, you are the boss in blogging. It’s depending on how aggressive are you to update your blog, the more often you update, the more traffics you could bring in, the more money you could generate. This is the rules, so lazy is not a good reason to quit blogging.

2) No improvement on Pagerank or SERPS
I believe that Pagerank and better SERPS are the excitant or stimulant that push you to write more, isn’t? But don’t forget, Google evaluates your blog by looking at your backlinks, how strong and quality is your backlinks, how many high PR blogs link to you. Google will give you higher Pagerank and better SERPS for the keywords you target by judging your backlinks. With that said, blogger who lazy to update their blog and nearly dead, there shouldn’t be any changes on the pagerank and SERPS for their blogs. Blogger who thirst for the pagerank and higher SERPS to make money online, they will quit blogging if they can’t achieve what they want for a long period. Remember, make money blogging is not a 1 or 2 days tasks, it can be months or years to see the result. You can read this article on how to increase your backlinks.

3) Low Traffic
Traffic is what every bloggers want for their blogs, to be famous or to make money online. Bloggers who can’t see any improvement on the traffics even though they tried very hard to update and improve their blogs, eventually they give up and quit blogging. You know that I’ve a list of 66 Professional Blogger that you can follow, follow their blogs and learn how to improve your blog in term of traffics or monetization techniques.

4) Low Readership
It can be related to low traffic, if you don’t have traffics in your blog, nobody read your blog and nobody know how good is your blog, of course you don’t have readership. In order to build up a good readership, the first thing is writing quality and useful article that helps people, 2nd thing is you should know how to promote your blog to the public. You can read this article of “7 Effectiveness Blog Tips For Getting Readers“. I believe that bloggers who don’t have readership will be feeling bored and soon they will quit blogging.

5) No mentors
I believe that every bloggers in various niches should have their mentors, isn’t? I have lots of mentors in my blogging journey, I learned blogging tips, make money online tips, traffic building tips, SEO tips from all of them, I appreciated the way they taught and wrote in their blogs. So, bloggers who don’t have any mentors in their blogging journey, they will never improve, they will feel bored of doing the same thing everyday with their blog. This is one of the reason bloggers quit blogging.

6) Can’t Make Money
I believe that most of the bloggers blog to make money online, me too. Money is the stimulant that push us to work harder, I’ll feel proud of myself and feel happy if I could make money through internet. In this way, I’ll work harder and put more effort on my blog. Of course, not all the bloggers able to make money through their blogs. They never put effort on their blog, they want to make money through their blog but they can’t, eventually they quit blogging. This is the critical reason that most of the bloggers quit blogging, trust me.

7) Financial Problem
Bloggers who have their own hosting and domain, they have to pay the hosting fees every month or year. It goes same to me, I pay about $150 for the hosting and domains fees every year, I make money online through my blogs to pay my hosting and domains fees. Between, there are many bloggers who not able to make money through their blogs, they’re not afford to pay their hosting and domains fees. Eventually, they quit blogging. Don’t forget, there is many free blog platform such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, and etc. One of my friend gave me a reason like this, I told him that he can blog for free in bloggger.com or wordpress.com, end up he told me that he was lazy (#1 point).

What Is Your Thoughts

A blogger who tend to quit blogging, they’ll give a lot of excuses, they just want to quit blogging and enjoy their life. They don’t even know blogging can be doing part time, by the way of blogging, we can enjoy our life as well, it’s not crossing over.

How do you think about this and what do you think that why a blogger quit blogging? Please leave a comment below and telling us about your thoughts.