Are Blogs and Websites profitable in 2024 and why do they fail

Most people start a blog because they are passionate about a certain subject or they are inspired by someone. Website owners and bloggers have perfected the way they market their blogs or make their careers as bloggers look mainstream. There is absolutely nothing wrong with self-promotion but with most bloggers monetizing their sites through selling courses “how to make a profitable blog in 7 days”, it brings about a fallacy that one can start “blogging from home” and by the next weekend, they already have income reports to show their success.

With various ways to monetize your blog, it is quite easy to get discouraged when you fail to even get accepted into the Adsense program to get paid via google Ads as I went through. Ultimately, when you run a quick google search, one of the reasons as to why bloggers fail, the most popular answer is “not passionate enough”. It sounds like Bloggers are part of a sleazy MLM. eeek

Bloggers fail because they are not profitable

I have seen that when you start to do any work online, it is taboo to state openly that you are doing this work FOR MONEY! That is ridiculous. At the moment I have two active YouTube channels, and I am putting up content for THE MONEY. The amount of money I make affects the projects that I want to pursue as well as the lifestyle that I want to have. Another thing to note, a lot of people take up blogging as a hobby or say that,  I do not go into YouTube/ blogging for the money. Just do it for fun or (place whatever hogwash people like parroting).

In today’s’ climate, if something takes hours and can even get stressful… yet you are not getting any income from it, then you are wasting your time. You are better off trying another project. There is no shame in that

“Select a niche you are passionate about theory”

I have another post about profitable niches that you can read here and I must say, if I am being truthful, yes, you can make money writing about passionate topics however, it can be difficult to reach your monetary goals. I love watching TV, reading romantic novels, reviewing shoes, and celeb gossip I  but if I had to write an endless supply of blog posts about one of these topics without making any money or building a following, I’d burn out 100% of the time.

And since most bloggers start by writing about their passions and trying to figure out monetization later, they’re destined to fail.

From writer to business owner

The best way to succeed in the blogger or website focus is to be able to make that transition from being a website owner, blogger to a business owner.

So what happens?

• They choose a non-lucrative niche targeting a low-value audience.
• They don’t do keyword research before writing posts.
• And they don’t leverage networking and connections to their strategic advantage.
• They have no idea how to monetize their blog and don’t plan that component from day one.

When one writes “passion” pieces and no monetary value comes out of it, it is quite easy to burn out or to simply lose interest. The best way is to select the right niche based on revenue potential and plan your monetization right from the start.

Three primary business factors:

• audience budget potential
• keyword volume
• Professional leverage.

1. Audience Budget Potential.

Before you even start, how much is your audience willing to spend on their pain points to be solved? The best way to easily monetize your website is to work with affiliate links. In the past, it was quite difficult to find company sponsorships as you had to send out a press kit, wait for it to be reviewed, and then work out a contract, and only then would you be able to promote their products to your followers/subscribers for commissions or payment.

Fast forward 2022. company sponsorships are still there, but most companies do work with creators to push their products freely by joining their affiliate programs and in return, for every purchase of their product through you, you get a residual. At the moment I am using Bluehost, and if you are researching to have a website or blog for your business, if you sign up using my link, you will get a 65% discount, free Domain plus (I can help you set up your website for FREE!. As you can see, with every sign-up, Bluehost gains a client, I make a commission and you make savings!

DOES YOUR SELECTED NICHE HAVE GREAT AFFILIATE PROGRAMS?

It all then goes to your selected niche, does it have any affiliate programs that you can join or you will just be pushing their content for free. And you can get started with affiliate marketing without followers

Here are some steps to get started with affiliate marketing:

1. Apply to a company’s affiliate program either on their site or in an affiliate network. For this, you’ll need a website and an email address from your domain – not just a Gmail or Yahoo email.
2. Once approved, grab your unique affiliate link, and copy/paste it into any text on your blog.

Your niche needs key words volume

It will be very difficult to be able to make your site profitable if you do not have any traffic. Organic traffic is the best because it is free. This is important at first because you do not want to spend a lot of money on ads to drive traffic to your site and there is no return on that investment. The best way to have a successful website/blog, or rather to avoid failing at your project, would be… to master how to drive traffic to your site and series traffic would be potential buyers of what you are talking about in your affiliate link articles or if you are monetizing via Ads, that you have enough traffic to generate money.

Keywords are the solution.

2. Keyword Search

So what are these keywords? Moz.com had an apt definition

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.” If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc.

These “best” keywords are searched by people looking for a particular product review. If you are doing an affiliate link article; “the best” would be “the best” keyword. They want to read a blog with in-depth content on the “best” something before making a purchase (and they aren’t ready to go right to a company’s website and buy something yet.)

Most bloggers fail because they start aimlessly writing and don’t start with an SEO and keyword research strategy.

Every single blog post you write needs to target one specific keyword – we’ll get into the details of exactly how to format your posts later, but for now, just know that your blog’s traffic is dictated by how many people are searching for what you’re writing about.

To begin, use a keyword research tool like the free Google Keyword Planner and enter some keyword ideas. You can also get a free Chrome Extension called Keywords everywhere to get keyword data right on Google when you search for things.

An example, if you want to blog about travel, you could type in things like:

• best travel credit cards
• best travel insurance
• best travel backpacks
• best travel shoes
• Etc.

Once you punch in these terms, you need to look at two things: keyword volume and competition/difficulty.

• Keyword volume is the number of times that the keyword is searched per month.
• Competition (sometimes called difficulty) is how hard it will be to rank for that keyword. It’s a score from 0 to 100 (or 0 to 1 with decimals) based on who’s already ranking for the target keyword and the authority of those sites.

There are no hard and fast rules for this. I recommend you shoot for target keywords with over 1,000 monthly searches and a difficulty score under 50 so that you can potentially get more traffic with less competition.

To recap, when researching your niche’s keyword potential, shoot for target keywords with:

• 1,000+ monthly searches
• A keyword difficulty score under 50
• The first page of Google has at least one site with a DR under 50

3. Use Your Professional Leverage to Choose Niche.

Yes, your experience does come in hand when getting down to leveraging and monetizing your website/ blog. After uncovering a lucrative audience to provide value to, the next step is to uncover the strategic advantages you may have over others.

Quick questions to ask yourself:

• What is my current level of professional experience?
• What connections do I have in my industry?
• Can I leverage this experience into a profitable blog?
• If I could pitch any website in the world to contribute a guest post, who would choose me from the start?

To build a truly successful blog, you first need to build influence. And to build influence, you need to step outside of your comfort zone and leverage your connections, professional experience, and everything at your disposal like never before.

You will also be performing a lot of outreach to make new connections. This includes building relationships so you can guest post on authoritative sites in your niche to get relevant, high Domain Authority (DA) backlinks for SEO.

And when you’re just starting, you may not have many connections or published content out there. You might say: “Why would anyone feature me?”

This is where leveraging your professional background helps tremendously.

To recap as to why websites and blogs fail

1. Not building a brand/authority in a space. A lot of blogs still use wordpress.com/ Blogspot or the site generally looks outdated, sign-up for hosting, and a free domain from Bluehost for a professional look. (Adsense only monetizes such sites) Domain (pachesa.com) Hosting (where your data/ site is run from)
2. Selecting niches that are not profitable. Before you start, make sure that your niche has affiliate links for everything that you want to talk about