8 discouragements that should be looked at as encouragements

Blog­ging is full of many twists and turns. Some days, you will be extremely happy with how every­thing is going on your blog. But, there are other days where that feel­ing is just not there. And for what­ever rea­son that may be, it really brings you down some. You could feel that the blog you thought was doing incred­i­bly well isn’t doing as great as you thought. Your blog could just be in a slum for that day, and can of course go back to nor­mal the next day. But it can be tough deal­ing with it.

There is a pos­i­tive side to every­thing. Even in the blo­gos­phere. Any­thing bad that hap­pens will have hap­pened for a cer­tain rea­son. The rea­son for it could rely on the actions you take on your blog, or some­thing totally out of your control.

In this post, I want to look over a few things that blog­gers strug­gle with just about every day. These things I am going to talk about can really ruin a blog­gers day. But like I said, it all hap­pens for a rea­son, and there will always be a pos­i­tive side to all of these occurrences.

8 big dis­cour­age­ments in the blogosphere

How many of these things have hap­pened to you?

Count­ing down from num­ber 8, I have pri­or­i­tized what I believe are the biggest dis­cour­age­ments for blog­gers to see on their blog. Do you agree with the order? What would you change, or how would you pri­or­i­tize it?

8. Not get­ting your blog linked to by other bloggers

Ever been through those “link love” posts on other blogs? You see these other blog­gers get linked to, but you may not get linked to. It’s great to be linked to for mul­ti­ple rea­sons, but is a lit­tle aggra­vat­ing to see your blog not up in that link love list. Maybe if not link love, but you just wrote a really good arti­cle that isn’t get­ting all of the recog­ni­tion you think it deserves.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: You want to get listed in another blog­gers post. So, you can try and become friends with that par­tic­u­lar blog­ger. Don’t stop at that one blog­ger either. Go to every blog you fol­low, become friends with the blog­ger. Mak­ing friends is fun, and mak­ing friends through blog­ging has a lot of ben­e­fits (like get­ting linked to!). It is not guar­an­teed that the blog­ger will just link to you because you made a few com­ments on their blog.

7. Get­ting neg­a­tive com­ments or reviews

It’s hard writ­ing up an arti­cle and then get­ting neg­a­tive com­ments on your post. You could get a com­pletely hate­ful com­ment, or the dreaded “This has been said over and over”. Even a neg­a­tive review on your blog can be tough to deal with. You put all that hard work into your blog, and then some­one totally strikes you down.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: Get­ting a neg­a­tive com­ment or review on your site or arti­cle is meant to help you. Not every­one will like your points and ideas, and not every­one will agree with them. It’s good to cre­ate dis­cus­sion with dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing opin­ions, and the more neg­a­tive the better.

“Con­struc­tive crit­i­cism” can also be looked at as a neg­a­tive com­ment. It will just have things that you need to work on, and since it’s com­ing from your users then you will be able to make your blog work best for them. The most impor­tant peo­ple on your web­site are your readers.

6. Los­ing RSS subscribers

Here at Blo­gus­sion, we know exactly how it is to lose sub­scribers. It hap­pens all of the time; we gain a few, and lose a lot. It sucks, because the read­er­ship we thought we had turned out to be not as strong as it was. It hap­pens to every blog­ger too. Sig­nif­i­cant drops in RSS read­ers (your ded­i­cated read­ers) really says some­thing about your com­mu­nity and qual­ity of con­tent posted to your blog.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: Obvi­ously you are los­ing read­er­ship because your con­tent just isn’t cut­ting it for those par­tic­u­lar sub­scribers. If you real­ize that, then you can see this as an oppor­tu­nity to really ana­lyze the qual­ity of your con­tent being posted on your blog and make some changes. Do what­ever you can to get their feed­back on your site. You can find that you will be able to make some really needed improve­ments to your blog.

5. Get­ting your con­tent stolen

This is some­thing that hap­pens every day, and it really hurts your blog. You could get in trou­ble for dupli­cate con­tent (even thought YOUR con­tent was stolen), you could lose cred­i­bil­ity and even author­ity as a blog­ger because the con­tent scrap­ers (peo­ple who stole your con­tent) could be seen as the orig­i­nal author of your post.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: While you should do every­thing in your power to get your stolen con­tent taken down, it can be seen as moti­va­tion to you. It looks like some­one is a fan of your writ­ing and wants to use it for them­selves. It’s great and all they like your con­tent, but they shouldn’t steal it. So keep up the good writ­ing, because it’s quite obvi­ous some­one likes it so much they would steal it!

4. Not mak­ing money on your blog

You mess around with just about every mon­e­ti­za­tion trick in the book, and you can’t make any money from your blog. Ban­ner ads, AdSense, reviews, any form of mon­e­ti­za­tion just doesn’t work for you. It’s in every blog­gers best inter­est to make some money off their blog even­tu­ally, and it’s hard to see other blog­gers roll in thou­sands when you can’t even earn enough to buy a cup of coffee.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: It shows that your com­mu­nity is not ready for adver­tis­ing. It is in my belief that you should not offer any form of adver­tis­ing on your blog from the start unless you have a bul­let­proof mar­ket­ing plan. You should just look past the money, and look at the peo­ple who actu­ally read what you write. As your com­mu­nity grows, so will the chances of you mak­ing money. So get out there, for­get money right now and offer the absolute best you can.

3. Low traffic

You do every­thing you can to drive a lot of read­ers to your blog. No mat­ter how hard the work is you do to adver­tise, you should know that get­ting some­one to click the link to your blog is harder than it sounds. It sucks when hard work doesn’t pay off, and a big dis­ap­point­ment to you.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: Obvi­ously your mar­ket­ing strate­gies are not work­ing since your traf­fic is so low. Ana­lyze your traf­fic sources, and make the most out of your biggest source of traf­fic. Along the way, exper­i­ment with other ways to bring in more traf­fic. While doing all of that, read some inter­net mar­ket­ing eBooks to pick up a few more tricks when it comes to pro­mot­ing your blog.

2. Your com­pe­ti­tion is doing bet­ter than you

It’s not good to see a com­pet­ing site in your niche doing bet­ter than you. While it is com­mon in any niche to have some­one doing bet­ter than you, the idea of that still hits you hard no mat­ter how long it takes you to real­ize it.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: Com­pe­ti­tion is healthy for you. It allows you to keep the moti­va­tion to keep going and con­stantly look for a way to become bet­ter. You want to be the best in your niche don’t you? You have to know how they got to be bet­ter than you and use that infor­ma­tion for the best of your blog. Don’t study too closely or start steal­ing things from them.

1. You don’t get many comments

The most com­mon dis­cour­age­ment for a blog­ger is not get­ting com­ments on their posts. It can be very frus­trat­ing to write up a very nice post, and never get any feed­back on it. I know it is, because it has hap­pened to me. I thought I wrote up some really high qual­ity con­tent, and only have got­ten a few com­ments, if any at all.

Why this is encour­ag­ing: You may not get com­ments on your posts for these two reasons:

1. If your com­mu­nity is not built up yet, then hav­ing a lot of com­ments shouldn’t be a thought in your head at first. So just keep writ­ing those great arti­cles, keep­ing in mind the response will not be great at first. If you build up your com­mu­nity, make friends and cre­ate con­ver­sa­tion, then com­ments will come. Isn’t that all the encour­age­ment you need to start build­ing a reader base?

2. Your con­tent just isn’t inter­est­ing. Are you writ­ing just to write, or writ­ing to teach? You can’t exactly teach infor­ma­tion that has already been drilled into everyone’s head by other blog­gers. You need to write unique con­tent, because unique con­tent is inter­est­ing. The only thing though, unique con­tent can be hard to come up with. How­ever, we do have a vari­ety of writ­ing tips on Blo­gus­sion you should check out if you need help writ­ing unique content.

So take what I men­tioned above, and think about it. Are you really doing the best job you can be doing? Do you at least get a cou­ple com­ments per post? Is your con­tent some­thing that hasn’t already been talked about a lot by other blogs? If you truly want more com­ments on your blog, then take what has been cov­ered here and use it to get those comments.

What do you think?

So do you think these bad things that hap­pen to your blog are really meant to encour­age you to become a bet­ter blog­ger? Every­one goes through hard­ships, even huge blog­gers like Dar­ren Rowse, Perez Hilton, etc. But I am sure they found ways to make the best out of the worst.

Let me know your thoughts on the arti­cle, and what dis­cour­ages you the most in blogging!

Go to top