There was once a time when blogging was considered nothing more than a hobby for people to air their tawdry lives and display pictures of their beloved cats or holiday snaps. The landscape was changed immensely when people started using blogging to air their opinions and talk about showbiz gossip. These blogs became hugely popular and advertisers soon began falling over themselves to hand over money.

This changed the landscape of blogging because very few people started blogging after this solely for enjoyment, they were getting into it simply to make money out of it. The harsh reality is that about 98% of blogs fail to make money and the majority of them are abandoned within about a year.

Here are a few reasons why your blog might be failing.

1. Mediocre Content

You will probably have heard the term “content is king” and this is one of the truest things you will ever hear when it comes to blogging. You have to make sure that the content you post on your blog is to the best of you ability (or the ability of your writers). This can be easily achieved if you stick to topics you are very knowledgable about.

2. Lack of Planning

Producing quality content is not enough on its own, you need to have a plan going into to blogging, just like you would do with any business venture.

What platform will you use? Who is your target audience? What can you offer them that they won’t get easily from other blogs? How often will you publish new content? These are just a few of the questions your plan should include.

3. Poor Layout

Great content might be the main bait to lure your visitors, but they won’t stay around too long (or indeed come back) if you have a terrible layout. It is important to spend plenty of time designing a striking design that will please the eye of your visitor. If you are unable to do this yourself then you can find a host of cheap designers on sites like Elance.

4. No SEO Effort

Getting your blog ranked highly in the search engine results is just as important today as it has always been, and it is something that a lot of bloggers fail to get to grips with. There are plenty of guides and articles that can be found on Google that will help you with this.

Personally it has always confused me, and that is why I rely on SEO experts to do that work for me. You’d be surprised just how cheap their services are.

5. Boring headlines

Coming up with eye-catching headlines is one of the hardest things I struggled to adjust to as a blogger, after all there is no point coming up with a great article and then giving it a boring headline, you want a headline that will punch your reader in the face!

6. Wrong motivation

The number one reason I see for people giving up on their blogs is because it didn’t become a hit overnight and make them lots of money. It is like anything else, you will rarely strike gold straight away, you need to work at it.

This is why I always tell new bloggers not to jump in with the main intention of making money, they should be prepared to work at their blog for at least a year before they should expect to make money from it.

Are there any other areas that haven’t been mentioned here? Maybe you failed in those areas yourself? Why not let our readers know in the comments section.