When you first start a blog, you’re overflowing with excitement. You’re ready to share your thoughts with the world, and you might even have visions of making a lot of money with your blog. Fast forward a few months, and the excitement is gone. Rather than being something you’re passionate about, blogging now feels like a chore.
What happened? You’ve been tripped up by one of these blogging obstacles.
• Coming up with new ideas—Whether you blog once a week or on a daily basis, sooner or later writer’s block will rear its ugly head. You sit staring at a blank Word document just waiting for a fresh idea to pop into your head, but it never comes.
Thankfully, there are several things you can do to overcome writer’s block. One easy way to generate ideas is to get involved in conversations on Twitter with others in your niche. Just by watching your Twitter feed, you’re bound to come across a new idea for a blog post.
You should also spend time browsing through old comments on your blog. You might find that your readers present some of the best ideas for new post topics. It could be a question they brought up about an old post or something they mentioned off hand that you could take a step further in a new post.
What other ideas do you have for beating writer’s block?
• Lack of readers—Is there anything more disheartening than writing one post after another only to look at your stats and realize no one is actually reading your blog? A lack of readers can make any blogger question whether or not their efforts are worth the trouble.
The good news is there are easy things you can do to drive traffic to your blog. The first thing you should always be doing is optimizing your posts for the search engines. Just incorporate the basics of SEO (placing keywords in your title, url, and throughout the post), and over time, your traffic will begin to increase.
You should also take full advantage of social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, ReddIt, Digg, Mixx, and other similar sites.
Read this post for more tips for getting blog readers.
• Finding time to network with other bloggers—Networking with other bloggers can help you in many different ways. First, it can help to drive traffic to your blog. See, when you network with other bloggers, they’ll be likelier to link to your posts, and you may even have opportunities to submit a guest post to their blog or have them submit one to yours.
Building relationships with other bloggers can also be helpful for positioning yourself as an expert in your niche. Suppose the opportunity for submitting a guest post does arise. This tells the readers of this other blog that the blog owner respects your opinion, presumably because you’re an expert.
Discover more reasons you need to start guest blogging.
• Standing out in a huge crowd—There are hundreds of millions of blogs online right now. Needless to say, the blogosphere is a little crowded. Perhaps the biggest obstacle you’ll face is standing out in this huge crowd.
As cheesy as it might sound, the best way to separate your blogs from all the others is to simply be yourself. Don’t try to copy what everyone else is doing. Write the way you talk. Share your unique point of view with readers. There are far too many bloggers who play it safe by just repeating what everyone else is saying. Don’t be one of them. Be yourself. It’s the one thing that truly makes you different from every other blogger.
What are your biggest obstacles to blogging? Share your thoughts in the replies.
