Why Blog fails and why bloggers quit blogging and start doing jobs and other traditional businesses? Why people get failed and leave blogging? Do you really want to quit blogging? Are you keep on struggling and searching that ‘how to make blog successful and how to make money on blog?
Well, if you are one of those seekers who want to know such answers and you started off blogging and left after sometime because you never earned a single penny from your blog, then this article would surely help you? Do you know I read long-tail articles sometimes and just get something positive from a single line written by any author, which is sometimes enough to be motivated and get an answer.
So I thought to share my experience of failing in my first blog and getting success after got failed couple of times in making mistakes in blogging. Everyone writes tips and tricks, ways to make money, top ten tips and best tips etc, to guide new bloggers and seekers, so I thought to go little differently, obviously you’ll find some outstanding ideas and suggestions out there on many blogs and some bloggers are really awesome and professional in blogging and I respect those.
But I thought to go more practical and share my own experience with my readers.
My First Experience
It was 2010 and I was sitting in my office with a friend and talking about some sports and reading some sports news, and suddenly found a blog on google which was having around 300 users online at that time (showing on: Whos amung us tracker), and me and my friend got shocked that how this is possible? Around 300 visitors online at the same time, and later on I found out that it was covering Cricket sport and there was some match going on at that time and that’s why his articles was getting high amount of traffic for the time being, but it was exceptional thing for me, I suddenly called my another friend who was a Web Expert and Developer and I told him that I saw a sports blog and explained everything!
And I said I want to start a sports blog too, he said its great, you should do! Then planning started for a sports blog and then I registered a domain in a couple of days and asked my friend what to do about Web Hosting, he wasn’t really a big expert of Blogging, he used to manage Web Hosting servers for his own big entertainment portals, he suggested me to go at least for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and don’t use shared web hosting, and he gave me a list of side-effects of shared web hosting and I was totally blank about SEO and Web Hosting and I agreed, and bought a $30 per month VPS plan and launched my Sports Blog.
First Blog Launched and What happened!
In just two months, I started getting readers from Google, and I was like jumping and crazy about it and in first 5 months I made around $300 from ppc advertising. There are a plus, I was kind of sports fan and I used to follow Cricket, Tennis and Field hockey and that were the sports I started covering on my blog, I was just writing pre-tournament analysis, pre-match analysis and post-match results and reviews.
Success started showing in the work
I thought Blogging is amazing and very easy thing to do and you can just launch your blog and write some stuff and within few months you will start making money. I had no idea about Niche, Keywords, Content quality, Web Hosting and SEO, but things kept on going for a while, Couple of healthy payments received.
At a point I was receiving 600 visitors on the daily basis and it was increasing my 40 to 50 everyday, and I was so happy about it and I thought Its going to be easily $1000 every month without doing much on this blog.
There is no Alternative to Learning
I practically entered to blogging, and thought that its not a big field to conquer and to be honest I had no idea that blogging is so vast field to dig in and learn a lot. So I kept on going and I wasn’t so much aware of the Blogging and just looking for better results.
First Shock on my Blog
After 5 months, blog started getting lower traffic and day by day traffic kept on decreasing and I was started noticing that I’m working with same pattern and routine and there is no control on the traffic, it is going down on its own!
What was the fault?
The Niche Selection: As I said I had to idea about niche selection and I just started that sports blog by getting impressed with a random sports blog found on google without much survey and research. What happened exactly to the blog traffic was, sports is a seasonal niche, when season comes people start following it and when major events or tournaments come people love to rush to the search engines and start searching about the latest results and updates, I started my blog during that phase when there were some major cricketing events, hockey events and other local cricket events were going on in various countries and that’s why I got huge traffic for few months, and when a cream of sports season ended and sporting events came back to the normal routine, traffic started going down.
I wasn’t aware much to know about niche selection at that time. But I kept on struggling and working with that blog.
Second Shock on my Blog
I started getting into panic about the $40 VPS payment (It was $30 in the start, but I updated the package after 2 months), but somehow it became difficult for me not financially for the time being, I had money to survive on VPS for few months, but blog’s database got expanded and it was taking little more resources on the server, so Server management in Czech Republic, called me on Messenger and told me to just move my blog on dedicated server otherwise my site will be blocked on the VPS, I got in trouble at that time, I wasn’t able to jump to 150$ per month server when my blog’s earning was slighting going down. So I urgently bought another web hosting and shifted my blog to that web hosting next day, and it was hectic time for me, because I wasn’t expert of managing websites and blogs etc.
Third Shock on my Blog
I wasn’t an expert of Web Development and obviously blogging and I made an attempt and tried to be more efficient by changing main default index title to custom written title in the <head> section of the index file, in order to get more traffic with the relevant keywords on the website title, but I wasn’t aware that I’m doing this from the wrong place, I can give the example of this mistake that someone is shot and to pull out the bullet from his body, someone just start cutting his part of the body through a knife. Ah! I just feel so bad about that coding mistake!
That coding mistake actually collapsed my blog and from 700 to 800 daily visitors, my blog started decreasing the traffic and within 4 to 5 days, it came to 3 to 4 visitors a day and I was like having a heart attack and so sad about it and I thought everything just ended!
I wasn’t able to do any work on the blog for few days and after few days I thought to start another blog on sports and planned to start few more together. Later on after few months, A friend detected that coding mistake on my blog and he told me that I myself killed my blog in the search engines and actually mistakenly I changed the around 30,000 page title to the same one and Search engines got panic to deal with the such a big amount of pages with the same titles and major search engines just swept my blog from their sites and links index and my traffic was gone.
Any idea about the next mistake?
Fourth Shock on my Blog
I made a mistake of starting couple of blogs at that time and I learned after 2 years that I shouldn’t have done that. I should only focus on one blog at that time. Almost after one year, I realized that I should really stop doing this and just be professional with the blogging and tried to learn some blogging tips and basics, and I kept on learning and reading some top blogs and actually learned about Content value and Search engine optimization and found out that I was nowhere closer to blogging and planned something positive, clear and readers oriented. I started leaving sports blog, some domains expired and I never renewed and made some offline from web hosting and kept on decreasing the burden.
Conclusion
I have seen some ups and downs since I got serious about blogging in 2010 and really worked hard to make my blogging career and believe me, learning and struggle did not stop yet but the difference is, now I’m not repeating my old mistakes and I learned a lot from those mistakes. I started blogging on free blogging platforms in 2007 but actually jumped to professional blogging in 2010 and that phase was stopped in 2012 when I started of bloggingmatters.net after a long struggle and research on blogging and SEO.
Still hard work is continued and learning things everyday!
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7 Comments
Hi Has San, thank you for openly sharing your experience. . I too started with a sports blog, but i soon realised there is not much scope in affiliate marketing . .
Hi Adithya,
Welcome and thanks for reading this article!
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When I was reading this post I thought you stole my story of blogging but I didn’t share it every that is why I had to believe that’s yours. The only difference is that I suffered a big decline in my traffic but never did anything to offset it and kept on blogging without losing my heart. Now after one year I againt fully bounced back and now planning to move ahead. Blogging is the second name of consistency. This is the moral of yours and mine story.
Mi Muba recently posted..Root cause of every problem in Pakistan is pollution
Thank you Sir for reading and checking my blog post. I liked your opinion about Blogging, which is consistency. I believe consistency, patience and hard work are three important things to adopt in blogging.
I hope you will visit again!