Welcome to another post in which I help you overcome a limiting belief as a blogger that stops you from actually growing your business. That’s the myth that if you haven’t earned anything or have just a little profit in your first year, it’s time to ditch your blog and move on to something else because it’s just not working.
Also, let me know how you like those short posts/episodes I’m releasing these weeks.
It’s a different format. I know these work really well for some people. Others might prefer longer ones with actual tips and strategies and step-by-step processes in each. Maybe they take notes. But here, there’s just one point and I share examples and I help you shift your mindset and take action.
And sometimes that’s all we need, right?
Before we dive into today’s topic, here are the other 3 blogging myths I talked about:
- Blog Monetization Myth #1: It’s too early to monetize my blog.
- Blog Monetization Myth #2: Affiliate marketing is the only way to make real money blogging.
- Blog Monetization Myth #3: I can’t earn from my blog without social media.
So, about today’s myth.
If you know my story, you might know that I didn’t earn anything in my first and even second year as a blogger. And so did most of the successful bloggers I’ve interviewed over the years, many of whom are now earning six figures from their website and some even seven.
Obviously, everyone’s business journey is different and there are many reasons why you might not have earned anything from your platform just yet. But the chance is very little that you might need to leave it behind and give up on the dream of being a full-time blogger.
Sure, you might be in the wrong niche. You might have no time to actually work on your blog.
You might prefer another business model or you don’t believe in yourself enough to stick to your project. But these reasons have little to do with the earning potential of your website.
If you have a vision, if you’re in the right niche, are creating content and really want to make money as a blogger and believe this is the right business model for you, then you can only give up on this after you’ve tested all the ways to grow and monetize your blog.
Why your blog might not be growing
It could be that you haven’t created much content in that one year or that you haven’t optimized it well, so it never started ranking in search engines and bringing you traffic.
It could be that you have no strategy in place and are just doing random things, following everyone’s advice, following trends and just doing what others in the industry are doing. But with such lack of focus, you probably won’t be able to successfully monetize a blog.
You might be sticking to one income stream that just doesn’t work for you. Or you might be doing a million little things that are taking your attention away, but never mastering any of them and never giving them a chance to turn into regular income.
Maybe in that one year, you haven’t even defined your blog categories well and don’t stick to covering one or a few topics, but write about everything you can think of.
Or maybe you create the content you want, not what your ideal reader needs. Maybe you haven’t found your voice yet, or your blog doesn’t load fast and doesn’t offer a good user experience. Maybe you don’t even have a self-hosted website, in which case, monetizing is sort of impossible.
Maybe your blog’s design is very chaotic. Maybe your pages aren’t organized well. And maybe you have so many elements on each page, and there are opt-in pop-ups on each, that readers simply can’t focus on the content so they leave your site soon after landing on it.
There are so many elements that go into running a website and having good content and helping readers, that it often takes more than one year to really figure out the basics and just get the hang of it.
Why rush it?
You can take courses and join communities and get help along the way, but you still have to do the work. No one else can do that for you.
If you want to be a full-time blogger, you can’t give up after one year. In fact, it might be beneficial to let go of any deadlines you’ve set for yourself and just focus on the day-to-day blogging activities and growing your blog’s metrics.
I also want you to go a few episodes back and listen to the one called The One Year Blog Experiment. It’s going to offer you more clarity on this topic and empower you to stay in business no matter what the results are. Also, there I share when to call it quits, in my opinion, of course, because only you know what is best for you.
Who are you surrounding yourself with online?
Another reason that you might feel like giving up after one year of not having any profit from your blog could be that you’re surrounded by the wrong people online or maybe you don’t know anyone and have no role models. What I mean here is that you are in touch with other bloggers who aren’t earning anything.
So they just complain, they talk about how hard it is to make it in business, and how competitive the industry is. They are constantly thinking whether they should start another blog and leave this one behind, or looking for quick ways to make a lot of money, or following the wrong people and so on.
If they are who you compare yourself with, well, then this is not an environment structured for growth. Instead, you have to find people that inspire you, who run the kind of blogging business that you want to run, who are already making money from it in different ways, who have a lot to share about it, who are open about their earnings, who started from nothing.
They definitely get what you’re going through. You can reach out to them, you can interview them on your blog, you can take their courses, you can listen to their podcast.
Just be in their energy and soak up their mindset because that’s the one thing they got right.
First, they shifted their mindset, they overcame all those limiting beliefs we’re talking about in these few episodes and they took strategic action. Eventually, something out of the many things they tried actually worked.
If this doesn’t inspire you to keep going and find what works for you, I don’t know what will.
That’s what I have for you today. If you’re looking for specific ways to monetize your blog, and more than just ads, and want support along the way and ask all your questions, definitely join us for the Blog Monetization challenge inside Fearless Bloggers, which is happening as we speak.
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